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Rotten Scoundrels. We rented a villa close to Roger and Luisa Moore’s and our friends, Leslie and Evie Bricusse, and as it was the school holidays Natasha came out to join us with two friends. The movie was nothing but a pleasure from start to finish – although I had a moment early on when I suddenly remembered why the script had seemed familiar. I had seen it years before when it was released under the title Bedtime Story starring Marlon Brando and David Niven, and it had been a complete flop. ‘Why,’ I asked Frank and Steve, ‘are we remaking a movie that flopped first time round?’ ‘Because,’ Frank said very reasonably, ‘there would be no point re-making a film that had been a success.’ I tried to think of a good counter-argument, but this was Hollywood logic and I gave up.

Hollywood logic or not, Frank was a fantastic director – and comedy takes some real directing. In the film, Steve and I play conmen who make their living off middle-aged ladies; any time it looked like one of our marks was becoming a bit too serious about me, Steve would appear disguised as one of a series of eccentric relatives to put them off. He was so off the wall in his characterisation that it was actually quite difficult to play opposite him. In the end, though, the solution was simple: I played my part completely straight and let the laughs take care of themselves.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is one of my favourite films – for me it’s the funniest movie I ever made. I think its appeal lies in the fact that my character and Steve Martin’s are rogues who only ever hurt the pompous and the rich – and they always get away with it. It looks fabulous, too – it’s stylish, it’s wicked – and people love it. Whenever it comes on the television, I always stop and watch a bit of it and it still makes me laugh. There’s one scene in particular I just can’t resist, where I’m pretending to be an eminent psychiatrist, Dr Emil Schaffhausen, who is lashing the legs of Steve Martin, who’s posing as a psychosomatically crippled soldier, to prove they don’t work. I had to intersperse each of my words with a lash of the whip: ‘My name is –’ lash, ‘Dr –’ lash, ‘Emil –’ lash, ‘Schaffhausen,’ lash. On the second, and final, take I added an ad lib. After ‘Schaffhausen –’ lash, I added, ‘the Third –’ and a final lash, to give him one more. I just wanted to have the last lash . . .

13

Family Secrets

After that glorious summer in the south of France, I plunged straight back into work and by the end of 1988 I was pretty exhausted. We’d bought an apartment in Chelsea Harbour, west London, and decided to take things a little bit easier for a while. If it was meant to be a sabbatical, it didn’t last long. After a wonderful trip to Los Angeles during which Swifty Lazar first suggested that I might write my autobiography (I said no, on the grounds that I couldn’t remember anything – but it planted a seed, which was something Swifty was very good at!), I did a small-budget thriller, Shock to the System, set in New York, and then went back to England to follow up the success of the Jack the Ripper mini-series with Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which was five weeks on location in London, so easy to manage from that point of view, but a lot of my time was spent in make-up being turned into the hideous Mr Hyde. Never again! I have no idea how John Hurt managed to get through The Elephant Man . . .

The end of the year looked like running its normal course and we were just planning our usual over-the-top Christmas, when we got the phone call I had, of course, been half expecting for some time. On 12 December 1989, my brother Stanley’s birthday, my mother died. Ma had been living in a nursing home for many years, where she was looked after beautifully. As was typical of many women of her generation and background, she viewed all doctors with great suspicion and the only way her thoughtful nurse, Gemma, managed to get her to see one at all was by finding an Indian doctor and telling her he was Shakira’s brother! If it was family, you see, that was all right . . . Ma wouldn’t have wanted