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By Root 468 0

Right from when I was a little boy, long before it could have been sexual, I was very aware of female beauty. I know that’s true of the majority of blokes, but there’s something else I think I respond to, though. I’ve met a lot of beautiful women who, if their souls were on their face, would be ugly. I always think that even if Shakira had an ugly face she would be beautiful, because her inner beauty shines out. And that’s often the case with female movie stars: some of them are not classically beautiful necessarily, but they have this wonderful quality of luminescence. Of course the reverse is true – I have met beautiful women who have not had that quality and it’s what stops them from making it in the movies. To become a really big female star, every man in the audience has to think: I bet she’d go out with me if I met her. Of course Garbo was a big star and no one would ever have thought she’d go out with them, but that’s unusual. Even Grace Kelly, who looked aloof, seemed approachable – she had a really warm face and you’d think: I bet she’d talk to me if we met. And it’s that warm quality that Charlize has got in spades – although, mind you, she managed to suppress it in her Oscar-winning portrayal of serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster. Now that was a truly chilling performance, she was brilliant.

The Cider House Rules was relatively early on in Charlize’s career and the only chilling aspect to it was the weather. We shot the movie in the town of Northampton in Massachusetts and it was so cold that Shakira stayed in New York and I fled there to join her at every opportunity. There were other challenges, too, as well as keeping my blood temperature above freezing. As I had when I was filming The Mandela Story, I told my dialogue coach confidently that I had no problems with accents. ‘Go ahead,’ he said. So I gave him my vintage American accent and he laughed. ‘It’s great!’ he said. ‘But your accent is pure Californian – and you’re playing a New Englander in this movie.’ So it was back to the grindstone and I spent many hours working with him and listening to tapes and just walking round (shivering) Northampton and overhearing people talk. In fact the New England accent is actually much closer to an English accent than it is to a Californian accent – it’s just a very subtle difference in the vowels. Ironically, while I got a great review for my accent in The New Englander (and they should know), I got poor reviews in the UK papers for sounding ‘too English’. You can’t win, can you?

Actually, sometimes you can – because I was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award in 1999 for my role in Cider House. So – great work with great people during the week, one of my favourite cities, New York, with my wife at the weekends, and an Oscar nomination! I had learnt my lesson with my previous Oscar and this time I did turn up for the Awards. And just as well I did – because I got a long, standing ovation when I won. Time is always the big issue at the Academy Awards and the winner’s acceptance speech is always under threat from the music . . . When the producer thinks you have gone on long enough he starts the music softly and gradually increases the volume until the audience can hardly hear you say goodnight. I had picked out the other nominees in my category for a remark – Tom Cruise, Jude Law, Michael Clarke Duncan and Haley Joel Osment – and I was aware I was going on a bit long. I needed another minute, so I looked over at the wings to check with Dick Zanuck who was producing that year. He gave me a smile and a thumbs-up and I got that extra minute – which is gold dust in an Academy speech.

So there I was, a second Academy Award, another role in a great movie – life, I felt, was great again.

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There’s a line in The Man Who Would Be King that I’ve always thought sums up my view of life. I have to ask Daniel Dravitt (Sean Connery) to tell someone that ‘Peachy’s gone south for the winter.’ And that’s always been my creed – Peachy’s gone south for the bloody winter . . . It’s always worked perfectly