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By Root 384 0

rambling. ‘I was in a boxing match,’ he was saying, ‘and it turns out the other guy had razors sewn into the gloves and that’s why I’m here. He finished me off, that guy – that’s why I’m here.’ He went on about this boxer for twenty minutes and Sean and I looked at each other and we were both in tears – and I’ve never seen Sean in tears. We left the hospital, very upset, and the next thing we heard was that John Huston had got up out of bed and made two more movies. When I saw him again I said, ‘The next time I come to say farewell to you, you’d better die or I’ll bloody kill you. You don’t know how upset we were.’ He said, ‘Well, Michael, you know how it is – people get upset. And people die.’ ‘Well, yes,’ I said, ‘but not twice.’

Back at John Foreman’s service, we had some laughs, told some stories and shed some tears and then it was on to New York for yet another book launch evening. This time it was at my friend Elaine’s restaurant and guests included Gloria Vanderbilt, Lauren Bacall, David Bowie and Iman – these legends just floated in front of my jet-lagged eyes. I had a mind that couldn’t think – not that it mattered, my tongue and lips were too tired to speak anyway.

If Chasen’s symbolised my Hollywood life and was the meeting place for so many of my LA friends, then Elaine’s was its New York equivalent. Elaine’s is more than a restaurant: it’s a New York institution, almost a salon. It was the perfect place to hold a book launch because it’s always been a place where writers, actors and directors gather, from Woody Allen to the people from Saturday Night Live. Elaine herself would flit from table to table making sure all her guests were all right. One night there was a guy bothering me and she came over and grabbed him by the collar and threw him out on the pavement – all on her own. I protested, ‘That’s a bit drastic – we could have got rid of him.’ And she said, ‘Nah – I don’t like those sons of bitches!’ Elaine is a close friend and I have lunch with her on a Saturday when we’re in New York. It’s always caviar, which she pays for in cash that she keeps in her bra. She says, ‘I’ll get this,’ and she dives in and pulls out this wad of cash!

The party at Elaine’s was the last of the tour and from New York I went back home to England. I was absolutely shattered but scripts had arrived while I was away, it was time to get on with the day job. Eventually I picked myself up and sat down to read one. I was appalled. The part was very small, hardly worth doing at all. I sent it straight back to the producer, telling him what I thought of it. A couple of days later the man phoned me. ‘No, no – you’re not the lover, I want you to read the part of the father!’ I put the phone down and just stood there, shocked. The father? Me? I headed into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. Yes, staring back at me was, indeed, the father – and so was someone else. In the mirror was a leading movie actor, not a movie star. I realised the only girl I’d ever get to kiss in a film again would be my daughter.

The difference between a leading movie actor and a movie star (apart from the money and the dressing room) is that when movie stars get a script they want to do, they change it to suit them. A movie star says, ‘I would never do that’ or ‘I would never say that’ and their own writers will add what they would do or say. When leading movie actors get a script they want to do, they change themselves to suit the script. But there’s another difference, and this was a difference I knew I could work with. A lot of movie stars can’t act and so when the big roles dry up they disappear, insisting they won’t play supporting parts. All leading movie actors have to act or they would vanish completely.

I had always known that this time would come. I was fifty-eight years old. Should I give up or keep going? Decision time. The question stayed with me for months. It stayed with me every morning as I opened the packets of crap, coffee-stained scripts with the pencil markings that other, younger actors had made before they turned the parts down.