Michael Caine’s Memoir, ‘The Elephant to Hollywood’ - The New York Times The New York Times Books |What It Was All About for Alfie, Now a Grandpa Search Books | Books of The Times What It Was All About for Alfie, Now a Grandpa Continue reading the main story Michael Caine ’s “Elephant to Hollywood” is an unabashedly old-school celebrity memoir. Its tales sound oft-told because they probably are. Mr. Caine is a charming raconteur, specializing in anecdotes packed with famous names. In these stories all the famous people do their famous-people things, whether it’s Jack Nicholson grinning “with that wolfish Nicholson grin” or John Wayne striding into the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel in full cowboy regalia. “You’re gonna be a star, kid” was the first thing Wayne said to Mr. Caine that day. Then “Call me Duke.” Then a funny off-color punch line. Mr. Caine has trod this territory before. He wrote about his life in an earlier book, the 1992 “What’s It All About?” But he is now Sir Michael Caine, so he has at least one new thing to talk about.

Naturally, he has stories to tell about the day on which he was knighted. He noticed that in the queen’s handshake “there is a very slight push towards you in case you have forgotten it is over.” He also reports that there is a back room in Buckingham Palace where those who will be kneeling before the queen can practice a very important part of the ceremony: getting up again. Mr. Caine, 77, writes with a quality that has grown rare among memoirists: good cheer. His stories aren’t saccharine, but they aren’t mean spirited either. “Beverly Hills is a long way from my childhood home in the Elephant and Castle in south London,” he says early on, referring to a working-class neighborhood there. It may have been a long way, but he makes the journey sound like smooth sailing despite a few comedic comeuppances here and there. A producer once wanted to fire him from “Zulu,” claiming that “Michael Caine doesn’t know what to do with his hands.” But he was imitating what Prince Philip does with his hands, since the role called for an authority figure of military bearing.

Advertisement Continue reading the main story When he gets from the Elephant to Hollywood, as per the title, Mr. Caine writes sunnily: “So off I went to the land of my youthful dreams. My expectations were so high that I thought the reality would be a disappointment. I was wrong — it was better than the wildest of those dreams.” Continue reading the main story This book starts with a vague promise of showbiz schadenfreude. It says it will trace the arc of a movie career that started big (“Alfie,” “The Ipcress File” ) and then hit the doldrums. There did come a time when Mr. Caine began to notice that he was being asked to play fathers instead of leading men and that he was being sent well-worn scripts that bore coffee stains; he took these as danger signs. But he has always seemed so indispensable on screen that it’s hard to picture him in trouble. And the trouble, if that’s what it was, didn’t last. Once he got into the “Batman” business (with “Batman Begins” in 2005) and became sought after by its director, Christopher Nolan (“Inception” this summer), the comeback was official.

Photo Michael Caine Credit Terry O'Neill Mr. Caine appreciates what it takes to have an indelible screen presence. He’s surprised that it is now possible to be a leading man who stars in vampire pictures. His idea of a star — and that’s one of his favorite words, along with “glamorous” and “luxurious” — is Humphrey Bogart or Cary Grant. (Originally named Maurice Micklewhite, he took “Caine” from “The Caine Mutiny,” Bogart’s hit.) So he tells lots of stories about this old guard, even one about a Beverly Hills hardware store. Luckily he heeds the advice of Elmore Leonard and leaves out the boring parts. So even his hardware store anecdote has a point. In the same store where he spotted beloved notables like Fred Astaire and Danny Kaye, he was startled to see Klaus Kinski — a man scarier than anything teenage vampire fans can imagine — buying an ax. Most of the events described in this book have a lot more glitter than hardware errands. Mr. Caine likes that glitter even though he knows how pernicious the workings of show business’s status-based culture can be.

“As the new boy in town I found myself in great demand as party fodder,” he writes about his first days as Los Angeles royalty. And on the evidence of this book, he’s been going to very A-list lunches, dinners, restaurants, parties and nightclubs ever since. Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up Privacy Policy But Mr. Caine can be wittily self-deprecating in describing the places he’s been. The London discothèque Tramp was a favorite haunt for him and a group of his friends, he claims, “for many nights until we started meeting our own grandchildren there.” Actually, his own three grandchildren are very young. And he writes as warmly about devotion to his family as he does about his career. He has lovely stories about his wife, the former Shakira Baksh, a woman so beautiful that Mr. Caine fell for her after seeing her in a Maxwell House coffee ad. And he successfully presents himself as a man whose domestic life means much more to him as his public life does.

He loves the fact that Paul Scofield, who won the best actor Oscar for “A Man for All Seasons” the year Mr. Caine was nominated for “Alfie” (both were released in 1966), was fixing the roof of his barn while the Academy Awards were being given out. “What did he say?” Mr. Caine asked Mr. Scofield’s wife. Her reply: “Oh, you know — ‘Isn’t that nice, dear?’ ” As for the two wins (“Hannah and Her Sisters” in 1987 and “The Cider House Rules” in 2000) and many nominations that have brought him to the Oscar show many times, “whenever I see the tears and tantrums at today’s ceremony, I always think of Paul and smile.” It takes one class act to recognize another. THE ELEPHANT TO HOLLYWOOD Excerpt: ‘The Elephant to Hollywood’ - The New York Times The New York Times Books |‘The Elephant to Hollywood’ Search Chapter Twelve Oscar Nights I am often asked which of my films has come closest to my own ideal of performance and I always answer, Educating Rita.

To me, Educating Rita is the most perfect performance I could give of a character who was as far away from me as you could possibly get and of all the films I have ever been in, I think it may be the one I am most proud of. I'm proud of it, too, because taking the part wasn't immediately the most obvious thing for me to do—for a start it involved turning down a film costarring Sally Field, who had just won an Oscar for Norma Rae, in favor of playing opposite Julie Walters, who had never appeared in a film at all. But the director was Lewis Gilbert, director of Alfie, and the screenplay was by Willy Russell, who had adapted it from his own novel and play and he had opened the play out so that the backstory of the two characters is played out on-screen. The story was also very close to my heart, because although it was a comedy, it was the story of the late flowering of a woman who has had few opportunities in life, and it carries a strong message about class and education.

