These days, as well as the obvious things—is the role going to test me, who is the director, what is the script like—I need to know if there’s going to be a lot of makeup. Because an early makeup call means getting up in the middle of the night. When he was playing Churchill in Darkest Hour, Gary Oldman had to get up at two thirty in the morning to be given his fabulous makeup. I couldn’t possibly do that any more. Where is the shoot and what time of year? It has to be somewhere Shakira is prepared to come with me. Not too hot, not too cold, not too damp, not too Spartan. How far is the hotel from the set? If it’s an hour’s drive, I have to set my alarm clock an hour earlier and I’ll arrive back late every evening. What’s the budget? If it’s too small, that means a budget hotel, a small, cold motor-home on the set and disappointing on-set meals. And, crucially, how much dialogue is there? My memory is still good but I’m past the point where I want to be memorising pages of dialogue, and not yet at the point where I’m prepared to have my lines written down for me on a wall.
In fact, I’ve become so fussy that I’ve just done something I’ve never done before in my life and turned down four movies. One was a fabulous part, but it involved spending two weeks up a Pennsylvanian mountain in the autumn and my first speech was two pages long. When you’re old, you feel the cold. One was an excellent script about Alzheimer’s that I really wanted to do, but it was so good it upset me just reading it through. With my friend Doug Hayward in mind, I knew I would never get through the scenes without breaking down so, with a heavy heart, I turned it down. And one was a script in which I’m supposed to bathe naked in a Swiss lake in the winter. As I’m coming out of the water, a coachload of tourists come by and stop for their lunch. They see me, and they all stand there laughing and pointing, taking photos of me and my frozen tiny manhood. Seriously. That was a script I was offered. I’m not vain, but I’m also not insane.
These days, if I pick up a script and it says, “Siberia, deepest winter. Our hero trudges through a featureless wasteland…,” I put it straight back down again. The only scripts I do are the ones I can’t not do: a brilliant script, a director I admire, not too much makeup, not too many lines and an agreeable location. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, and I’ll be there.
Don’t look back
I don’t regret that I’m no longer young. It’s a waste of time and, anyway, I’ve done being young. I had a great time, but now I’m having a great time being old. The 1960s were a crazy buzzing time of excitement and possibility. I loved the stardom that followed, the glitz and glamour of Hollywood. But every decade has been an improvement on the last, and it just keeps getting better. How could I regret being old when the last decade has brought me the joy of my life, my grandchildren? I thought I’d seen it all, done it all, and suddenly I had three grandchildren and there was a whole new world of love inside me.
When I go, I know they’ll say, “He’s had a good old knock. He’s had a good innings.” I say that myself when my friends go. But I don’t feel like I’ve had a good innings just yet. I feel like I’ve just stepped up to the crease. Pass me the bat: there’s a few more overs in me yet.
16.
A Life in Balance
“Goodnight, you Princes of Maine, you Kings of New England.”
The Cider House Rules, 1999
I HAVE AN EXTRAORDINARY movie family. I have been married to a wonderful array of some of Hollywood’s most glamorous and talented women, from Jane Fonda in Hurry Sundown, Elizabeth Taylor in Zee and Company and Mia Farrow in Hannah and Her Sisters, to Glenda Jackson in The Romantic Englishwoman, Maggie Smith in California Suite and Helen Mirren in Last Orders.
My movie children are a quite incredibly talented brood, and I’m very proud of them all, from my first movie child, Demi Moore (I knew there was something good about Blame It on Rio), to Ray Winstone in Last Orders, Mike Myers in Austin Powers in Goldmember, Nicole Kidman in Bewitched, Anne Hathaway in Interstellar and Rachel Weisz in Youth: brilliant, steady and beautiful, inside and out. And although they are not strictly my movie sons I also feel deeply fatherly towards Christian Bale in Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, Tobey Maguire in The Cider House Rules and my movie son-in-law in Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio. Certainly Christian, Tobey and Leonardo are warmly invited to my (imaginary) movie family occasions. I am even blessed with a handful of movie grandchildren.
