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career. The legendary Otto Preminger, director of movies such as Carmen Jones, The Man with the Golden Arm and Anatomy of a Murder, had offered me a part in his new movie, Hurry Sundown. I was so excited I barely bothered to read the script and headed off to the sun of the Deep South with only those few words of advice from Vivien Leigh to help me. Otto was reputed to be a monster with a habit of screaming at actors and technical staff alike, but I decided up front that I was not going to let him scream at me. ‘You need to know something about me,’ I said to him on the first evening we met. ‘I’m very sensitive and I’ll cry if you or anyone else shouts at me while I’m working.’ Preminger raised an eyebrow in surprise. I plunged on. ‘And if anyone does shout at me, I’ll go straight to my dressing room and I won’t work again that day.’ A long silence. Otto seemed puzzled. ‘But I would never shout at Alfie!’ he said eventually – and he never did and in the end we became firm friends. Like many men – and perhaps this was one of the secrets of the film’s success – Otto Preminger saw himself as Alfie and, again like many others, made the mistake of seeing me as Alfie, too.

Otto may have gone easy on me, but he made everyone else’s life on the set a misery and was particularly tough on my young and beautiful co-star Faye Dunaway, who was often in tears by the end of a day’s shooting. Apparently he always chose a scapegoat, and poor Faye was in the firing line. From time to time our friendship meant that I was able to tell him to ease up on her. But I was warned that I would never completely get away with telling Otto never to shout at me. He took his revenge in a way that took no account at all of the feelings of Jane Fonda, also then a young actress, who was playing my estranged wife. We were due to shoot a scene in which I was supposed to rape her and, very nervous about how I should go about this, bearing in mind the US censor and my co-star’s feelings, I asked Otto for some guidance. ‘Simple, Michael’, he leered (Otto had an impressive leer. In his acting days he had been a remarkably realistic Nazi officer). ‘Just smash the door down, burst into the room and rape her. I’ll call CUT when we’ve got what we need.’ So I did what he said. I smashed the door down, hurled myself into the room, threw Jane Fonda onto the bed and proceeded to ‘rape’ her as realistically as I could without doing any actual damage (and always bearing in mind the US censor’s strictures that she should have her bra and knickers on at all times). After a while I began to feel I was running out of options and that there was a danger that things would get out of hand. ‘I’m stopping!’ I shouted and sat up abruptly. Otto and the entire crew were sitting there with wolfish grins. They had long since switched off the camera. Jane, I’m relieved to say, just went along with it and wasn’t upset at all – in fact she laughed as much as the rest of us.

From the heat of Louisiana I went straight to Finland, for the third of the Harry Palmer movies, Billion Dollar Brain (and if this feels like a breathless gallop from one film to another, it’s because it was . . .). I have never felt cold like it – and I hope I never do so again. But this was the first in a whole run of movies I was to make almost back-to-back, some of them memorable and some of them I’m only too happy to forget. Subconsciously I thought that my good fortune wouldn’t last and that I should line up as many as I could while the going was good and make as much money as possible before I found myself back in the dole queue.

Aside from the cold, I was very pleased to be playing Harry Palmer again and I thought – and still think – that Billion Dollar Brain is a really atmospheric movie. It was way ahead of its time, too. I recently discovered that in Billion Dollar Brain I was the first person ever to use the internet on screen. At the time, I just assumed it was one more piece of technological spy wizardry and back then I certainly couldn’t get the hang of it – so I did what all actors do, which is to ask