It's rare, too, to find something in cinema that is deeply written enough for the characters to change each other the way Frank Bryant and Rita do: they have a profound effect on each other. And when I look back at my own films, the ones that stand out for me in terms of character development like this are all films that began in the theater: Alfie, Sleuth, California Suite and Deathtrap. While I could appreciate the strengths of the script, taking on the character of an overweight, alcoholic professor was a real challenge for me. To help get into the role, I grew a shaggy beard and put on about thirty pounds and called on every nuance of alcoholic behavior I could recall. It would have been easy to play the part the way Rex Harrison played Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady—but I saw Dr. Frank Bryant as far less attractive and more vulnerable than that and went back to Emil Jannings's performance as the ugly professor who nurses an unrequited love for Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel for inspiration. I became so immersed in the part and what I imagined to be the "type" that I felt as if I had known academics all my life. Julie Walters was brilliant.

Of course she had already done a lot of television and had played Rita in the West End stage play, but it was her first ever movie, although you would never have known it—she was a completely instinctive film actress. Like John Huston, Lewis Gilbert was a hands-off director and believed in letting the actors get on with it. A measured man, he was nevertheless obviously pleased at the way the filming was going and one day he said to me—just as he had fifteen years before with Alfie, that he thought both Julie and I would be nominated for an Academy Award for our roles in the movie. And just as he had been fifteen years previously with Alfie, he was right. Continue reading the main story For Alfie, I had had the misfortune to be up against my friend the great actor Paul Scofield who had been nominated in the Best Actor category for his role as Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons. I had seen his performance and thought it was brilliant and realized I had no chance of winning with Alfie so I didn't turn up.

The next time I was nominated was for Sleuth in 1973, again for Best Actor, but my costar Laurence Olivier was also nominated for his role in Sleuth, so we had cut our own chances in half from the start. On that occasion I decided to go to the ceremony anyway because I had never been and I thought it might be fun. Big mistake. For a start, in a moment of madness I'd agreed to host a quarter of the ceremony, with Carol Burnett, Charlton Heston and Rock Hudson doing the other three quarters. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Presenting the Oscars was the most nerve-racking job I have ever done in show business. It's very much a live show: they have comedy writers waiting in the wings and as you come off between presentations they hand you an appropriate gag to tell. As if that wasn't bad enough, it was destined to get even more stressful when it got to the Best Actor nominations.

Marlon Brando won it for The Godfather, but—as we all knew he would—he refused to accept it and sent a Native American girl called Sacheen Littlefeather on his behalf, to read a fifteen-page speech protesting the treatment of Native Americans by the film and television industry. The producer of the show had told her beforehand that she would be slung off if she spoke for more than forty-five seconds so she restricted herself to a short speech—which got quite a few boos—and read Brando's letter to the press afterwards. I think that any gesture in a good cause is admirable, but it turned out that the young lady's name was in fact Marie Cruz, that she was an actress whose mother was Caucasian, and that three months after the Oscar ceremony she posed for Playboy magazine. Of course it doesn't invalidate the cause, and Sacheen Littlefeather continues to work as an activist today, but it does show you, yet again, that Hollywood is never quite what you think it is! Littlefeather's performance that night certainly caused consternation backstage.

I was standing there with everyone else while it was going on, waiting for the finale, which was to be John Wayne leading the entire cast in singing "You Oughta Be in Pictures." By the time we got on, everything was a bit chaotic: no one knew the words and John Wayne couldn't sing in tune anyway. I was so embarrassed that I started to edge towards the back of the stage. I had been talking to Clint Eastwood, who had just been presenting an award, and he felt the same so he edged back with me. The problem is that we both edged back so far we fell off. It wasn't far, and neither of us was hurt, but we both became hysterical with laughter and couldn't finish the song. As Lewis Gilbert had predicted, I was nominated for Best Actor in Educating Rita in 1983—as was Julie for Best Actress—but once again the odds were stacked against me, this time because, of the five nominees in my category, four were British: Tom Courtenay and Albert Finney in The Dresser, Tom Conti in Reuben, Reuben and of course me.

The only American in the running was Robert Duvall in Tender Mercies—he was brilliant as a burned-out country singer, but I suspect he would still have won even if he hadn't been. And I was in for an agonizingly long wait to find out. The Academy Awards ceremony is a tense and very long evening. It starts very early, at around five o'clock in the afternoon, so that it makes prime-time TV on the East Coast, which means that you have to set off for the venue at about three-thirty because of the appalling traffic. It seems incongruous to have to put on evening dress in the middle of the day and of course you know you're going to have to wait until nearly midnight for any food, so although it may all look glamorous, the reality is different. And as soon as you get inside the theater you know what the likelihood of winning is: if you are seated on the aisle or near the front, then it's clear you are in with a chance. If you are on the inside of a row, the chances are you're not.

I had already decided that I wasn't going to win for Educating Rita, but as soon as I was shown to my seat, halfway back, and looked over to see Robert Duvall sitting bang in the front row, I started practicing my gallant loser's smile. I could see that Shirley MacLaine was in pole position for Terms of Endearment, too, so it wasn't a wild guess to make that Julie Walters had also been unlucky for Best Actress. Tedious though all the hanging about might be, the annual Academy Awards is the most important fixture in the Hollywood calendar and has been since it started. Perhaps the most iconic event in the Hollywood social calendar—and certainly the aspect of the whole Academy Award business I enjoyed the most—was for years Swifty Lazar's Oscar party. Along with the other two top parties, media mogul Barry Diller's lunch and the late Hollywood agent Ed Limato's dinner, Swifty's party ranked as the place to be and to be seen. Swifty's Oscar parties were real high-octane affairs held first of all at the Bistro restaurant and then at Wolfgang Puck's Spago.