Extraordinary as my movie family is, my real family is even more so.
My mother and father in their own ways gave me what I needed to go out into the world. I am filled with love and gratitude towards them both. Shakira, Dominique and Natasha helped me to make sense of the world and live well in it. My precious grandchildren, Taylor, Allegra and Miles, were a late-life miracle, who came along when I was seventy-six years old and complete my world.
Shakira, literally and metaphorically, saved my life. I was thirty-eight when I met her, and if it hadn’t been for the meaning she provided for me, and the more practical way she pointed out that I was drinking far too much, I would probably have become just one more actor who died an early, promise-unfulfilled, drink-fuelled death. I am still as madly in love with Shakira as when we first met forty-seven years ago. At the risk of repeating myself, she is as beautiful on the inside as she is on the outside—which, as anyone who has met her will attest, is very beautiful indeed—gentle without being weak, funny without a hint of cruelty, poised and confident but not in a way that would ever make anyone else feel inferior. Quite the opposite, she exudes kindness and warmth and has a way of putting everyone around her at their ease.
I’m so proud of both of my smart, kind daughters: Dominique, or Niki as she is to all of us who know and love her, who built herself a fulfilling career and a happy life out of her passion for horses, first as a show-jumper and later as a horse breeder; and Natasha, who has a great business brain and is an interior designer, a nutritionist and a wonderful mother—essentially a single mother—to her three young children.
My grandchildren changed Shakira’s and my life completely and brought us a joy I never knew was coming. I take pleasure in every detail of their lives. I live again as I see their faces light up with excitement at pleasures we have come to take for granted, and I have to try hard not to bore my sadly diminishing circle of friends with their exploits. I have lost weight, halved the alcohol and study every health-food article in the newspaper. I obey all my doctors to the letter in an attempt to stay with my precious grandchildren for as long as possible.
My family have given me such confidence, such peace, such joy. And they are a big part of how I have been able to achieve anything I have achieved. They have, almost always, felt complementary to my professional world: a support, not a hindrance or conflict. But, of course, even for someone who has had as much luck as I have there are balances that need to be found.
Balance is about choosing
Even before work/life balance was talked about, it was important to me, although I might not have put it in that way. And for me, balancing my professional and home lives has been mostly about choosing the right projects.
When I was young and struggling I was in no position to choose. I said yes to whatever I was offered and it was still nowhere near enough. It is no coincidence that this was the period of my life when I failed utterly to balance my personal and professional lives. Or, rather, they were in some kind of balance: I failed at both. I would not say that I chose work over family: it was more complicated than that. But at the age of twenty-four my inability to support my wife and beloved baby through the career I longed for filled me with such shame and self-loathing that it led to the breakdown of my first marriage. My wife Pat took Dominique, not yet one, to be brought up by her marvellous and devoted grandparents in Sheffield, and over the next few years I could only rarely afford the train fare to go and see her, let alone the child maintenance I owed her. I ended up divorced, with a daughter I always dearly loved but who, until my career took off, I barely saw and could barely support.
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Even as my circumstances were transformed, and I was able at last to be a better father to Dominique, the fear of saying no to offers of work stayed with me. I never really unlearnt the sense of insecurity, the dread of being without work, so I never stopped saying yes. But I did learn to say yes to the right things. And I learnt that the very best thing about stardom and success isn’t the money, the fame, the amazing new friends or the best seats in the house, but the freedom to choose.
How did I use that ability to choose? Some would pick out some of my more dubious artistic and commercial choices and say, “Unwisely.” But I used it to meet my priorities—which changed over time—and to bring the right balance to my family’s life. I was working hard for success, but at the same time I was making damn sure that success was working hard for me.
