That's Another Story: The Autobiography (32 page)

However, salvation was at hand; a month later I was put out of my misery when Lewis rang again.

‘It’s all right, darling, we’ve got Michael. You won’t have to do a screen test now.’

At first I couldn’t make any sense of this; I thought he could only be saying that I had not got the part.

‘Oh . . .’

‘OK, dear . . .? Happy?’

‘What?’

‘You’ve got the part.’

‘
Oh my garrrrrrrd
!’

‘Yes, dear, now that we’ve got Michael, we don’t need a star to play your part.’

‘. . . Sorry? Michael . . .? Michael who?’

‘Caine, darling, Michael Caine is going to play Frank.’

‘M-Michael Caine . . .? Michael C—Alfie? Alfie is going to play ... Rita?’

‘No, dear, he’s going to play Frank.’

‘Yes, no, yes, no, I knew what you meant.
Oh my gaaaaaaaard
!’

I rang everyone I knew, including Duncan Preston. So when a few minutes after my last call the phone rang and a deep Texan drawl said, ‘Hi, am I speaking to Julie Walters?’ I answered suspiciously, ‘Yeeees?’

‘My name is Herbie Oakes. I am the producer of your movie
Educating Rita
and—’

‘Stop before you start! Yeah, great name, Duncan, very good, but I know it’s you and do you know how I know it’s you? Because your Texan accent is soooooo bad!’ And cackling manically I put the phone down.

About five minutes later I decided to ring Duncan back. He completely denied having just called me and, what is more, I believed him.
Oh my gaaaard
! I’m already off on the wrong foot. In fact, I’m off on the most terrible of feet. But the producing person with the ‘great name’ rang back and, in an obsequious, faltering way, I tried to explain and apologise.

‘I’m so sorry, erm . . . Mr . . . Mr Hoax, er, no . . . I’m sorry, Mr Mr Mr Mr Mr Mr . . . Oakes.’

‘Please call me Herbie, yes, I thought I had the wrong number.’

Oh, if only you had. But, even though I’m not sure that he had understood, he was charming and friendly, going on to explain that he had simply called to introduce himself and to invite me round to his place for drinks so that I could meet Michael as well as some other people whose names went immediately in and out of my head. All I heard was
Michael
, Michael (
The Ipcress File
,
Get Carter
,
The Man Who Would Be King
,
Zulu
,
Alfie
and millions of other films too numerous to mention) Caine.

He was, as you might imagine, funny, friendly and direct, with a working-class down-to-earthiness that put me at my ease straight away. When I was leaving, Shakira, his wife, whose vivid beauty was even more arresting in the flesh than it was in print, said, ‘You are so lucky it’s Michael.’

I mentioned this to Lewis.

‘Oh yes, darling, when you think who else it could have been, she’s absolutely right.’

I have spent the last twenty-five or so years trying to work out who on earth he might have been referring to.

We started shooting some time around the beginning of August 1982 in Dublin at the university. The play was set in northern England and in reality the university would more than likely have been some red-brick monstrosity, but Willy and Lewis wanted it to be intimidatingly other-worldly for Rita and remote from the probably sixties-built secondary modern that she would have attended. So the beautiful, photogenic Trinity College, Dublin, was cast, with its imposing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century architecture, and its sense of ancient academia.

The Friday before we were to start on the Monday, I was due to have a make-up and hair test, in which I would be made up as the character, wearing my wig and costume, and they would shoot some film of me in order to see that the whole thing worked. Unfortunately, a week or so earlier I had been bitten by a horsefly and Mount Vesuvius had erupted on my cheek, large, red and glowing. I stood there in the glare of the lights, feeling rather awkward in the wig, make-up and costume, as it was very different from the stage production, where I had worn my own hair throughout and where Rita’s clothes reflected the fact that from the very beginning she had already moved away from her working-class contemporaries towards the middle-class student identity she craved. In contrast, in the film she looked the antithesis of a student, to begin with at least, when she was still very much a hairdresser in a little suburban salon. Lewis wanted the cinema-going audiences to see her transformation clearly displayed in her choice of dress and general demeanour. So I stood there in my pink-and-black-striped pencil skirt, pink blouse, black fishnet tights and staggeringly high heels, as Lewis, Freddie Williamson, the make-up artist, and Candy Patterson, who did my costumes, discussed me in stage whispers from behind the camera.