Swifty's party may have been the hot ticket, but you could find yourself seated at the back of the restaurant in "Siberia" if he didn't like you or think you mattered—and he had a very keen sense of priority. He once invited me to dinner and I had to turn him down because I was already having dinner with someone else. When I told him who it was he looked at me, rather disappointed. "He's not a dinner, Michael," he said, "he's a lunch!" So sitting at the front of Spago at Swifty's Oscar parties were the "dinners"—the "lunches" were at the back. . . . After Swifty's death, the mantle passed to Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, who started the very small and very exclusive Oscar party at Morton's, which very quickly became the massive—but funnily enough still very exclusive—Vanity Fair party at Morton's. I discovered just how exclusive the Vanity Fair party was when one year Shakira and I were invited and we found ourselves seated right by the kitchen.

This would definitely have been classed as "Siberia" and a real social stigma, but so many stars were seated round us that it was very clearly not. In addition, it had two great advantages: we were served first and the food was piping hot! But it wasn't until I went to the Gents that I realized quite what an exclusive crowd it was. There were three urinals. Left and right were occupied so I went for the middle one. All three of us finished round about the same time and we went to wash our hands and I found myself in the company of Rupert Murdoch and George Lucas. Back at our table, I found myself sitting next to an old friend, Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington. She had a BlackBerry with her and every now and then would pick it up either to speak on it or to fiddle with it. As the awards show played on the giant television screens placed around the restaurant, we all started to give our uninhibited opinions—both negative and positive—of each award. During a commercial break I asked Arianna what she was doing on the phone. "I'm texting my blog," she said.

I had never heard of a blog at the time and she had to explain to me that she was texting what was happening to her right now, live on the Internet, to all the readers of her very popular Huffington Post. I panicked. "You haven't put out what I've just been saying about some of the winners for millions of people to read, have you?" I couldn't keep the note of fear out of my voice: I had not been discreet. . . . "No!" She laughed. "I wouldn't do that—I've just told my readers that I'm here sitting next to you, that's all." Phew! Morton's restaurant isn't big, so when the dinner and the Oscars show are over, they open up a door and you go into an enormous pavilion and wait for the people who went to the actual ceremony to come to join the party. It doesn't take long before the first ones come in, usually slightly pissed off and demanding a drink. These are the losers and the presenters who don't have to stay at the Oscars for the Governor's Ball. The winners do, and eventually turn up much later, brandishing their trophies. I remember bumping into Jack Nicholson, who was smoking.

I started to give him the lecture I'd first had from Tony Curtis about the dangers of smoking, but he interrupted me. "Michael," he said, with that wolfish Nicholson grin, "it has been proved that people who are left-handed die earlier than smokers. I am right-handed, so I am ahead of the game." Even Hollywood and the Oscars have been affected by the credit crunch. Morton's has now closed down and been turned into another successful restaurant, and the Vanity Fair party is now a much smaller affair, held at the Sunset Towers restaurant on Sunset Boulevard—a trip down memory lane for me as I lived in that building on my first stay in Hollywood while I was making Gambit. Advertisement Continue reading the main story There are hosts of other wonderful and much larger parties, of course—Elton John's annual AIDS Foundation party, for instance, which is now a regular fixture in the Hollywood calendar and combines high glamour with fund-raising for a worthy cause—but for me part of the pleasure has always been about finding the smaller, more intimate occasions in the midst of all the glitz.

Being one of the six thousand industry members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences who vote for the awards involves being sent the most fantastic Christmas present any film buff could ever want: the "screeners." These are the DVDs of the eligible films made over the previous year, sent to us by their producers, all of whom are hoping to get nominations. The screeners arrive at the beginning of November and my family and I hibernate into the cinema and live on those screeners. Although British winters were one of the many reasons Shakira and I had decided to relocate to LA, by 1983 I had found myself becoming increasingly homesick. I had given the performance of my life in Educating Rita and we decided that, much as we loved Hollywood, if I didn't win the Oscar, there was no professional reason to stay on and we would move back to England. I didn't win, but in my mind I had won—because I was going home, and so my delight at Robert Duvall's Oscar was genuine.

That was the year of Swifty's first Oscar party and I was completely unprepared for what awaited me there: as I came into the restaurant I was greeted by a standing ovation from all the brightest and best in the movie business. As I stood there with tears streaming down my face, Cary Grant came up to me and gave me a hug. "You're a winner here, Michael," he whispered. I was overcome—how could I leave people like this? But I knew I had made the right decision—and I knew, too, that we would be back and that the friends we had made would be friends for life. After a trip to Brazil for Blame It on Rio, an adaptation of a French comedy in which a middle-aged man (me) is seduced by his best friend's daughter (unfortunately the charm of the original was lost in translation and it got panned by the critics), we went back to England to look for a house. The summer of 1984 was just gorgeous and the perfect time to house-hunt: the countryside was looking its absolute best.

We wanted to find a house on the river, like the Mill House but further away from London in the deep country and, above all, in a village that had no through road. Property prices were booming in southern England at the time and with this and our list of stipulations it was very difficult to find the right place. We had just been gazumped (a nasty English practice in which someone jumps in with a higher offer after a seller has accepted yours) on a house that met all our criteria and were feeling very grumpy when the estate agent told us an offer on another house in the same village had fallen through that day. As we drove up through the gates marked "Rectory Farmhouse" Shakira leant over to me and whispered, "We've got to have it!" "We haven't even bloody seen it," I grumbled—but I should have known better. Shakira has an uncanny ability to know things—and in this instance she was absolutely right. The house was gorgeous—about two hundred years old, with gabled windows and beautiful oak beams—and it was surrounded by what had once been a magnificent garden with—I could hardly believe our luck—two hundred yards of river frontage.

We bought it on the spot—and what's more, we arranged with the owner to rent it from her for the summer until the purchase went through. So from all the glamour and organized luxury of Hollywood we moved into a house that needed just about everything, but that we knew, from the moment we stepped inside it, would be the family home we were looking for. It proved the perfect project: Shakira got on with plans for the old house, I began designing the new part we wanted to build and the garden, and Natasha made friends with Catherine, the daughter of a farming family just up the road and spent the entire summer on their farm. We indulged ourselves with all the most English summer pastimes we could find—the Derby, Wimbledon, evening dinners at Thameside restaurants—and gave the first of several annual July 4 parties, bringing American and English friends together. It was hard to tear myself away from such an idyllic summer, but I had to pay for it all somehow (and the builders were coming in) and so I headed off for ten weeks in Germany to film The Holcroft Covenant.

