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I’ve always thought that life swings on small, sometimes insignificant incidents and decisions. When I got to the theatre at ten the next morning, Cy Endfield, a round, slow-speaking American director, said he was sorry, but he’d already given the part to my friend James Booth, because he thought he looked more Cockney than I did. I was used to rejection by now, so I just shrugged. ‘That’s OK,’ I lied and turned and began to walk back towards the door. The bar at the Prince of Wales Theatre is very long – and that’s why I became a movie star, because just as I reached the end, Cy called out, ‘Can you do a posh British accent?’ I stopped just before the door and turned round. ‘I was in rep for years,’ I said. ‘I played posh parts many times. There’s no accent I can’t do. That’s easy,’ I said, fingers crossed behind my back. ‘You know,’ said Cy, peering at me down the length of the bar, ‘you don’t look anything like a Cockney. You look like one of those faggy officers. Come back.’ I glanced in the mirror behind the bar. He was right. I was six foot two, slim, with blond curly hair and blue eyes. Jimmy Booth looked like everyone’s idea of a tough Cockney, which he was; I was a very tough Cockney, too, but I didn’t look like it. I came back – and I never looked back. ‘Can you do a screen test with Stanley on Friday morning?’ Cy asked. ‘You’d be playing the part of a snobbish lieutenant, Gonville Bromhead, who thinks he’s superior to everyone, especially Stanley. Do you think you could handle that?’ Perhaps it was also something to do with Cy being an American; he had no inherent British class prejudice that might have made him think a working-class actor couldn’t play an officer on the big screen. I thought back to national service; I thought back to Korea. I was quite confident I could handle that.

I wasn’t so confident by the time Friday came around. I stumbled through the screen test, fluffing my lines, sweating with fear despite all Stanley’s help and Cy’s patience. At last we were done and I stumbled up the steps and set out to spend the weekend getting completely wasted before hearing the result on Monday morning. What I hadn’t bargained on was bumping into Cy Endfield at a party on Saturday night. He seemed to be avoiding my eye. It didn’t look like good news. Nonetheless, while he was still at the party I did my best to remain sober. Just as he was about to go, he finally came over to me. ‘I’ve seen the test,’ he said, ‘and you were appalling.’ I swallowed. It was going to be hard to bounce back from this one. ‘But you’ve got the part,’ he went on. ‘We go to South Africa in three weeks.’ I gaped at him. ‘Why did you give me the part if the test was so bad?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know, Michael,’ he replied. ‘I really don’t know – but I think there’s something there . . .’ He walked away and I threw up all over my shoes.

I had been a private in the army and I had my own experiences of a certain Lieutenant from the Queen’s Royal Regiment to draw on for the characterisation of Gonville Bromhead. The man was, to put it bluntly, a complete arse – very pompous and very posh. He wasn’t a stupid man, he just had the attitude that we were the ‘little people’ who had to be dealt with and he was simply born to rule us. It wasn’t personal on either side, but my encounter with him and others like him certainly fostered my loathing of class prejudice and I was delighted to be able to get my own back.

But I did have a problem. I had known lots of officers and I knew exactly how they had behaved towards me, but I had no idea how they behaved towards each other and Zulu was a picture about a relationship between two officers. So in the weeks before I left for South Africa, I arranged to go for lunch every Friday in the Grenadier Guards officers’ mess. The Guards were on the whole very tolerant of having this soppy actor hanging about, but I noticed that they gave the job of looking after me – which no one else wanted – to the youngest