The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [107]
Jack’s a tremendous actor who takes life easy and I owe him for restoring my faith in this often nasty business. It was a joy working with him and a great bunch of professionals again. Jack’s attitude to work was summed up for me one day when we were hurrying to get a shot before the sun went down. I started to run towards the set. ‘Don’t run, Michael!’ hissed Jack. ‘They’ll know it’s us who are late!’ So we kept strolling – and I still do.
Jack has a deservedly great reputation for the ladies, but he had me fooled one day. We broke for lunch and I saw Jack go into his motor home with one particularly pretty but very young girl. After lunch I tried to broach the subject diplomatically. ‘That was a very pretty girl I saw you with at lunchtime,’ I said, trying to keep a disapproving note out of my voice. He looked at me for a moment and then the wolfish Nicholson smile gradually spread across his features as he read my evil thoughts. ‘That was my daughter, Michael,’ he said, pretending to look puzzled. ‘By Miss Denmark,’ he added with a careless flourish. I dropped the subject immediately.
Although Blood and Wine was never a big hit with the public, it was a big hit with me. Filming was suddenly fun again and there was a whole new bunch of talented young actors to get to know – Jennifer Lopez, Heath Ledger, Sandra Bullock, Christian Bale, Charlize Theron, Scarlett Johansson to name but a few . . . It was the beginning of an exciting new phase of my life – slower to take off than I’d have liked, but I was definitely on my way back!
16
Back in the Game
Back in England, the weather was terrible and I found that my house had moved even further away from London over the previous few years. It had taken us fifty minutes to get from London when we first moved there, but now the traffic was so bad it was taking me an hour and a half. I was starting a new professional life – maybe, I thought, it was also time to start a new home life? And so I began looking for a new house and a new movie at the same time.
It would take a while to find the new house, but the movie came quite quickly. I had sifted through the pile of post when I got home to find the usual bundle of crap scripts with fingerprints and coffee stains all over them from the other actors who had turned them down – but among them was a small gem. It wasn’t a big movie – it wasn’t even really a movie as I would have defined one – it was a made-for-TV film called The Mandela Story, which told the story of the collapse of apartheid in South Africa and the election of Mandela as President. And my old friend Sidney Poitier was, as they say in Hollywood, already ‘attached’ to play Nelson Mandela. I read the script with great excitement. I would be playing South Africa’s last president under the apartheid system, President de Klerk. It would be a challenge – it always is, playing a real person – but I felt it would be a worthwhile one and we packed our bags for Cape Town.
Even with the best script, the best co-star and a fabulous location, movies are never plain sailing. The first problem I encountered was my South African accent. I’d listened to and learnt the way white South Africans spoke on the set of Zulu, all those years ago, so I felt very confident when my language coach asked if I could do a South African accent and proudly showed her that I could. She listened for a moment and then looked at me. ‘That’s an English South African accent,’ she said. ‘De Klerk is a Boer.’ I struggled for weeks trying to identify the tiny differences between the two and in doing so made my second mistake. To help capture the nuances of his speech I studied every piece of film and newsreel in which de Klerk had ever appeared. In the end I thought I had captured him quite well, but after we had been shooting for a couple of weeks I finally