It turned out to be yet another bad film, although it was good fun at the time, and as soon as it was done I headed to LA to join Shakira and Natasha where we were still living while Rectory Farm was being renovated. In LA, the autumn is party season and I had always looked forward to it, but this year Hollywood had a really special surprise for me: a private party at the Beverly Wilshire thrown by my friend the producer Irwin Allen just for Shakira and me—and all of Hollywood's best comedians and their wives. It was a roast and I was guest of honor. I couldn't have asked for anything better. I've always been a bit of a comedian myself and I've often thought that if I was young today I might have been a stand-up comic, so an evening in the company of such comic greats as George Burns, Milton Berle, Bob Newhart, Steve Allen and Red Buttons to name just some of the lineup, was my idea of heaven. Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to.

Sign Up Privacy Policy The movies I worked on in 1984 were taken on more with the new conservatory at Rectory Farmhouse in mind than their critical reception, but in November I went to New York for a film that would come to mean a great deal to me. Woody Allen was a director I had long admired and never worked with so I was very excited to be starting on the filming of Hannah and Her Sisters. There are many myths about Woody Allen, most of which are untrue. I'd always heard that he never gives actors the script until the day of shooting—and even then he only gives you your part. I got the script of the whole thing weeks before we began with the only proviso being that I didn't reveal it to anyone, which seemed fair enough. And it was a great script, I could tell that straightaway. Woody works on the dialogue for months before a shoot and yet his films always have a very natural atmosphere, almost as if the actors were ad-libbing, which is absolutely not the case. And as an actor himself, Woody brings something very different to the role of director—and he notices everything.

Once, he stopped a take and asked me why I had not moved my hand the way I had done in the rehearsal a few minutes before. I had no idea I had even moved my hand at all, let alone in what way, but he had spotted it, liked it and we repeated the take to get it in. It takes a great deal of skill to achieve the levels of naturalism that Woody does. In Hannah and Her Sisters, Mia Farrow plays my wife (she was Woody's partner at the time) and we shot the film in her apartment. It really was a family affair: some of Mia's large brood of children played our children in the film, and when she was not required on "set" (her own flat!), Mia could be found in the kitchen doling out food to the others. Being directed by Woody and doing a love scene with Mia in her own bedroom gave an added piquancy to the whole business, too—especially when I made the mistake of looking up at one point only to see Mia's ex-husband André Previn watching the proceedings. . . .

As well as having her partner, children and ex-husband around, Mia's real mother, Maureen O'Sullivan, was playing her screen mother and we were also occasionally visited by a little old man who used to wander in and try to sell us watches, who turned out to be none other than Woody's dad. It was a bizarre and unforgettable experience! Advertisement Continue reading the main story My nomination for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Hannah and Her Sisters came in 1986. It was a surprise on two counts: first, I'd never been nominated in this category before, and second, Woody Allen was very publicly anti-Oscar. In fact he was so opposed to the whole idea of the Awards that he was always publicized playing his clarinet with his group in New York during the broadcast of the show, even when he got nominated himself. The film had also been released in February the previous year, eleven months before the nominations, so I had assumed it had been long forgotten by then.

In fact, I was so sure I would not be nominated, I hadn't even bothered to put the date of the Oscars in my diary and the irony was that I had signed to do a small ten-day part in the Caribbean in Jaws 4 (not a film that was ever likely to feature on the Academy nomination list, at least in any of the acting categories), which coincided with the show. By the time the nomination came through it was too late to do anything about it and so when, finally, I won an Oscar, I wasn't even there to collect it and it was Shakira and Natasha who rang me from one of Swifty's Oscar parties to give me the good news. I was reminded of the time during the filming of Too Late the Hero when my costar Cliff Robertson heard he'd won an Oscar as Best Actor for a film called Charlie. As we were stuck in the Philippine jungle he couldn't go and pick it up, but he was determined not to lose a PR opportunity and got a local woodcarver to make him an exact replica of the statuette so he could be filmed carrying it when we eventually got home.

It seemed like a good plan and indeed there was a huge press pack waiting for us when we got off the plane, Cliff clutching his replica Oscar, but there was a surprise in store: Gregory Peck, the president of the Academy, had turned up to make a presentation of the real Oscar. As the crowds parted and Greg came forward, Cliff reacted with lightning speed and chucked his fake Oscar over his shoulder so he could reach out and accept the real one. It hit me square on the forehead. So there is Cliff, triumphant with Oscar aloft, and me behind, clutching my head and pouring blood. . . . In the end, I learnt my lesson—and the next two times I was nominated I made sure I was there in person (though I've never made the mistake of hosting the ceremony again!). After Hannah, I took on a number of movies, again with Rectory Farm in mind, and we began to prepare for our imminent relocation back to England. Renovations on the house were going well but slowly and it wasn't until the summer of 1987 that we made the final move, after eight and a half years in Hollywood.

It was good to be home and to be able to spend more time with my mother. She was eighty-seven now, and although she was still pretty lively, she didn't always cotton on to what was going on. We invited her to Natasha's fourteenth birthday party to show her the new house. We still didn't have any curtains in the living room and she told me that she thought the place looked bloody awful. "You'd think," she said, gesturing round at all the guests, "that if they're doing this sort of business they'd be able to afford curtains, wouldn't you?" I realized she thought our house was a pub. "And have you run short of money?" she demanded. "No, Ma," I said. "Why do you think that?" "Well, look at Shakira!" Ma said. Shakira was pouring out drinks and refilling glasses. "Why's she working as a barmaid?" I gave up. "It's only a part-time job, Ma," I said. It was a sad moment but I was just glad to be back in the UK so that we could make the most of the time we had left.

