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By Root 395 0

had changed enormously, but I witnessed something there that really shocked me and set the alarm bells ringing – although, at the time, I let it go. We were filming outside a block of derelict apartments that were waiting to be demolished and were, I thought, abandoned. We’d been there a couple of hours when suddenly, out of this terrible slum poured about half a dozen young people, all filthy, all emaciated, all stoned out of their minds, all waving grubby bits of paper. As they walked unsteadily towards us in slow motion I thought of that cemetery scene in Michael Jackson’s Thriller video, where all the bodies come out of the graves. As they gathered round me, I could smell their unwashed bodies and see up close the bloodshot eyes and the tattered skin on their faces. I stood there, signing these dirty scraps of paper and I was stunned at what was happening in my city. I realised what a sheltered and cocooned life I now led: I had no idea that this was the norm – yet local people seemed to be walking by without a second glance.

Although Shiner was more successful than my previous two movies, it still didn’t cause much of a stir and so I couldn’t have been more pleased when something fantastic came in right out of the blue: Miss Congeniality.

Sandra Bullock, who was the producer as well as the star of the movie, wanted me to play the sort of Professor Higgins to her tough, dowdy FBI agent, who has to go undercover as a beauty queen. This picture was a joy from start to finish. Just before we began shooting I had won my Oscar for The Cider House Rules and in my acceptance speech I had told Tom Cruise (who was also nominated in this category for his part in Magnolia) that he should be pleased that he hadn’t won as the dressing room trailers given to supporting actors would be much too small and modest for him. It was a joke and Tom and everyone else laughed, but when I got to the set of Miss Congeniality on the first day and was shown to my trailer, it was the biggest and most luxurious accommodation I had ever had on a set. And on the door was pinned a note in Sandra’s handwriting. ‘Welcome to the shoot. This is as big as Tom’s.’ I checked – and it was.

Miss Congeniality was tremendous fun to make. Sandra was fantastic, both as an actress and as a producer. She was always kind and attentive and pleasant and never imposed any problems that she might have been encountering with the production on the rest of us. I never saw her without a smile – and yet I discovered later that just before this movie, her mother had died of cancer. We never knew; she was a true professional. I was so pleased to see her win the Best Actress Oscar this year for her role in The Blind Side. And she has a great sense of humour. The night before winning the Academy Award, she won the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actress in a film called All About Steve. Typical of Sandra – she turned up to accept it with as much good grace as she showed the next evening at the Oscar ceremony. She’s a true star. Candice Bergen, a friend from the past, was also in the movie. We’d last worked together on a terrible film of John Fowles’s book The Magus, which none of us understood, and neither, it seemed did the audience. William Shatner was in the movie, too, probably the funniest and craziest actor I have ever met. The romantic lead was Benjamin Bratt and we became good friends. He was going out with Julia Roberts at the time and Benjamin and I were in a car one day together and he phoned her in Las Vegas where she was making a film. During the course of the conversation he handed the phone over to me and said, ‘Say hello to Julia.’ I did – and there was no reply. So I tried again. Still no reply. I tried a third time and finally I heard a voice at the other end say, ‘I can’t believe I’m talking to Alfie!’ ‘Alfie?’ I said. ‘You’re far too young to have seen Alfie!’ ‘Have you never heard of television, Michael?’ she said. I agreed that I had, indeed, heard of television, told her how brilliant she was in Pretty Woman and passed the phone back to Benjamin. I have