The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [24]
After Jimmy dumped me I found another agent, Josephine Burton, but the jobs didn’t exactly come thick and fast and I had to go back to living with Mum and Stanley. There was no film work on the horizon but I did get a part in one of the legendary Joan Littlewood’s shows with Theatre Workshop in the East End. All the other members of the company were committed Communists. I’d propped up capitalism in Korea; now I had a chance to see how the other side worked. I wasn’t very impressed: the wages were less than I’d been earning at Horsham, and the dialogue struck me as very unnatural. But then I didn’t have a clue who the proletariat were – and was very surprised to find out I was one of them.
It soon became clear that Joan did not believe I was suited to Method Acting, the form pioneered by the Russian Konstantin Stanislavsky to which she had dedicated her life. In fact I later based all my acting on it and its basic principle that the rehearsal is the ‘work’ and the performance is the relaxtion – which is ideal for the movies. But at the time, Joan was blunt about my shortcomings. ‘Get off!’ she said to me as soon as I appeared on stage for the first rehearsal. ‘And come on again.’ I did as I was asked. ‘No!’ she said when I reappeared. ‘I’m not having it.’ I had no idea what she was talking about. ‘Not having what?’ I asked. ‘That star nonsense!’ she said. ‘This is group theatre.’ I tried my best to blend in with the rest of the cast, but Joan was never convinced. When the production ended she sacked me with what, when I look back on it, was an unintended compliment, ‘Piss off to Shaftesbury Avenue,’ she said with contempt. ‘You’ll only ever be a star.’
Joan may have thought I was destined for stardom, but no one else seemed to agree. The next few months and years were very hard. I used to hang about a casting agency just off Trafalgar Square run by a man called Ronnie Curtis, waiting to see if I could get the odd walk-on part – play, TV, film, I didn’t care. On one occasion I got a job just because I happened to fit the policeman’s uniform the film company had already got in their wardrobe. When I wasn’t in work (which was most of the time) and couldn’t stand sitting around in Ronnie’s office any longer, I’d go to the places where all the other young, unemployed actors used to hang out – the café under the Arts Theatre in Sackville Street, the Salisbury pub in St Martin’s Lane, the Legrain coffee shop in Soho, or Raj’s (illegal) afternoon drinking club. There was great comfort in knowing it was just as tough for everyone else but it was a soul-destroying time. And it wasn’t just the lack of jobs – every time I was rejected at an audition I had to pick myself back up and start again. Occasionally people have criticised the sums of money I’ve made from movies – well, I always think back to the ten years of hard work, of misery, of poverty and uncertainty I had to go through to get started. As an out-of-work actor I couldn’t rent a room, borrow money from the bank or get insurance. It’s not surprising so many eventually decide they can’t take it any more.
I was nearly one of them. One night, when I really was on the verge of finally giving up the struggle, I placed my regular phone call to Josephine. Every evening at six o’clock, all of us young hopefuls would rush to the phone boxes in Leicester Square to call our agents to see if any jobs had come in that day. Usually there was nothing going, but this time Josephine had some good news: she’d managed to get me a small part in a TV play of The Lark by Jean Anouilh – courtesy of Julian Aymes, the director of A Hill in Korea, who had asked for me. There was one problem – I’d have to become a member of the actors’ trades union