There are no part-time jobs in the movie business, and at this point in the late eighties, the British film industry was on its knees. As I didn't want to leave Shakira and Natasha behind to do a film abroad, I went back to television for the first time in twenty-five years. When I last worked for the BBC I got paid in guineas—and very few of them at that; this time, with an American TV company attached to the deal, the fee was as much as I'd have got from a film. It was a drama called Jack the Ripper based on a new theory of the identity of the killer. We shot it in London, which suited me perfectly—although the TV shooting schedule was a bit of a revelation after the slower pace of movies. Still, I kept up, and we were rewarded by the most incredible ratings for the show—I think only the wedding of Charles and Diana had ever achieved a higher rating. I was feeling pretty pleased with myself about this, but I was even more excited when the next project came along. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels appealed from the very start.

My costar was to be Steve Martin, and the director was Frank Oz, who is only slightly better known as Miss Piggy from the Muppets. I asked them both down to Rectory Farm for a lunch party to discuss the film, and was surprised to find that Steve was actually very shy. There were about thirty of us gathered there that day, but because the sitting room was huge, it was far from crowded. "I'd love to have a place like this," Steve said rather wistfully, looking round. "Well you could!" I said, surprised by his comment: I knew how successful Steve was. "Yes . . ." he said, "but I wouldn't have the friends to fill it." It's strange how often actors who are able to come across as the most gregarious of people on-screen can actually be quite inhibited in real life. Inhibition is not one of my problems and eventually, at the end of the lunch, I broached the subject of location with Frank. The story for Scoundrels is set—according to the script—in the south of France in summer, but I was all too aware of the costs that would be involved in taking a crew there at the height of the season.

"So where are we actually shooting, then, Frank?" I asked, prepared for some decaying Eastern European resort. "It's set in the south of France," Frank replied, "so we shoot in the south of France." Those words were music to my ears. The south of France is one of my favorite places in the world. I first went there when Peter Ustinov lent my friend Terence Stamp his yacht and house in the hills behind Cannes as a present for starring in Peter's movie Billy Budd and Terry took me along for the ride. Although I went back to Cannes several times for the film festival, it was always so crowded that it was impossible to leave the hotel without being pursued and it wasn't until I was invited by Peter Sellers, who was filming There's a Girl in My Soup with Goldie Hawn there, that I got to know the south of France better. Advertisement Continue reading the main story While Peter and Goldie were working, I explored St. Tropez. It was right in the middle of the boom that Brigitte Bardot had created after she and Roger Vadim made the movie And God Created Woman there in the late 1950s.

The beaches were incredible, the restaurants were unforgettable and the whole place was full of the most beautiful people I had ever seen. I fell in love with the place and have spent the rest of my life looking for excuses to head back there. I couldn't have had a better excuse than Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. We rented a villa close to Roger and Luisa Moore's and our friends Leslie and Evie Bricusse, and as it was the school holidays Natasha came out to join us with two friends. The movie was nothing but a pleasure from start to finish—although I had a moment early on when I suddenly remembered why the script had seemed familiar. I had seen it years before when it was released under the title Bedtime Story starring Marlon Brando and David Niven, and it had been a complete flop. "Why," I asked Frank and Steve, "are we remaking a movie that flopped first time round?" "Because," Frank said very reasonably, "there would be no point remaking a film that had been a success." I tried to think of a good counterargument, but this was Hollywood logic and I gave up. Hollywood logic or not, Frank was a fantastic director—and comedy takes some real directing.

In the film, Steve and I play con men who make their living off middle-aged ladies; any time it looked like one of our marks was becoming a bit too serious about me, Steve would appear disguised as one of a series of eccentric relatives to put them off. He was so off the wall in his characterization that it was actually quite difficult to play opposite him. In the end, though, the solution was simple: I played my part completely straight and let the laughs take care of themselves. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is one of my favorite films—for me it's the funniest movie I ever made. I think its appeal lies in the fact that my character and Steve Martin's are rogues who only ever hurt the pompous and the rich—and they always get away with it. It looks fabulous, too; it's stylish, it's wicked and people love it. Whenever it comes on television, I always stop and watch a bit of it and it still makes me laugh. There's one scene in particular I just can't resist, where I'm pretending to be an eminent psychiatrist, Dr.

Emil Schaffhausen, who is lashing the legs of Steve Martin, who's posing as a psychosomatically crippled soldier, to prove they don't work. I had to intersperse each of my words with a lash of the whip: "My name is—" lash, "Dr.—" lash, "Emil—" lash, "Schaffhausen," lash. On the second—and final—take I added an ad-lib. After "Schaffhausen—" lash, I added, "the Third—" and a final lash, to give him one more. I just wanted to have the last lash. . . . From the book THE ELEPHANT TO HOLLYWOOD by Michael Caine, published this month by Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Copyright (c) 2010 by Michael Caine. All rights reserved.

9780805093902: The Elephant to Hollywood - AbeBooks - Caine, Michael: 0805093907 The Elephant to Hollywood ISBN 10: 0805093907 ISBN 13: 9780805093902 Publisher: Henry Holt & Company, 2010 About this title Charming, engaging, and surprisingly forthright, Michael Caine gives us his insider's view of Hollywood and the story of his brilliant second act When he was in his late fifties, Michael Caine believed his glamorous, rags-to-riches Hollywood career had come to an end. The scripts being sent his way were worse and worse. When one script really disappointed, he called the producer to complain about the part. The producer said, "No, no, we don't want you for the lover, we want you for the father." Salvation came in the unlikely form of his old friend Jack Nicholson, who convinced him to give acting one more shot. What followed was not only an incredible personal transformation but also one of the most radical comebacks in film history.

Learning to accept his new role both on camera and in his own life, Caine went on to win his second Oscar, be knighted by the queen, and deliver some of his best performances to date. Now he shares the spectacular story of his life, from his humble upbringing in London's poverty-stricken Elephant and Castle, his military service, touching marriage and family life, and lively adventures with friends, to legendary meetings with fellow stars, forays as a restaurateur, and hilarious off-screen encounters from his glittering five-decade career. Caine brings his gift for storytelling and his insider's view to a tale that is funny, warm, and deeply honest. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. About the Author: Sir Michael Caine has won two Academy Awards during his distinguished five-decade career on screen. Knighted in 2000, Caine was born in working-class Sussex, England, and served in the British Army before landing his first film role in Zulu (1964). His films include The Ipcress File, Alfie, Hannah and Her Sisters, The Cider House Rules, and Harry Brown. He is the author of the bestselling What's It All About?.

