Life and Laughing_ My Story - Michael McIntyre [77]
He looked me straight in the eyes and said, ‘Are you sure you want to be a biologist … or chemist?’
I replied, ‘No, I’m going to write comedy films, like Woody Allen. I’m moving to London!’
16
I wouldn’t be moving back home in London. Not because I was an adult now, determined to fend for myself, but because my mum, Steve, Nicholas, Thomas and Andre (now born) had upped sticks and moved to France. My mother had always dreamed of living in the sunshine, so she sold the house in Golders Green, and with the proceeds in cash drove to the South of France and bought another one. So my grandmother rented a tiny studio flat in West Hampstead for my sister and me to stay in.
Lucy was also heading up to Edinburgh University but was rather more studious and academic than myself. She got eleven As at GCSE and three As at A-Level so the world was her oyster. She didn’t require ‘clearing’ to get into Edinburgh; nor did she have to wait until she got there to find out what her course was. She was Little Miss Perfect: outgoing, social, she had a huge circle of friends and a charming boyfriend. She could have perceived me as her loser university dropout older brother, but she believed in me and she loved my script. She read it and improved my writing significantly. I would have been lost without her input but mostly her support, especially when I started to receive rejection letters on a daily basis.
I sent the script to everyone on Mark Cousins’ list with hope and optimism. In fact more than that: I fully expected a bidding war. But the returned scripts would land on my doorstep. Many of the covering letters were standard, copy and paste: ‘Thank you for sending in your screenplay, which we read with interest, blah blah, blah. Good luck with placing it elsewhere.’ One script was simply returned to me with the word ‘NO’ in big red pen on the front. Not a good day. I was also struggling to write another script. My first one had been such a breeze, but I had difficult-second-album syndrome. The problem, of course, was that my first album wasn’t a hit.
My sister was spending a lot of her time at her boyfriend’s flat, leaving me to struggle with my new script and start working as a barman at All Bar One in St John’s Wood to help make ends meet. She came to witness me pulling pints and excitedly told me she’d met an actress who was perfect for my film.
‘Have you been casting for my film?’ I asked while serving up a lager with an overflowing frothy head. ‘I love that you’ve got so much confidence in it.’
‘She’s a friend of Joe’s,’ she said, referring to her boyfriend. ‘She’s just hilarious and ditzy, a real character. I kept thinking she reminded me of someone, and then I realized it was Sasha, the girl in your film. She’s an actress, and her dad is a really famous actor. You’re going to love her.’
I was already approaching actors for the film. A film script always has more weight with ‘talent attached’. I was waiting to hear from (still am, incidentally) Sean Connery, Billy Connolly and Anna Friel. To give you an idea of the extent I was residing in cloud cuckoo land at the time, I wanted to play the main character, Marty. So a meeting was set up with me and potentially my leading lady.
She did indeed come from good acting stock. Her father was a major star in the seventies, playing Winston Churchill in Richard Attenborough’s Young Winston. Her sister was also an actress and had starred in Return to Oz and Steven Spielberg’s Young Sherlock Holmes. The signs were good. My sister said she was twenty years old and beautiful, a femme fatale with a string of