In the 1960s, after the success of Alfie and The Ipcress File, I was acutely conscious of the precariousness of my position. I was a star for the moment, but the choices I made now would determine whether I remained one. I quickly formulated a fairly simple plan. First, I would choose the great roles. Something stretching, something different, something that could show my range. And if none of these came, I would choose the mediocre roles. And if they didn’t come either, I would choose the ones that paid the rent. Putting it another way, it was, as they say it should be, always “the script, the script, the script.” Apart from when times got hard, when it was “the script, the money, the script, the money.” And then, when I got really desperate, “the money, the money, the money.” If I wasn’t going to win an Academy Award I was at least going to earn my living and keep working. Unlike major stars, such as, say, Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford or Paul Newman, I had no concerns about letting down my fans by taking this role or that: I was an actor and I needed to work.
In 1971, Shakira walked into my life and turned it upside down in the best way possible, and not long afterwards our darling baby Natasha arrived and, though I hadn’t thought it possible, made my life even more perfect. My priorities changed and my decision-making changed with them. It was still about the stretching roles, and keeping working, but now there was another layer. Now I looked for roles that would allow me to stay with my wife and baby, either filming near our home in England or somewhere agreeable where a mother and young child could happily join me. Shooting in rural Tanzania and squatting in huts in the local village? Or—and I did actually do this, on Too Late the Hero, pre-Shakira—shooting in a humid, insect-infested Philippines jungle and living for twenty-two weeks in a half-built massage parlour? The rooms were only ever expected to be used for brief encounters and every expense had been spared in furnishing and decorating them. (And we could really have shot it in the tropical garden at Kew. It was just us looking at a load of palm trees.) No, thank you. Shooting in Paris and staying in the George V? No problem. You have probably never heard of The Marseille Contract, released in the United States as The Destructors in 1974. And you don’t need to: despite the presence of Anthony Quinn and James Mason, it was a flop. But I didn’t care. It got Shakira and new-born baby Natasha, who had both been through the wringer, out of that bitter English winter and into the comparative warmth of the South of France.
By the 1980s I was experienced enough that I was layering in some other important factors. It was still about a challenging role and a pleasant location, but it was also about a great script (you can win an Academy Award for some of the easiest acting of your career with a brilliant script) and a director I admired and wanted to work with. In any walk of life, it’s never just about your own job description. It’s about the boss, your colleagues, the quality of the work and how it fits with your personal life.
That was how I came to turn down a film co-starring Sally Field, who had just won an Oscar for Norma Rae, and instead accept the role of Frank in Educating Rita opposite Julie Walters, who had played a blinder as Rita on stage but had never appeared in a film. The role was a wonderful stretch for me; the director was Lewis Gilbert, who had directed me in Alfie; and the wonderful screenplay was by Willy Russell, who had adapted it from his own novel and play. As a bonus, it was funny—comedy is so hard to write that a good one is like gold dust. And as the cherry on top, the story was one I felt honoured to tell, about working-class lives and the power of education.
And, of course, that was also how I was able to give an immediate yes to Chris Nolan, when he turned up that Sunday morning, script in hand, wanting to know whether I would like to play Alfred Pennyworth, Batman’s butler. Was it a great role? Yes. He’s the toughest butler you ever saw: he serves drinks but he’s also a trained killer. Was there a great script? Yes again. A great director? Absolutely. An agreeable location? Could hardly have been better: we’d be shooting at Shepperton, the studios where I’d appeared in my first movie, A Hill in Korea, in 1956. It was extraordinary to walk in there and appear again on the sound stage where I had spoken (or, rather, forgotten) my first ever lines in a movie. And for bonus points: a terrific cast of brilliant old friends and exciting new talent.
As my family grew up, my priorities continued to shift. When my mother needed a new house, I did Jaws: The Revenge. My agent Dennis Selinger thought it was a poor decision but my bank manager loved it (and Mum did too). When my daughter Natasha became old enough to watch movies I realised that it would be years until she would be able to watch any of mine, which were all unsuitable viewing for a child. That was how I came to play Scrooge in The Muppet Christmas Carol, a great experience at the time because the puppeteers are such gentle folk, and a recurring joy every Christmas when we watch it all together as a family.