He lives in Surrey with his wife of thirty-seven years. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.: Chapter One THE TWILIGHT ZONE When I finished my first autobiography, What's It All About? 1992 seemed like a good place to stop. I had a great film career, a worldwide bestseller, I owned some restaurants, a beautiful house and, most importantly of all, I had a loving family. Christmas 1991 and New Year's Eve 1992 were spent in Aspen, Colorado, as guests of Marvin and Barbara Davis, the Texan oil billionaires and socialites. My wife, Shakira, and I stayed at the Little Nell Inn (which Marvin happened to own) surrounded by friends, including Lenny and Wendy Goldberg, Sean Connery and his wife, Michelene, and Sidney and Joanna Poitier. It was a fabulous group to spend a holiday with. I don't ski, but I have really worked hard at developing my après-ski skills and that is what Aspen is all about. As we sat around, enjoying the sunshine, gossiping about old times and eating fabulous food with this great group of people, I felt pretty happy with my lot.

Everyone there had been part of my life since I first got to Hollywood, although in fact I'd met Sean in London back in the late 1950s at what was then called a "bottle party." If someone was giving a party in those days and couldn't quite afford it, the invitation would be to "bring a bottle and a bird." I was so broke then that I couldn't afford to bring a bottle, and so I brought two birds. And they were both very beautiful girls. I walked into this party and there was Sean, who seemed enormous compared with the rest of us weedy actor types, and he saw me with those two girls and I became his instant new best friend. That period, back in the 1950s, was a tough time for me—perhaps the toughest I've ever known—and I was living hand to mouth through much of it, owing small sums of money to people all over London and often having to cross the road to avoid creditors. Of course, what I couldn't have foreseen was that not so many years later, Shirley MacLaine would choose me to play opposite her in Gambit and give me a welcome to LA party, and in would walk Sidney Poitier.

And that Sidney would become my instant new best friend. Aspen with old friends was followed by a period back in Hollywood. I felt on top of the world. Things could only get better. I was completely oblivious to the downturn in store for me. Shakira and I had bought a small house with a fantastic view on a Beverly Hill but in the modest district of Trousdale. It was a holiday home, really—our main base was back in England but we wanted to be close to our dear friend, Swifty Lazar, whose wife, Mary, was very sick. Apart from Mary's illness, there were no signs of impending doom. Our old friends were all in town. Just like our New Year at Aspen, the dinner we had one night at Chasen's restaurant in Hollywood with Frank and Barbara Sinatra, Greg and Veronique Peck and George and Jolene Schlatter seemed to sum up all that was good in our lives. It was a great Hollywood evening, full of in-jokes including a prime one from George that seemed to sum up perfectly the relationship between actors and their agents.

George is one of the great TV producers, the man who discovered Goldie Hawn in his fantastic show Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, and every bit as funny as the shows he's produced. I've been lucky—my agents have always been close friends—but the relationship between stars and agents is usually quite distant socially. As George told it, an actor gets a telephone call to say that his house has been burnt down and his wife raped. The actor rushes home and a police officer meets him outside and tells him that it is his agent who has come to the house, burnt it down and raped his wife. The actor's jaw drops and he turns to the policeman and says, completely astonished, "My agent came to my house?" In fact, that dinner at Chasen's, and one the following week at Barbra Streisand's (all Art Nouveau, and sensational Shaker furniture), were to be the last high for quite some time. Looking back to this period I can see that the storm clouds, as they say, were gathering. A movie I had made the previous year, Noises Off, had come out and gone out just as quickly. I wasn't too bothered.

Everyone has a flop movie now and then, I thought. But it was another little sign. I took no notice. I had become part of Hollywood history. Completely out of the blue, Robert Mitchum, the great 1950s movie star, asked me to present his Lifetime Achievement Award at the Golden Globes. I loved Bob Mitchum and was honored that he should ask me, but I didn't know him and had never worked with him and I was curious. "Did you pick me because I had heavy eyelids like you?" I asked him. And he said, "Yes. You're the only one, you know. People were always talking about my eyelids and then I saw you in Alfie and I thought to myself: this guy's got heavy eyelids, too. They're not as heavy as mine, of course, but they're quite heavy. It's all to do with the eyelids." A charming story—and Bob was a charming guy—but I began to wonder if it was really because everyone else turned him down. Whether or not that was the case, I've always liked the Golden Globes because you can sit at tables and get a drink and move around and talk to people.

Burt Reynolds once pointed out something that everyone in the business knows but which is rarely mentioned: the class distinction. At awards ceremonies all the television people are seated at the back and the movie people at the front. It's absurd, really—you get TV stars like those on Friends who are earning a million dollars a week, and their tables aren't at the front. And I'm thinking—wait a minute—I've never earned a million dollars a week! I asked one of the organizers of the Golden Globes about it and he said simply, "Movies come first." I was just about to find out how true that was. Back in England, my book came out and went straight to Number One. And I embarked on a world tour to publicize it—what could possibly go wrong? For a start, doing publicity on a book tour turned out to be just like doing publicity for a movie, which is something I have done and hated all my life. When I first went to America on a publicity tour for The Ipcress File and Alfie, it came as a big shock to be bundled out of bed at six in the morning by my press agent, Bobby Zarem, and told that I was appearing on the Today show at seven-thirty.

"Seven-thirty?" I said. I'd only flown in the night before. "So why do I have to get up at dawn?" He looked at me pityingly. "It's seven-thirty this morning, Michael." "And who on earth's going to be watching at that time of day?" I demanded. This time Bobby was a little firmer. "Twenty-one million people," he said. "So if you want to be a star in America, you'll have to get up!" I'm used to the 24/7 publicity machine now, but it doesn't mean I like it and this tour was no different. It consisted of me giving jet-lagged interviews to journalists who hadn't even bothered to read the book, then getting on another plane and doing the same thing all over again in a different, equally fascinating and equally beautiful country that I only got to see from the car window to and from an airport. I remember Chris Patten, the then governor of Hong Kong, sending an official to whip us through immigration and customs so we wouldn't be late for our first-night dinner with him.

