That's Another Story: The Autobiography Page 24

  In the summer of 1980 I was renting a room in the flat of my friend, the actress Rosalind March, in Oakmead Road, Balham, along with Babs, my Jack Russell terrier. We had both come out of long relationships - that is, Ros and me as opposed to Babs and me - and we spent a lot of evenings, armed with a bottle of wine, vindicating ourselves of any blame, while heaping it instead on the hapless men involved, and celebrating our freedom. We had met originally through the acting agency, Actorum, a couple of years earlier.

  Actorum was an agency run by and for actors, with a tiny office in Tower Street, and when members were unemployed they were expected to come into the office to man the phones, ring round for work and negotiate contracts. Although it worked in principle, in practice some members were rarely, if ever, in the office and others were never out of it, which at times gave rise to a degree of, shall we say, bitterness. Whilst there were people who were wonderfully efficient in the office, there were others who put only themselves up for parts, plus one or two who suggested themselves for parts that were completely wrong for them. One such individual, who at this time was most certainly middle aged and not what a girl would describe as good-looking, put himself forward to play Romeo in a production of Romeo and Juliet at the Royal Shakespeare Company, no less, when actually, were it being cast at the time, The Hobbit would have been more appropriate. Needless to say he wasn’t called for an audition. Also problematic was the fact that no deal could really be negotiated without close consultation at every stage with the actor for whom the deal was being struck. This resulted in situations such as the one that occurred when I was filming Nearly a Happy Ending.

  It was our last evening in the studio and for some reason we were very behind with the recording. It may have had something to do with the director coming down and saying, ‘What’s happened? You were funny in rehearsal . . . Be funny!’ This, as any actor will tell you, is the kiss of death. Anyway, in those days if you hadn’t finished in a television studio by ten-thirty they would simply pull the plug, so the pressure and tension were already fairly high when suddenly I was summoned up into the director’s gallery to take an urgent phone call. I couldn’t imagine what it was; thoughts of my flat burning to the ground or my mother being ill or worse shot into my head as I picked up the receiver. To my surprise, on the other end was the chirpy voice of a fellow actor.

  ‘Julie! Good news! I think I’ve got Sheffield Crucible over a barrel! Shall I go for the extra fiver?’

  Just before rehearsals for Educating Rita were to start I decided to take a little holiday. Ros was about to do a commercial in Amsterdam. The filming would be spread out over five days or so, with quite a bit of free time, and we thought it would be fun if I went along too. We checked into a hotel that had been booked by the production company. It was on the Heerengracht, one of the three main canals that run through the centre of the city. The name means Gentleman’s Canal, the appropriateness of which was completely lost on us, at least to begin with. The hotel, one of those ornate-looking, tall, thin houses, was cosy and friendly. After unpacking in our respective rooms, which were at the top of a narrow creaky staircase, we went down to the little bar for a drink. The bartender, a good-looking chap with bright blond hair, was wearing a kilt. He was chatty and friendly, speaking very good English, but he was definitely not Scottish. We spent the evening talking to him and another rather dapper man in his fifties who had just checked in and who, it turned out, was a consultant neurologist from Canada. Both of us being tired and Ros having to get up at some unearthly hour, we decided to get an early night.

  The next evening we ended up again in the little hotel bar. This time, there were just two or three young men, standing around quietly having a drink. As the evening went on and the bar started to fill up, we began to notice a distinct lack of women. It was only later, around midnight, when the consultant came back into the bar after a night on the town, that we began to cotton on as to what kind of hotel it was. With him was a huge and very beautiful black man dressed from head to toe as a cowboy, including leather chaps and spurs. I innocently asked whether they’d been to a fancy-dress party, a question that was mysteriously met with peals of laughter from the assembled group.

  As the night crept on towards the small hours, the cowboy, enlivened by drink, began to remove his clothes and show us his piercings. I thought I was daring, having two in one earlobe, but these were simply eye-watering to behold; there were little rings and studs glinting and gleaming from folds and crevices that a person simply does not associate with jewellery, and all I could think at the time was what a terribly uncomfortable impediment some of them would be to certain activities.