‘Less eye make-up, Freddie, that’s too much, she looks as if she’s done three round with Muhammad Ali.’

No, Freddie, I like tons of eye make-up, I was well pleased with that.

‘Well . . . the thing is, she’s got such small eyes, perhaps we just go without.’

Nooooooooo
!

‘Yes, that’s probably best.’

Nooooooooo
!

‘The natural look.’

God,
nooooooo
!

‘Exactly, now what’s that on her face?’

My nose?

‘I don’t know, I presumed it was just a spot. I’ve done my best to cover it up.’

What do you want? The George Cross?

‘Well, let’s hope it’s gone by Monday. What do you think?’

‘Well . . .’

‘It could be a bite.’

Oh my God!

‘Hello, helloooo, excuse me, I say, hello! Please allow me to put you out of your misery:
I’ve been bitten by a horsefly, everyone
. I know this to be the case because I was actually there when it happened.’

Luckily they laughed. The bite was gone by the Monday, well, more or less, with the help of a trowel and a whole container of concealer, that is.

The filming lasted nine weeks and with the very gorgeous Lewis Gilbert at the helm it was an unstressed, light-hearted pleasure. He was delightfully absent-minded and legend has it that once, after filming for some time at Pinewood Studios, he drove the twenty miles to Shepperton Studios by mistake and berated the security man on the gate for not recognising the name of the film he was directing. On one occasion when everyone had assembled to start filming after lunch, the entire crew and I decided to play a trick on Lewis, who had not yet returned. Hiding behind vehicles and round corners, we all watched as he approached the set and stood there for several seconds with an open-mouthed, slightly baffled smile on his face. He then turned round slowly in a jerky, flat-footed little circle, muttering puzzled half-words as he went: ‘Oh . . . thought . . . Ha . . . mm.’ We jumped out at that point and surprised him; he laughed at the fun of it all but claimed that he knew we were hiding all along. He had an appealing clumsiness and would frequently walk on to the set knocking lamps this way and that, leaving cries of ‘Relight!’ in his wake, and once when not quite concentrating he crossed his legs and fell off the dolly. (This is a platform on wheels for the camera and not something that you blow up, dear reader.)

Michael was completely unstarry, managing to my surprise to walk around Dublin without any fuss and without being recognised to a troubling degree; he rarely stayed confined to his trailer, preferring rather to be out on the set chatting to the crew. He loved good food and treated us to lavish meals in some of Dublin’s and the surrounding area’s finest eateries. He also gave me one of the best pieces of acting advice ever, which was: ‘Save it for the take.’ It may sound obvious, but there is a great temptation to do a scene at full pelt in rehearsal, if only to make sure that you actually can, but often there are, for technical reasons, lots of rehearsals and you can kill the freshness and spontaneity of the thing by constant repetition.

This happened on the day when we were shooting the scene when Rita comes back to tell Frank why she hadn’t turned up to his house for dinner. It was meant to be tearful and from the moment I woke up on that morning, I was preparing for it, even gulping my breakfast down whilst on the verge of tears. By the time I got to the set I was already drained and the first shot was of Rita standing there crying through the rain-lashed window. So in the very first rehearsal, I let it all out and then struggled to achieve any tears through the next five or six rehearsals, until Michael pointed out that it was not that close a shot and that they couldn’t really see whether I was crying or not anyway. Another filming lesson: check the size of the shot before launching into your performance of performances. By the time it came to my close-up I had absolutely nothing left and it was then that Michael said: ‘Use the rehearsals for yourself, and save the special stuff for the take.’ It has rung in my ears many, many times since.

