The Elephant to Hollywood (38 page)

My next film was
Shiner
, in which I played a Cockney gangster. Yes – probably a mistake. It wasn’t a bad film – and it was certainly a step up from
Curtain Call
and
Quills
– but it seemed as if the public were fed up with gangster films. We shot it in the East End of London. I hadn’t been there for years and it had changed enormously, but I witnessed something there that really shocked me and set the alarm bells ringing – although, at the time, I let it go. We were filming outside a block of derelict apartments that were waiting to be demolished and were, I thought, abandoned. We’d been there a couple of hours when suddenly, out of this terrible slum poured about half a dozen young people, all filthy, all emaciated, all stoned out of their minds, all waving grubby bits of paper. As they walked unsteadily towards us in slow motion I thought of that cemetery scene in Michael Jackson’s
Thriller
video, where all the bodies come out of the graves. As they gathered round me, I could smell their unwashed bodies and see up close the bloodshot eyes and the tattered skin on their faces. I stood there, signing these dirty scraps of paper and I was stunned at what was happening in my city. I realised what a sheltered and cocooned life I now led: I had no idea that this was the norm – yet local people seemed to be walking by without a second glance.

Although
Shiner
was more successful than my previous two movies, it still didn’t cause much of a stir and so I couldn’t have been more pleased when something fantastic came in right out of the blue:
Miss Congeniality
.

Sandra Bullock, who was the producer as well as the star of the movie, wanted me to play the sort of Professor Higgins to her tough, dowdy FBI agent, who has to go undercover as a beauty queen. This picture was a joy from start to finish. Just before we began shooting I had won my Oscar for
The Cider House Rules
and in my acceptance speech I had told Tom Cruise (who was also nominated in this category for his part in
Magnolia
) that he should be pleased that he hadn’t won as the dressing room trailers given to supporting actors would be much too small and modest for him. It was a joke and Tom and everyone else laughed, but when I got to the set of
Miss Congeniality
on the first day and was shown to my trailer, it was the biggest and most luxurious accommodation I had ever had on a set. And on the door was pinned a note in Sandra’s handwriting. ‘Welcome to the shoot. This is as big as Tom’s.’ I checked – and it was.

Miss Congeniality
was tremendous fun to make. Sandra was fantastic, both as an actress and as a producer. She was always kind and attentive and pleasant and never imposed any problems that she might have been encountering with the production on the rest of us. I never saw her without a smile – and yet I discovered later that just before this movie, her mother had died of cancer. We never knew; she was a true professional. I was so pleased to see her win the Best Actress Oscar this year for her role in
The Blind Side
. And she has a great sense of humour. The night before winning the Academy Award, she won the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actress in a film called
All About Steve
. Typical of Sandra – she turned up to accept it with as much good grace as she showed the next evening at the Oscar ceremony. She’s a true star. Candice Bergen, a friend from the past, was also in the movie. We’d last worked together on a terrible film of John Fowles’s book
The Magus
, which none of us understood, and neither, it seemed did the audience. William Shatner was in the movie, too, probably the funniest and craziest actor I have ever met. The romantic lead was Benjamin Bratt and we became good friends. He was going out with Julia Roberts at the time and Benjamin and I were in a car one day together and he phoned her in Las Vegas where she was making a film. During the course of the conversation he handed the phone over to me and said, ‘Say hello to Julia.’ I did – and there was no reply. So I tried again. Still no reply. I tried a third time and finally I heard a voice at the other end say, ‘I can’t believe I’m talking to Alfie!’ ‘
Alfie
?’ I said. ‘You’re far too young to have seen
Alfie
!’ ‘Have you never heard of television, Michael?’ she said. I agreed that I had, indeed, heard of television, told her how brilliant she was in
Pretty Woman
and passed the phone back to Benjamin. I have never spoken to her since – and neither, I think, has Benjamin.