  Anyway, dear reader, as you may have guessed long before I did, it was a gay hotel and the production company presumably thought it was a nice safe place for a woman on her own, as Ros was initially going to be. It was either that or, when she asked them whether they would also book a room for her friend, they got the wrong end of the stick. I really don’t know which it was but it was all very educational and, more importantly, it made us laugh, starting a friendship that has lasted to this day.

  When the Royal Shakespeare Company commissioned a play from Willy Russell, apparently they were expecting a big modern musical like John, Paul, George, Ringo and Bert, which had enjoyed a massive success, here and in the States. What they got was a two-handed play with one set and no idea how to cast it. It remained on the shelf for some time, after which it was decided to cast it from outside the company, leaving Willy and Mike Ockrent to their own devices. So we started rehearsals in June 1980.

  Mark Kingston was to play Frank, the Open University lecturer, and the two of us hit it off immediately. Although I had identified with the character of Rita on just about every level, when it came to act her I had real difficulty in finding her core and agonised through rehearsals about who she was, trying different approaches and using different characters from my own life as inspiration. At one point Willy suggested that if I wanted, I could play her as a Brummie. That night when I went through the script I was fascinated to find that the timing and rhythm of Rita’s one-liners were at odds with the Birmingham accent and its kind of dry, downbeat music, which has utterly different cadences and humour. It simply did not fit the sparky Liverpool tempo. I never truly found Rita until the first preview at the Donmar where somehow, through sheer terror and the life-or-death need to survive in front of an audience, she clicked gawkily into place. I thought that I would most certainly fall flat on my face as soon as I stepped out on to the stage. On that first night Mark and I stood holding hands in the darkness backstage, waiting to go on, shaking with fear, both feeling that the critics would dump on us from a great height and that a blanket of humiliation was waiting to smother us.

  How wrong could we be? I remember during the first-night interval Mike whooshing through the dressing rooms, making an O with his thumb and forefinger, kissing it, thrusting it into the air and calling to the gods with a huge smile on his face, ‘Prima! Prima! Prima! Prima!’ whilst Mark and I just stared at one another, thinking: Is he deluded? No, he was right; the next day the papers were full of praise and you couldn’t get a seat. After its three-month run we transferred to the Piccadilly Theatre, a great barn of a place, made more intimate by shutting off the upper tiers.

  One day during the course of the run I received a phone call from a man who introduced himself as Lewis Gilbert. He told me that he was a film director and that on the recommendation of his wife he had come to see the play and had absolutely loved both it and me. He was going to make a film of it and said that he wanted me for the part but could not offer it to me just then as he had yet to raise the money. He would be in touch.

  Approximately three months later he rang again. He had been in America where potential investors had talked of Paul Newman and Dolly Parton in the roles of Frank and Rita. Well, I could think of two very good reasons why I couldn’t compete with her. It seems that because I was an unknown I would be required to do a scree
n test, the very thought of which sent me into paroxysms of panic. I would have to prove myself all over again to people who knew nothing about me.

  It seemed an exhausting task, in which the stakes felt ridiculously astronomical: a tiny unreliable pivot on which my life might turn and move into another league, where I was to star in a major motion picture or, alternatively, where I would fail to make the grade and then have to live with that and the rejection therein - not an easy one for me (remember the fiasco of the walking race? And the hoohah over eleven-plus, where failure was just about equal to death?) - and I would then have to watch someone else take the part that I had created. I would be too nervous! I wouldn’t be relaxed enough to be really inside the character, and what if I was just too nervous to perform at all? The Americans wouldn’t think that I was good-looking enough and what if, what if, what if . . . It felt like a test to see whether I was good enough to be on this earth instead of right for a part in a film and a part that I knew inside out at that.

  However, salvation was at hand; a month later I was put out of my misery when Lewis rang again.

  ‘It’s all right, darling, we’ve got Michael. You won’t have to do a screen test now.’

  At first I couldn’t make any sense of this; I thought he could only be saying that I had not got the part.

  ‘Oh . . .’

