The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [108]
I had dinner with de Klerk one evening at his home, which was a very grand official residence. I asked him where President Mandela lived and he said that he lived round the corner in a smaller house. ‘But he’s the President,’ I said. ‘I know,’ de Klerk said, ‘but he didn’t want to live here because of its connections to apartheid and so I stayed on.’ I asked de Klerk how he got on with Mandela and his reply was a guarded one. They got on fine, he said, except for one moment at the ceremony in Sweden when they were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace prize. De Klerk told me that he was surprised and upset when, during his acceptance speech, Mandela made a personal attack on him. He looked at me in a rather sad and disillusioned way. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘I was the reason he was there in the first place.’ De Klerk reminded me a little of President Gorbachev of Russia: both were key players in the dismantling of ruthless and terrifying regimes and yet both were eventually sidelined by the onward march of the progress they had helped initiate.
I never had the privilege of meeting Mandela – a man I greatly admire – but Sidney was lucky enough to. Unlike Sidney’s meeting with Jomo Kenyatta all those years ago when we were filming The Wilby Conspiracy in Kenya, President Mandela did know who he was and paid tribute to his contribution to the struggle for freedom. He even joked after they had shaken hands that he wouldn’t be washing his!
It was to take another year for something else to attract my attention, but I spent the time happily involved in my restaurant business, working on the first draft of a novel (still not finished . . .), spending time with the family, cooking and gardening. Life was slower than it had been, but it was great – and I was biding my time. My patience paid off in the end and although it seemed that I still wasn’t flavour of the month in the movie business, eventually an interesting script did come along. It was another made-for-TV film, a remake of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. I was to play Captain Nemo and what really appealed about it was that the sea it was going to be twenty thousand leagues under, was off the Gold Coast of Australia.
My whirlwind tour of Australia for What’s It All About? had really whetted my appetite for the country and this was a fantastic opportunity to go back and see what all the fuss was about. I wasn’t disappointed. The crew on the film, the people I met and the landscape were all wonderful and we had a great time shooting the movie. Among many highlights of my time there was the food. It was the best movie catering I’ve ever known – and I’m fussy about what I eat! They served a different menu every day for two months, which is almost unknown in an industry where the meals sometimes resemble British Army rations.
We had a great place to stay, too; we rented a house right on the beach. I’ve lived in hot climates and I’ve lived by the sea and so I thought, lovely though it was, that I’d seen it all before. And I was right: the weather was amazing, the sea was as blue as any I’ve ever seen. But the people swimming in it were very different. Long before those of us who live in the northern hemisphere realised the danger of the sun’s rays, the Australians were being careful. The first time Shakira and I went for a stroll on the beach we stopped and stared in amazement: it was like a seaside painting from Victorian England. Everybody had covered as much of themselves as they possibly could and still walk and swim. And what little exposed flesh there was left was slathered in gallons of sun tan lotion. We did spot several bright red sunbathers in bikinis and Speedos, but of course these turned out to be recent British