The film was shot in Austin, the capital of Texas. Austin is a very rich town with a massive university and a lot of steak houses. The most famous one at that time was Sullivan’s and it was here that the then governor of Texas and his cronies always ate: we saw George W. Bush there every time we went. Everything in Texas is big, including the onion rings. Benjamin and I were at Sullivan’s one lunchtime and just about to start eating, when we saw a woman approaching us with a smile and a camera. It happens all the time when you are well known: not only is your meal interrupted with the photograph, but attention is drawn to your table and so everyone else thinks it’s OK to interrupt you, too. Anyway, as she came over, we both put a brave face on it and prepared to pose, but she completely took the wind out of our outraged sails by saying, ‘Can I take a picture of your onion rings? The folks back home just won’t believe how big they are!’ With a sigh of relief, we both said yes . . .

Austin is a strange town – and the citizens know it. I have a souvenir mug that says ‘Keep Austin Weird’, and they are doing a pretty good job. Sandra was going out with Bob Schneider around the time we were making the film and she took a group of us to see him play. When he came on, the young female fans at the front lifted up their blouses and flashed their breasts at him. Sandra said that they always did that to him as a greeting. It would have made my day back when I was fourteen, but it seems a pretty odd business to me now.

The weirdest thing I saw in Austin was from the window of our hotel, which was on the banks of the Colorado river. Shakira and I arrived back at the hotel late one afternoon and the receptionist told us rather mysteriously to go out onto the balcony of our room at precisely six o’clock and look at the bridge over the river on our right. We did exactly as she suggested and saw that there were crowds of other guests standing on their balconies, too, and a host of people standing below, all with cameras ready, waiting for something to happen. Not wanting to miss anything, I rushed back inside to get my camera and got back just in time to witness one of the most extraordinary sights I’ve ever seen. At dead on six o’clock, two million bats flew out from under the bridge in their nightly search for food. There’s no other word for it – weird.

My next film couldn’t have been more different.
Last Orders
was a tiny, low-budget British picture and although I only had a small part and the money was modest, I wanted to do it because not only was the great director Fred Schepisi involved, the cast included actors I liked and admired including Helen Mirren, Bob Hoskins and, from way back in the Sixties, David Hemmings and Tom Courtenay. Ray Winstone was playing my son, as well, so this really was the Best of British Talent. I suppose I always knew I’d end up playing my father at some point or other: my character, Jack Dodds, was a battler, just like my dad, a man who’d been born and bred in Bermondsey. But even though I was only on the set for about ten days out of the nine or so weeks of shooting, I found that playing a character like Jack Dodds alongside so many of my contemporaries, and watching Bob and Ray, the next generation of working-class actors like us, if you like, almost felt like watching the life I could have had play out on screen.

You couldn’t have had a greater contrast with that cameo role than the small part I took for the fun of it in the third Austin Powers movie,
Goldmember
. Again I was playing the father (well, by now I was getting used to it . . .), but this time it was the father of Mike Myers’ Austin Powers himself. Nigel Powers, the rakish super spy, gave me every chance I could ever have wanted to send up the whole business of the Sixties man about town, and I adored it. It was an honour to be invited to play a bit part which was really a tongue-in-cheek send-up of my own on-screen image.

I loved
Goldmember
from start to finish. Mike Myers is crazy – but crazy like a fox, because he is a comic genius. For a start, he loves what he does – and he makes sure everyone else has fun, too. At the end of every take, for instance, he played loud rock-and-roll through the speakers and everyone started dancing, which took me completely by surprise the first time it happened, but I soon got into it. And Mike, like me, hates getting up in the morning, so every day we got a later and later start until by the time the movie finished we were working from noon until midnight. The lines were crazy, too – one of my own favourites was, ‘There are only two things I hate in the world: people who are intolerant of other people’s cultures, and the Dutch,’ while Mike got to say, when explaining to someone why he had a stiff neck, ‘I took a Viagra and it stuck in my throat!’ No one was going to get an Oscar for this movie, but it was a huge box office success and a great laugh.

One of the revelations for me in
Goldmember
was the performance of Beyoncé Knowles. At the time of the film she was still in Destiny’s Child and she was only nineteen. She was quiet, observant, absolutely determined to get her first acting role right and completely professional, with a sensitive regard for the feelings of everyone else on the set. She was famous then, but now of course Beyoncé is one of the top female recording artists in the world, although she once confided to me that she would love to win an Academy Award one day. I am convinced she will . . .

