The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [37]
My next major film role would finally nail the idea that I looked gay on screen once and for all: Alfie is one of cinema’s great womanisers. I wasn’t first choice for the part; the director, Lewis Gilbert, wanted Terence Stamp, who’d played Alfie in Bill Naughton’s stage version, and I spent three hours trying to persuade him to do it. But Terry had taken the play to Broadway where it had flopped and wasn’t keen to repeat the experience. Thank God.
Apart from stepping in the dog shit on day one of the filming, I found Alfie a surprisingly straightforward movie to make. I was growing in confidence with every new role and I found Lewis Gilbert – who came from a similar background to me – great to work with. Unlike some directors, he actually worked with his cast and took their opinions into account, even asking me who we might cast as the middle-aged married woman Alfie seduces. I immediately thought of Vivien Merchant, with whom I’d appeared in Harold Pinter’s The Room at the Royal Court. She was a brilliant stage actress, but she’d never appeared in a film before and Lewis wanted her to do a screen test, which she refused to do. It looked as if that was that, but Lewis took a chance on my judgement and we cast her anyway. She turned out to be a huge success and was eventually nominated for an Oscar. Lewis and I also came up with a way to have Alfie address the audience without making it seem as if he was delivering a long declamatory speech: I spoke instead as if I was talking just to one person, so the audience felt as if they were an intimate friend of the character.
In spite of all Lewis’s encouragement, however, and my gut feeling that things were going well, I still refused to see any of the rushes. I could now well afford a new pair of shoes, but I still didn’t want to be sick all over them. It’s not about being competitive with other actors; my competition has always been me. My only question is: can I be better than I was the last time? I’m not just self-critical, I’m a nightmare! And with rushes, I’d learnt from my experience with Zulu that if you see them you’ll just screw up the next day’s shooting worrying about yesterday’s. It’s a lesson in life – don’t look back, you’ll trip over.
‘Why not just wait outside?’ Lewis said to me kindly one day when he was about to go into the screening room with the latest reels. Feeling decidedly queasy, I hung about nervously – and was immensely relieved to hear gales of laughter coming from inside. Maybe, just maybe, this was going to be a hit.
Lewis certainly thought so. We had lunch in that twilight zone in between finishing filming and awaiting news of a release date, and he said to me, ‘You know you’re really very good in this. I think you could be nominated for an Oscar.’ I just sat there dumbly, gaping at him. I’d never imagined that Alfie would have any traction in America whatsoever. Alfie himself spoke in such a heavy Cockney accent that Shelley Winters, my co-star, told me that she hadn’t understood a single thing I’d said to her during the course of the movie and had resorted to just watching my lips to know when to come in on cue. I’d had to lip-synch a clearer version of my lines onto the original take, in case we did get an American release (if you ever see the American version of the film you’ll think I can’t do