  ‘OK, dear . . .? Happy?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’ve got the part.’

  ‘Oh my garrrrrrrd!’

  ‘Yes, dear, now that we’ve got Michael, we don’t need a star to play your part.’

  ‘. . . Sorry? Michael . . .? Michael who?’

  ‘Caine, darling, Michael Caine is going to play Frank.’

  ‘M-Michael Caine . . .? Michael C—Alfie? Alfie is going to play ... Rita?’

  ‘No, dear, he’s going to play Frank.’

  ‘Yes, no, yes, no, I knew what you meant. Oh my gaaaaaaaard!’

  I rang everyone I knew, including Duncan Preston. So when a few minutes after my last call the phone rang and a deep Texan drawl said, ‘Hi, am I speaking to Julie Walters?’ I answered suspiciously, ‘Yeeees?’

  ‘My name is Herbie Oakes. I am the producer of your movie Educating Rita and—’

  ‘Stop before you start! Yeah, great name, Duncan, very good, but I know it’s you and do you know how I know it’s you? Because your Texan accent is soooooo bad!’ And cackling manically I put the phone down.

  About five minutes later I decided to ring Duncan back. He completely denied having just called me and, what is more, I believed him. Oh my gaaaard! I’m already off on the wrong foot. In fact, I’m off on the most terrible of feet. But the producing person with the ‘great name’ rang back and, in an obsequious, faltering way, I tried to explain and apologise.

  ‘I’m so sorry, erm . . . Mr . . . Mr Hoax, er, no . . . I’m sorry, Mr Mr Mr Mr Mr Mr . . . Oakes.’

  ‘Please call me Herbie, yes, I thought I had the wrong number.’

  Oh, if only you had. But, even though I’m not sure that he had understood, he was charming and friendly, going on to explain that he had simply called to introduce himself and to invite me round to his place for drinks so that I could meet Michael as well as some other people whose names went immediately in and out of my head. All I heard was Michael, Michael (The Ipcress File, Get Carter, The Man Who Would Be King, Zulu, Alfie and millions of other films too numerous to mention) Caine.

  He was, as you might imagine, funny, friendly and direct, with a working-class down-to-earthiness that put me at my ease straight away. When I was leaving, Shakira, his wife, whose vivid beauty was even more arresting in the flesh than it was in print, said, ‘You are so lucky it’s Michael.’

  I mentioned this to Lewis.

  ‘Oh yes, darling, when you think who else it could have been, she’s absolutely right.’

  I have spent the last twenty-five or so years trying to work out who on earth he might have been referring to.

  We started shooting some time around the beginning of August 1982 in Dublin at the university. The play was set in northern England and in reality the university would more than likely have been some red-brick monstrosity, but Willy and Lewis wanted it to be intimidatingly other-worldly for Rita and remote from the probably sixties-built secondary modern that she would have attended. So the beautiful, photogenic Trinity College, Dublin, was cast, with its imposing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century architecture, and its sense of ancient academia.

  The Friday before we were to start on the Monday, I was due to have a make-up and hair test, in which I would be made up as the character, wearing my wig and costume, and they would shoot some film of me in order to see that the whole thing worked. Unfortunately, a week or so earlier I had been bitten by a horsefly and Mount Vesuvius had erupted on my cheek, large, red and glowing. I stood there in the glare of the lights, feeling rather awkward in the wig, make-up and costume, as it was very different from the stage production, where I had worn my own hair throughout and where Rita’s clothes reflected the fact that from the very beginning she had already moved away from her working-class contemporaries towards the middle-class student identity she craved. In contrast, in the film she looked the antithesis of a student, to begin with at least, when she was still very much a hairdresser in a little suburban salon. Lewis wanted the cinema-going audiences to see her transformation clearly displayed in her choice of dress and general demeanour. So I stood there in my pink-and-black-striped pencil skirt, pink blouse, black fishnet tights and staggeringly high heels, as Lewis, Freddie Williamson, the make-up artist, and Candy Patterson, who did my costumes, discussed me in stage whispers from behind the camera.