We stayed in the Regent Hotel and Shakira and I had a Jacuzzi together in the most romantic setting ever—in the middle of the roof of the penthouse apartment thirty stories up. There was nothing there but the Jacuzzi and a 360-degree view of Hong Kong. We spent hours in there. We must have been the cleanest tourists in the whole of Asia. Spectacular though it was, that was pretty much all we saw of Hong Kong. We went on to Bangkok. As we came out of the airport we saw a Rolls-Royce with a police escort waiting for someone. That someone turned out to be us. It all seemed a bit over the top until we hit the traffic on the freeway—I had never seen anything like it. It didn't seem to matter to our policemen whether we went on the off ramps or off the on ramps, we just plowed our way into the city, doing what normally would have been a four-hour trip in under an hour. When we got to the Oriental Hotel we were ushered into the Somerset Maugham suite—more than a bit intimidating for a first-time writer. On to Australia, New Zealand . . .

and then to Los Angeles for the first stop in a whirlwind publicity tour, punctuated by something that was beginning to happen more and more frequently in my life: a memorial service. I suppose if I'd been looking for signs that there was a downturn in store for me, I might have taken one from the death of John Foreman, a friend and the producer of one of my favorites among my own movies, The Man Who Would Be King. I gave one of the eulogies at his memorial service and others also got up and spoke, including Jack Nicholson. John Foreman was a very special kind of guy and I'd put him in the category of the "nearly greats"—I think he died just before he reached his full potential, although The Man Who Would Be King is more than enough to confirm his reputation. Sitting in the packed chapel and listening as friends paid tribute to a wonderful man, I couldn't help thinking back to that film and what it had meant—and still means—to me.

Not only was I working with a man I regarded as God—director John Huston, who had directed three of my all-time favorite films including The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Maltese Falcon and The African Queen—but I was playing the part of Peachy Carnehan, a part Huston had planned for Humphrey Bogart, my screen idol. I thought back to the first time I saw The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, that great film classic about a bunch of misfits searching for gold, a dream as impossible as mine to be an actor seemed then. As a teenager I had identified with the Bogart character completely and now I found myself in a movie directed by Huston, playing a part intended for Bogart. It seemed as if impossible dreams really could come true. The other thing that made The Man Who Would Be King so special was that I was playing opposite Sean Connery. Working with him proved to be a real pleasure and we became even closer as a result. Sean, like me, felt he owed a great deal to John Huston and we were both very sad to hear the news, many years later, that he was on his deathbed.

The two of us went to Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Hollywood to say goodbye. When we got there John was rambling. "I was in a boxing match," he was saying. "And it turns out the other guy had razors sewn into the gloves and that's why I'm here. He finished me off, that guy—that's why I'm here." He rambled on about this boxer for twenty minutes and Sean and I looked at each other and we were both in tears—and I've never seen Sean in tears. We left the hospital, very upset, and the next thing we heard was that John Huston had got up out of bed and made two more movies. When I saw him again I said, "The next time I come to say farewell to you, you'd better die or I'll bloody kill you." I added, "You don't know how upset we were." He said, "Well, Michael, you know how it is—people get upset. And people die." "Well, yes," I said, "but not twice." Back at John Foreman's service, we had some laughs, told some stories and shed some tears and then it was on to New York for yet another book launch evening.

This time it was at my friend Elaine's restaurant and guests included Gloria Vanderbilt, Lauren Bacall, David Bowie and Iman—these legends just floated in front of my jet-lagged eyes. I had a mind that couldn't think—not that it mattered, my tongue and lips were too tired to speak anyway. If Chasen's symbolized my Hollywood life and was the meeting place for so many of my LA friends, then Elaine's was its New York equivalent for me. Elaine's is more than a restaurant: it's a New York institution, almost a salon. It was the perfect place to hold a book launch because it's always been a place where writers, actors and directors gather—from Woody Allen to the people from Saturday Night Live. Elaine herself would flit from table to table, making sure all her guests were all right. One night, there was a guy bothering me and she came over and grabbed him by the collar and threw him out on the pavement—all on her own. I protested.

"That's a bit drastic—we could have got rid of him." And she said, "Nah—I don't like those sons of bitches!" Elaine is a close friend and I have lunch with her on a Saturday when we're in New York. It's always caviar, which she pays for in cash that she keeps in her bra. She says, "I'll get this," and she dives in and pulls out this wad of cash. The party at Elaine's was the last of the tour and from New York I went back home to England. I was absolutely shattered, but scripts had arrived while I was away—it was time to get on with the day job. Eventually I picked myself up and sat down to read one. I was appalled. The part was very small, hardly worth doing at all. I sent it straight back to the producer, telling him what I thought of it. A couple of days later the man phoned me. "No, no—you're not the lover, I want you to read the part of the father!" I put the phone down and just stood there, shocked. The father? Me? I headed into the bathroom and looked in the mirror.

Yes, staring back at me was, indeed, the father. In the mirror was a leading movie actor, not a movie star. I realized the only girl I'd ever get to kiss in a film again would be my daughter. The difference between a leading movie actor and a movie star (apart from the money and the dressing room) is that when movie stars get a script they want to do, they change it to suit them. A movie star says, "I would never do that" or "I would never say that" and their own writers will add what they would do or say. When leading movie actors get a script they want to do, they change themselves to suit the script. But there's another difference, and this was a difference I knew I could work with. A lot of movie stars can't act and so when the big roles dry up they disappear, insisting they won't play supporting parts. All leading movie actors have to act or they would vanish completely. I had always known that this time would come. I was fifty-eight years old. Should I give up or keep going? The question stayed with me for months.

