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unnoticed by the crowds. Like me, he had come to pay a visit and he seemed to feel quite nostalgic about it and sad about the way it had been destroyed – first by the Luftwaffe and then by the developers. He didn’t have a clue who I was, but we talked for a little while and he pointed out the ruins of the South London music hall he had appeared at in his last show before he went to America. It was only about 300 yards from the prefab I had grown up in. I once asked my mother where she went for her honeymoon. She laughed drily and said, ‘The South London theatre to see Charlie Chaplin in Humming Birds with Stan Laurel.’ Small world… When I met him, Chaplin was beautifully and expensively dressed, but even in his overcoat and hat – a trilby, not a bowler – I couldn’t help seeing the echo of the Little Tramp as he walked away.

My other connection with the Chaplin studio is that not only did we shoot the interiors of Too Late the Hero here, but it then became the headquarters of the Jim Henson Company with whom I made The Muppet Christmas Carol in 1991.

Samuel Goldwyn’s studio is the third and last studio still actually in Hollywood itself. It was originally built on land owned by Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks on the corner of Formosa and Santa Monica Boulevard known as ‘The Lot’, until it was renamed when they formed United Artists with Charlie Chaplin and D. W. Griffith. Goldwyn eventually took it over and named it after himself, after a lengthy legal battle with Mary Pickford, who owned the lease and wanted to name it after herself – an early Hollywood story but one that strikes a chord . . . Now the studio is called The Lot once more and is still used for independent film-making – I made the Austin Powers Goldmember movie there myself, with Mike Myers.

Next door to one of the most prime areas of real estate in the world, Holmby Hills, is the city that Cleopatra built. Century City was once the back lot of Twentieth Century Fox, which now sulks in a small corner of its formerly great property. Fox had a string of movie disasters in the late fifties and early sixties, most notably Cleopatra, the biopic starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton notorious for costing $44 million rather then the original $2 million budgeted, and in 1961 they were forced to sell their 180-acre back lot to the Alcoa company who turned it into the Century City you see there today. To be a city in Britain, you have to have a cathedral, but this is Hollywood and it has its own cathedrals: skyscrapers full of the archbishops, bishops and priests of our age – the accountants and lawyers (including my own) who guide our prayers.

All show business ends up as farce and Century City and Cleopatra are no exception. Many years later I was on a yacht in Monte Carlo harbour with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and after dinner we all sat down and watched Carry On, Cleo, one of the lowest budget films ever made. They had brought it with them all the way from London – and in those days it wasn’t a matter of tucking a DVD into your handbag or briefcase, films were all on reels, so they had gone to some real effort to get it there. We all roared with laughter at the silly jokes – there was one in particular I remember Elizabeth and Richard cracking up over. The two Caesars are arguing about whose gladiator is better, and one of them says, ‘My gladiator is the greatest,’ and the other one counters with, ‘My gladiator is invincible,’ and the first one comes back with, ‘Well, my gladiator is impregnable!’ And the gladiator is standing there – he’s a raddled old Cockney of about sixty – and he says, ‘It’s not my fault, guv – my wife doesn’t want any kids!’ I tell you, they were killing themselves.

Although they started in Hollywood, Universal Pictures moved out to a 250-acre lot in the San Fernando Valley in 1914. They were still there in 1966 when they gave my career two massive boosts. The first was when they bought and released The Ipcress File in America – the first time any of my movies had a general release there. No one told me they had done