The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [26]
Mr Lennard, as it happened, turned out not to have the sharpest eye in the business. I wasn’t the only actor finding it tough; the others who used to hang out with me waiting for work around this time included Sean Connery, Richard Harris, Terence Stamp, Peter O’Toole and Albert Finney. And all this while Mr Lennard had dozens of people under contract whose names are entirely absent from the annals of movie history. Despite his advice, I picked myself up, yet again, and kept on going, surviving on the odd small part. I couldn’t help noticing, however, that some of my friends were beginning to get the odd big part. Sean Connery, for instance, who had originally been discovered in a gym by a casting director looking for some slightly more convincing American sailors than the usual British chorus line for South Pacific, had got the lead role in the TV play Requiem for a Heavyweight. I came on in the last scene. Then my friend Eddie Judd got the starring role in the film The Day the Earth Caught Fire; I played the policeman – and I didn’t even manage that very well. And Albert Finney, playing opposite the legendary Charles Laughton in The Party, was receiving rave notices for his performance – and rightly so. Meanwhile, I’d hit a new low. I turned up at one film audition, was called in, opened the door and the casting director shouted, ‘Next!’ before I’d even opened my mouth to say hello. I really couldn’t see what I’d done wrong – and it turned out I hadn’t done anything wrong, except grow too tall. The star of the film was the famously short Alan Ladd and if you were above the height mark they had chalked on the door as you went into the room, you were automatically disqualified.
But slowly – certainly more slowly than some of my friends – bigger parts began to come my way, and more often. I did another Dixon of Dock Green and then I was offered the job of understudy to Peter O’Toole in The Long and the Short and the Tall, by Willis Hall, a play about a British unit fighting the Japanese in the Malayan jungle in 1942, one of the first British plays about ordinary soldiers. This was regular money and a chance to work with friends – Robert Shaw and Eddie Judd were also in the all-male cast – but it was a heart-stopping experience. The play was a huge success, because Peter O’Toole was brilliant, but he – as we all did – liked a drink and he sometimes cut things pretty fine. Once he came hurtling through the stage door just as the curtain was about to go up, casting his clothes off and shouting to me, ‘I’m here! I’m here! No need to go on!’ as he ran.
When Peter went off to make Lawrence of Arabia – the film that would rocket him to stardom – I took over his part in The Long and the Short and the Tall on tour. Playing one of the leads in a really good play with a talented cast (the other was the exceptional Frank Finlay) was just what I needed to give me my confidence back and I returned to London after four months travelling the country certain, once again, that I was on the right path. When I got back I moved in to a shared house in Harley Street with ten other guys, including a young actor called Terence Stamp – a fellow Cockney, like me – whom I had met on tour. I’d taken Terry under my wing and initiated him into some of the secrets of a happy touring life, including how to grab the best room in the boarding house and the rather more specialised significance of the Ivor Novello show The Dancing Years. This show was almost always on tour somewhere in the country and if you coincided with it, your luck was in. Set in Ruritania, it featured a large cast of village maidens and village lads and was known in the trade as The Dancing Queers as the village lads always seemed to be gay. This left a crowd of village maidens at something