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By Root 428 0

than that and went back to Emil Jannings’s performance as the ugly professor who nurses an unrequited love for Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel, for inspiration. I became so immersed in the part and what I imagined to be the ‘type’, that I felt as if I had known academics all my life. On our first day’s shooting in the idyllic grounds of Trinity College, Dublin, I found myself hailing a familiar figure, overweight and with a straggly beard, shambling across College Green, convinced he was an old friend. As he got closer, I realised I didn’t know him from Adam, but I reckoned I did know exactly what he did . . . ‘Excuse me,’ I said, when he got near enough, ‘you’re not a professor of English by any chance, are you?’ He stopped, swaying a bit, perhaps from the effects of the previous night or perhaps from the weight of the case of red wine he was carrying, and said, amazed, ‘How on earth did you know that?’ ‘Oh,’ I shrugged. ‘Just a lucky guess.’

Julie Walters was brilliant. Of course she had already done a lot of television and had played Rita in the West End stage play, but it was her first ever movie, although you would never have known it – she was a completely instinctive film actress. Like John Huston, Lewis Gilbert was a hands-off director and believed in letting the actors get on with it. A measured man, he was nevertheless obviously pleased at the way the filming was going and one day he said to me – just as he had fifteen years before with Alfie – that he thought both Julie and I would be nominated for an Academy Award for our roles in the movie. And just as he had been fifteen years previously with Alfie, he was right.

For Alfie, I had had the misfortune to be up against my friend the great actor Paul Scofield who had been nominated in the Best Actor category for his role as Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons. I had seen his performance and thought it was brilliant and realised I had no chance of winning with Alfie so I didn’t turn up. The next time I was nominated was for Sleuth in 1973, again for Best Actor, but my co-star Laurence Olivier was also nominated for his role in Sleuth, so we had cut our own chances in half from the start. On that occasion I decided to go to the ceremony anyway because I had never been and I thought it might be fun. Big mistake. For a start, in a moment of madness I’d agreed to host a quarter of the ceremony, with Carol Burnett, Charlton Heston and Rock Hudson doing the other three quarters.

Presenting the Oscars was the most nerve-wracking job I have ever done in show business. It’s very much a live show: they have comedy writers waiting in the wings and as you come off between presentations they hand you an appropriate gag to tell. As if that wasn’t bad enough, it was destined to get even more stressful when it got to the Best Actor nominations. Marlon Brando won it for The Godfather, but – as we all knew he would – he refused to accept it and sent a Native American girl called Sacheen Littlefeather on his behalf, to read a fifteen-page speech protesting at the treatment of Native Americans by the film and television industry. The producer of the show had told her beforehand that she would be slung off if she spoke for more than forty-five seconds so she restricted herself to a short speech – which got quite a few boos – and read Brando’s letter to the press afterwards. I think that any gesture in a good cause is admirable, but I would have been more impressed if Marlon had turned down his first Oscar, not his second. It turned out that the young lady’s name was in fact Marie Cruz, that she was an actress whose mother was Caucasian, and that three months after the Oscar ceremony she posed for Playboy magazine. Of course it doesn’t invalidate the cause, and Sacheen Littlefeather continues to work as an activist today, but it does show you, yet again, that Hollywood is never quite what you think it is!

Littlefeather’s performance that night certainly caused consternation backstage. I was standing there with everyone else while it was going on, waiting for the finale, which