Every morning as I opened the packets of coffee-stained scripts with the pencil markings that other, younger actors had made before they turned the parts down, I could see that things were going to be different now, more difficult. I had reached the period of my life I called the twilight zone. The spotlight of movie stardom was fading and although the slightly dimmer light of the leading movie actor was beginning to flicker into life, it all seemed very gloomy. There were some bright spots. Out of the blue I was made CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List—a great honor and a beautiful medal. I was now a Commander of the British Empire and very proud of it, although an unkind journalist pointed out that I'd been made a commander of something that no longer existed. Excerpted from The Elephant To Hollywood by Michael Caine Copyright 2010 by Michael Caine Published in 2010 by Henry Holt and Company All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission t... "About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

When it wasn't fun being Michael Caine: THE ELEPHANT TO HOLLYWOOD BY MICHAEL CAINE | Daily Mail Online When it wasn't fun being Michael Caine THE ELEPHANT TO HOLLYWOOD BY MICHAEL CAINE (Hodder & Stoughton £20) Updated: 11:22 EST, 1 October 2010 Northern grit: Michael Caine opposite Britt Ekland in Get Carter There was a time not so long ago when people tended to confine themselves to just one autobiography. But not any more. The market leader here is Katie ‘Jordan’ Price, who, at 32, has already racked up three, followed by ­Sharon Osbourne and Geri ­Halliwell with two each. Now, 18 years after his first book of ­memoirs, What’s It All About?, comes Michael Caine’s second. As he says with a slightly plaintive edge in his introduction, a lot has happened in the past 18 years. The early ­Nineties saw Caine’s career at an unprecedented low.

The few scripts he was sent invariably had coffee stains on them, having passed through so many other actors’ hands before they got to him. Worse still, the roles he was up for were all men of a certain age - an age Caine could scarcely believe that he’d reached. ‘I realised the only girl I’d ever get to kiss in a film again would be my ­daughter,’ he writes glumly. His enthusiasm had taken a knock, too: somehow, it just wasn’t fun being Michael Caine any more. And yet, as he’d be the first to admit, he had nothing to complain about. He had a wife and two daughters whom he adored, plenty of money and a lavish property ­portfolio. What follows, therefore, is not exactly a rags-to-riches story - more like a riches to more riches story, this time with an extra dollop of happiness on top. If there is a key to writing one’s second autobiography, it would seem to be this: never be embarrassed about ­repeating yourself. While much of the material here will be familiar to readers of What’s It All About?, it’s told with such freshness and verve that I can’t imagine anybody is going to ­quibble.

Nor could anyone complain about a shortage of rags in his early life. Born with a condition called ­Blefora which gave him his characteristic heavy eyelids, the-then Maurice Micklewhite grew up in the ­Elephant and Castle, the son of a Billingsgate porter and a char-lady. Sleepy-eyed, stick-legged - the result of childhood rickets - ­jug-eared and painfully shy, his ­prospects did not look promising. Caine believes that we all become the thing we are most afraid of - in his case somebody who has made a spectacle of themselves for a living. Having changed his name to Michael Caine after seeing a poster for The Caine Mutiny starring his idol, Humphrey Bogart, he tried to launched himself as an actor, only to be told that he was too common, too awkward and - bizarrely - too effeminate. His big break came playing Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File. This was immediately followed by Alfie, and, suddenly, Caine was a star. In Hollywood, where at first ­people regarded him as being a creature from another planet, he was soon knocking about with Frank Sinatra and John Wayne.

Sir Michael Caine: Has a shrewd idea of his own worth, but lives in the real world It was Wayne who offered him a piece of advice that proved ­particularly apt: ‘If you want to stay a star, remember to talk low, talk slow and don’t say too much.’ One of the strange and engaging things about Michael Caine, given how self-contained he appears on screen, is that he never seems to have lost his shyness, or his gauchness. Introduced to Brigitte Bardot in a bar in the late Sixties, Caine was so excited he leapt to his feet - knocking the table, and the drinks on it, flying. The story of how he met his ­second wife, Shakira, has often been told before, but this, too, can stand almost any amount of repetition. Seeing her on TV in a coffee ad, he fell instantly in love, got her number and, nervously, asked her out. By then, he was downing three bottles of vodka a day. Under Shakira’s influence, he straightened himself out, set about perfecting his craft and discovered the joys of gardening.

But, by the early Nineties, Caine’s career appeared to be over. He was dragged off the scrap heap by his old chum, Jack Nicholson, who offered him a part in a film called Blood And Wine. The film wasn’t a hit, but much to his surprise Caine found he’d got his mojo back - ‘filming was suddenly fun again’. Soon the work, and the accolades, were piling up, once again. Caine must be one of the few ­Hollywood stars who’s actually written his own memoirs, not had them ghosted for him. Near the beginning of The ­Elephant To Hollywood, he writes: ‘This is not a serious tome by a ­pompous old actor.’ Veterans of showbusiness autobiographies, well used to such disclaimers, will brace themselves for an orgy of po-faced pomposity at this point. In Caine’s case, though, it’s nothing less than the truth. He clearly has a shrewd idea of his own worth, but it’s equally clear that he lives in the real world, not in some wafty, self-inflated cloud.

He watches the news, worries about what he sees and - where appropriate - does what he can to improve it. This is an unusual showbusiness autobiography in other ways, too. Anyone hoping for lots of gossip or introspection is going to be ­disappointed: Caine doesn’t really do either. Of all the actors he’s worked with, only Joaquin Phoenix is described in less than glowing terms, and even he’s unlikely to be rushing to his lawyer. ‘Joaquin was a pleasant young man but somewhat strange...’ However, there are ample compensations. To read Caine is to be in the company of an amiable, sentimental man who has achieved great success - and happiness - without ­appearing to be in the least smug. At 77, he says that he’s happiest of all at home these days, preferably in the kitchen cooking a Sunday roast for his family. It’s a tough act to emulate, but anyone wanting to try can at least follow his recipe for roast potatoes - rosemary and ­celery salt are the big secrets here. ‘Michael Winner,’ he notes proudly, ‘has always been very ­complimentary about them.’

Question: Whose 2010 biography was called "Elephant to Hollywood"?
Answer: MICHAEL CAINE