My working life had felt like a succession of wild changes of tone for a while, but if there could be a greater contrast between my screen role in
Goldmember
and the ceremony I was about to take part in, I can’t think what it might be. I had been given a CBE in 1993, and although I was grateful to receive such a beautiful medal, I don’t remember anything about the occasion whatsoever. But I can remember everything about receiving a knighthood in the year 2000, in great detail. For a start it was one of the proudest moments of my life. It is not like winning an Oscar – that is for a single piece of work – it is an award for a lifetime’s achievement. It means a great deal to me and to my family – but to us alone. I don’t expect other people to recognise it or to call me ‘Sir Michael’. The knighthood is for me and for us and what anybody else thinks or says about it is of absolutely no concern to me whatsoever.

You are informed that you have been awarded a knighthood months before the honours list is announced and you are sent some sort of form to fill in if you want to turn it down – which some people do. I never understand people who make a big fuss about turning it down. If not being a knight is so important to them, why do they have to shout about refusing it? I think they should just fill in the form and shut up!

My only problem with the whole knighthood business was having to find a morning suit, but fortunately Doug Hayward stepped into the breach again – just as he had done back at the premiere of
Zulu
all those years ago – and lent me his. We were, remarkably, still the same size. Accompanied by Shakira, Dominique and Natasha – all looking incredibly glamorous – I drove to Buckingham Palace. When we got out of the car, we were immediately greeted by an army officer who must have been about six foot five, standing ramrod straight (something I never achieved in my army days) and with a big stick under his arm. He was our own personal usher for the occasion and he led us down the long corridors of the palace at a cracking pace, to the ballroom where the investitures were taking place. As we whipped along, I noticed that various doors were half opening along the way as people popped their heads out to watch us go. ‘Good luck!’ some of them whispered as they recognised me, before shutting the doors hastily as our usher glared at them. It was a welcome human touch in such formal and intimidating surroundings. The whole thing was high-tech, too – we were on digital camera for every moment of the ceremony and were told that we could have a photograph of any moment I chose while we were at the palace. Who says the Royal Family is out of touch? I chose, of course – like everyone else, I gather – the moments when the Queen touched my shoulder with the sword and when the family gathered outside the front of the palace.

Once Shakira and my daughters were shown to their seats in the ballroom, I was taken to a back room to practise. There was a wooden apparatus with a cushion for kneeling on. ‘The right knee only!’ my usher instructed me firmly. ‘I know how to kneel,’ I said. ‘It’s not the kneeling we’re worried about,’ he replied. ‘It’s the getting up again!’ He pointed out a rail on one side of the cushion. ‘This,’ said the usher – he really did know everything – ‘is for the older recipients who might have trouble getting to their feet again.’ He then gave me detailed instructions on the protocol. It seemed enormously complicated and I realised that – unlike the movies – I’d have to get it right first time: there wouldn’t be a chance for another take. ‘When your name is called,’ he said, ‘you will walk straight in and turn right on the line directly in front of Her Majesty. You will not at any time speak unless you are spoken to. You will kneel on your right knee until the queen has knighted you with her sword. You will then stand and again not speak unless spoken to by Her Majesty. She will then stretch out her hand and shake yours and at that point you are done – not another gesture or word – and you will immediately turn right and walk smartly out of the room. Do you understand, sir?’ I was reeling by this time, but I told him I did and stood there on my own waiting for my turn. When it came, I did everything I had been told to do and in the correct order (I could sense my usher anxiously watching me from the wings) and stood in front of Her Majesty. ‘I have a feeling that you have been doing what you do for a very long time,’ she said. I stifled the temptation to say, ‘And so have you, Ma’am,’ and just said, ‘Yes, Ma’am,’ went down on one knee and was knighted. I got to my feet, and she put out her hand without another word. I noticed that in her handshake there is a very slight push towards you in case you have forgotten it is over. It’s all clever stuff. I turned right as I had been instructed and was met by my usher who seemed very pleased with my performance – as for me, I was walking on air. I was a knight! Just like all those men I had read about in comics and books when I was a kid. I couldn’t believe it and I went to join my family for the rest of the ceremony in a daze. I thought of my mother and of my father and of all the generations of their families stretching back behind me over the centuries and I felt that it was for them as well as for myself and Shakira and the girls that I was there.