Thirty years and another generation later, I started getting the urge to make another children’s movie. I couldn’t let my grandchildren watch Harry Brown any more than Natasha could have watched Get Carter, but since they had been born in a period of just over eleven months I had become quite a cartoon connoisseur: the biggest TV in the house was in my office and the children wouldn’t watch TV anywhere else. In fact Taylor, aged two, decided that my office was his office. If you called, “Taylor, where are you?” he would shout back, “I’m in my office!” and if you asked him to come and he didn’t want to, he would say, “I’m working!” So, when I was approached to voice Finn McMissile in Cars 2—a 1966 pale blue Aston Martin, about the coolest car I’d ever heard of—I jumped at the chance. Cartoons, or animated features as I believe they’re known now, have come on a long way since Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Cars 2, which, apart from anything else, was the first 3D movie I had ever seen or been involved in, was absolutely astonishing to me.
I also made Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, based on the Jules Verne story and shooting in the Hawaiian jungle, which, I’m pleased to report, was situated close to an enormous shopping mall and seemed to contain no insects—or, anyway, none that wanted to bite me. And I voiced Lord Redbridge in Gnomeo and Juliet and Sherlock Gnomes. One movie for each grandchild and one for luck. Although things don’t stand still, do they? Grandchildren in particular. The other day they wanted to watch a movie so I started scrolling through the kids’ movies section on Sky. “What are you doing?” my still-nine-year-old grandson Taylor protested. “We’re not kids any more.”
“Yeah,” said eight-year-old Allegra.
“Yeah,” said her twin brother, Miles.
“What do you want to see, then?” I asked them.
“Vin Diesel,” shouted Taylor, and his younger siblings did not demur.
Slightly saddened at this loss of innocence, I quickly rallied and found them a movie called The Last Witch Hunter, featuring Vin Diesel, Elijah Wood, Rose Leslie and Granddad. Honour was satisfied all around.
I have often been tempted to choose a picture for the pleasure of working with old friends. With mixed results. Working in Chris Nolan’s repertory company has been nothing but a pleasure and brought me nothing but commercial and artistic success. On the other hand Bullseye, which I made with Michael Winner and Roger Moore, could not have been more inappropriat
ely named. We had a blast making it but, as far as I could tell, no one got any pleasure from watching it and it never came close to hitting any target. The 1998 movie Curtain Call, co-starring Maggie Smith, with whom I had had success with California Suite, and directed by my old friend Peter Yates, went straight to DVD. Working with friends, I have concluded, is an added bonus when everything else—role, script, director—is right. When any of those things is wrong, having friends around will make things more fun, but it won’t fix the movie.
Balance is about boundaries
I have balanced my work and family partly by bringing them together and partly by keeping them strictly apart.
In keeping the two halves of my life apart, I was lucky that I was always able to compartmentalise. I never brought my work stress home (“Don’t watch the rushes”) and I never took my home stress to work (“Relax, focus, be in the moment”). When I’m in the studio, nothing exists but the studio, and when I’m at home, nothing exists but home.
In bringing my two lives together, I have been extremely fortunate in my choice of wife. Shakira is no little woman married to the big film star: we are equal partners in our marriage and in our professional life and Shakira’s off-screen contribution to our success is as important as what I do in front of the cameras. But, while Shakira is no one’s appendage, she has been prepared to come with me as a partner everywhere I go. I haven’t gone off on location and made a load of new friends she doesn’t know—or, even worse, created a real-life alternative movie family. She hasn’t stayed at home and created a home life that has no space for me when I come back. Parallel lines, as they taught me in geometry, never meet. So we have kept our lines and our lives well and truly intertwined.
Blowing the Bloody Doors Off Page 20