The whole experience, being my first film, was a steep learning curve. I had performed the role innumerable times on stage and that performance was in itself like an old film playing in my head, something that needed to be got rid of rather than utilised. It was a performance designed to reach people sitting in the back rows of the Piccadilly Theatre, while I was now required to give a performance for an audience that for a lot of the time was just inches from my face. However, Lewis was always at hand with his inimitable style of direction: ‘Too big, darling, it’s not the Albert Hall!’

No one could have been more surprised than me by the success of the film. When I first went to see it in a little screening room in Soho, I was appalled by my performance, thinking it over the top and amateurish, and again, as with the play, I thought both it and I would be dumped on from a great height by critics and public alike. I wanted to run and hide, so when Lewis mentioned that Columbia Pictures had bought it for release and that on top of that there was talk of Oscar nominations, I thought he had gone completely off his rocker with optimism when the film would probably not even make it in the ‘straight to video’ category. Of course it did go to video but before doing so the play enjoyed a huge, worldwide, theatrical distribution and success.

The film opened in London first, in the spring of 1983, with a royal première at the Odeon, Leicester Square, attended by the Duke of Edinburgh. He sat in the row in front of me and when the film finished he turned round to give me a huge thumbs-up and a wink. My mother came down from Birmingham and, unable to get through the crowd in order to get into the cinema, she called to a policeman for help. Pointing up at my name on the hoarding she told him in no uncertain terms that that was her daughter up there in lights and could she please come through or else.

The following autumn the film was to open in the States and that August Columbia Pictures’ mighty publicity machine was set in motion. I flew with my friend Ros Toland to New York and was booked into a huge corner suite at the Plaza Hotel, looking directly out over Central Park. One of my fellow guests was the King of Morocco, who had taken the entire first floor of this enormous hotel, together with his massive entourage and his three hundred items of personal luggage. Ros, who had been the publicist for the film of
Educating Rita
in Britain, had a refreshingly irreverent attitude towards the Hollywood establishment as well as a wicked sense of humour, so I had asked her to accompany me, both as a friend and as a personal publicist to help stave off the worst excesses of the publicity demands. I fell for New York instantly and even today the first sight of Manhattan, lit up as you drive across the midtown bridge from the airport, makes my skin prickle. I think it one of the most beautiful sights in the world. Everywhere I turned seemed to be a movie location; in fact the whole place felt like a film set. It was buzzy, neurotic, with an ambient sense of excitement and danger. There were warnings back then that to veer off the beaten track was not advisable and ending up in the wrong street in the wrong neighbourhood could spell disaster for a bumbling tourist. I was enthralled by the city and still am.

Waiting for me when I arrived at the hotel was a script that had been sent to me by Burt Reynolds, whom I instantly confused with Burt Lancaster. It seemed he had seen the film and wanted me for his next project. I thought: This is it! I’ve arrived! Look out, Hollywood, I’m here! Then I read it. It was not only awful but I was being asked to play an upper-class New York stockbroker type: why? So I duly turned it down, and in any case I wanted to do the publicity tour that was to take me in some style around America, Australia and Europe. However, Burt wasn’t taking no for an answer and sent a message, saying that even if I didn’t want to do his film, he would like to meet me. This I couldn’t resist. He flew Ros and me down to his home town of Jupiter, yes, Jupiter in Florida, where as we drove through the town we noticed several buildings emblazoned with the letters BR. We were booked into an hotel and that very night we were to meet Burt over dinner at the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theater where a production of
The Hasty Heart
by John Patrick was playing, starring the woman who played the eldest daughter of the Von Trapp family in the film of
The Sound of Music
. We were very excited. When Ros informed me that the man we were meeting was in fact not Burt Lancaster of
From Here to Eternity
and
Elmer Gantry
but Burt Reynolds of
Smokey and the Bandit
and
The Cannonball Run
fame, I was thrilled. Then I recalled an interview that I had seen on television in the recent past with Dolly Parton, who had just done a film with him, and she said that they had two things in common: they both had forty-inch chests and they both wore wigs; the latter comment Burt was apparently not too pleased about. So as we were being driven to dinner in our stretch limo through the streets of Jupiter City, I regaled Ros with this story, adding that above all else we must not mention the wig or refer to it in any way, however obliquely.