  ‘Less eye make-up, Freddie, that’s too much, she looks as if she’s done three round with Muhammad Ali.’

  No, Freddie, I like tons of eye make-up, I was well pleased with that.

  ‘Well . . . the thing is, she’s got such small eyes, perhaps we just go without.’

  Nooooooooo!

  ‘Yes, that’s probably best.’

  Nooooooooo!

  ‘The natural look.’

  God, nooooooo!

  ‘Exactly, now what’s that on her face?’

  My nose?

  ‘I don’t know, I presumed it was just a spot. I’ve done my best to cover it up.’

  What do you want? The George Cross?

  ‘Well, let’s hope it’s gone by Monday. What do you think?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘It could be a bite.’

  Oh my God!

  ‘Hello, helloooo, excuse me, I say, hello! Please allow me to put you out of your misery: I’ve been bitten by a horsefly, everyone. I know this to be the case because I was actually there when it happened.’

  Luckily they laughed. The bite was gone by the Monday, well, more or less, with the help of a trowel and a whole container of concealer, that is.

  The filming lasted nine weeks and with the very gorgeous Lewis Gilbert at the helm it was an unstressed, light-hearted pleasure. He was delightfully absent-minded and legend has it that once, after filming for some time at Pinewood Studios, he drove the twenty miles to Shepperton Studios by mistake and berated the security man on the gate for not recognising the name of the film he was directing. On one occasion when everyone had assembled to start filming after lunch, the entire crew and I decided to play a trick on Lewis, who had not yet returned. Hiding behind vehicles and round corners, we all watched as he approached the set and stood there for several seconds with an open-mouthed, slightly baffled smile on his face. He then turned round slowly in a jerky, flat-footed little circle, muttering puzzled half-words as he went: ‘Oh . . . thought . . . Ha . . . mm.’ We jumped out at that point and surprised him; he laughed at the fun of it all but claimed that he knew we were hiding all along. He had an appealing clumsiness and would frequently walk on to the set knocking lamps this way and that, leaving cries of ‘Relight!’ in his wake, and once when not quite concentrating he crossed his legs and
fell off the dolly. (This is a platform on wheels for the camera and not something that you blow up, dear reader.)

  Michael was completely unstarry, managing to my surprise to walk around Dublin without any fuss and without being recognised to a troubling degree; he rarely stayed confined to his trailer, preferring rather to be out on the set chatting to the crew. He loved good food and treated us to lavish meals in some of Dublin’s and the surrounding area’s finest eateries. He also gave me one of the best pieces of acting advice ever, which was: ‘Save it for the take.’ It may sound obvious, but there is a great temptation to do a scene at full pelt in rehearsal, if only to make sure that you actually can, but often there are, for technical reasons, lots of rehearsals and you can kill the freshness and spontaneity of the thing by constant repetition.

  This happened on the day when we were shooting the scene when Rita comes back to tell Frank why she hadn’t turned up to his house for dinner. It was meant to be tearful and from the moment I woke up on that morning, I was preparing for it, even gulping my breakfast down whilst on the verge of tears. By the time I got to the set I was already drained and the first shot was of Rita standing there crying through the rain-lashed window. So in the very first rehearsal, I let it all out and then struggled to achieve any tears through the next five or six rehearsals, until Michael pointed out that it was not that close a shot and that they couldn’t really see whether I was crying or not anyway. Another filming lesson: check the size of the shot before launching into your performance of performances. By the time it came to my close-up I had absolutely nothing left and it was then that Michael said: ‘Use the rehearsals for yourself, and save the special stuff for the take.’ It has rung in my ears many, many times since.

  The whole experience, being my first film, was a steep learning curve. I had performed the role innumerable times on stage and that performance was in itself like an old film playing in my head, something that needed to be got rid of rather than utilised. It was a performance designed to reach people sitting in the back rows of the Piccadilly Theatre, while I was now required to give a performance for an audience that for a lot of the time was just inches from my face. However, Lewis was always at hand with his inimitable style of direction: ‘Too big, darling, it’s not the Albert Hall!’