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By Root 367 0

around him, ‘Did you hear that? Good morning? Did you hear the way he said that?’ And he always had this thing that I made too many movies. Every time we met he’d say, ‘How many movies you make today?’ and I’d say,’ Only one, Frank, only one.’ I think Frank also found me a bit unusual. He didn’t suffer fools and I think he respected the fact that I didn’t defer to him. He was very generous about my acting, too. He loved Alfie, in particular. It wasn’t surprising, I guess – he was Alfie and then some! I think there was also a connection between us because of our backgrounds: he was a slum kid and I was a slum kid. He liked the fact that I wasn’t a toffee-nosed Englishman. And then there was his affection for London. He told me about the time his career was in the doldrums and how he’d just finished From Here to Eternity and they asked him to go to the Columbia offices in Wardour Street to see the finished movie. ‘And from the moment I saw it,’ he said, ‘I knew that there I was, in London, and I was on my way back. And, Michael, I always remember it was in London.’

I was in England when Frank died in 1998. Of course the surprise wasn’t that he’d died, but that he lived so long. He smoked like a chimney, which was unusual for a singer, and he was a heavy drinker. On one of the last occasions we met, it was at a dinner he gave in Palm Springs. I was standing near the bar about to place an order when Frank came over. He put his hand on my elbow. ‘You’re not going to order a Perrier, are you, Michael?’ he said with only the faintest hint of menace. ‘No, Frank,’ I said, hastily changing my mind. ‘Vodka and tonic.’

Hollywood was different back then. It seems to me that perhaps the stars of today are not the big characters I used to know and work with. I’ve just watched the Academy Awards and all the people nominated seemed to be very small young men who had just been in a vampire film. They were all dark looking and a bit pale – as I guess you would be – and I’m not sure that among them I can identify the new De Niro, Pacino or Hoffman. There’s the physical thing, too: they really do seem to be getting smaller. Sean Connery, Peter O’Toole and I are all over six foot: Tom Cruise is short and so is Jude Law. Bogart was small, but then he made it work for him by getting all the parts George Raft didn’t want to do.

I suspect one of the reasons the old star system worked was because there was no TV at the time and when those big stars were up there on the huge screen they seemed much more remote than they are now when they are beamed directly into our sitting rooms. These days there’s complete fluidity between movies and television and it’s possible to switch between the two seamlessly. Alec Baldwin, for instance, who almost became a great film star and then suddenly he made a success of 30 Rock and his movie career took off again. Tina Fey – to me, she’s the funniest girl in the business and she makes me laugh just to look at her – began in TV and has now moved into movies. Of course, it can work the other way round – Lucille Ball started off as a movie star but the peak of her career was in television.

Stars of the magnitude of Elizabeth Taylor and Vivien Leigh – and male stars like Cary Grant, Robert Redford, Paul Newman or Clint Eastwood – have always been careful about the roles they chose. I took a different view. Between Gambit in the late Sixties and what I thought was going to be my retirement from the movie business in 1992, I was in well over seventy films. I always took a pragmatic view: if a movie came along and I liked the look of it and I needed the work, I did it. I had no concerns about letting down my fans by playing a particular role. I am an actor and I work for a living. And I think it’s why, when the time came to morph from movie star to leading actor that – once I’d got used to the idea – I was able to do so. I have always kept the example of Sir John Gielgud in my mind, too – a wonderfully gifted actor who kept working right until the end of his life. His agent told me that even aged ninety-two, Gielgud was