Young Winstone (17 page)

The French fella we were with was some kind of karate expert, and when it all eventually went off he started really putting himself about, karate-chopping everyone. If I’d had a choice I probably wouldn’t have been on his side, but I didn’t have a choice because all these Spanish geezers attacked us. In that kind of mass tear-up you basically just end up hitting anyone who’s near you who you didn’t come in with. We’re dishing out a few good clumps, but we’re taking some as well.

What you don’t want in that situation is for someone to take things up a level, and John’s mum’s boyfriend pulling out a gas gun and shooting the geezer next to him in the chest with a flare was never really going to calm things down too much. The other guy went up like a human torch. Although he was alright in the end because everyone jumped on him to put the fire out, I had to get John’s mum and throw her under the table to keep her out of the free-for-all that followed. At this point, the Old Bill – or the Vieux Guillaume as the French call them – arrived, and whatever language we were speaking, this was definitely a ‘stoppo’.

We all sprinted out the side door, Johnny’s mum and the French fella jumped in one car, and me and Johnny got in his little motor which we’d been running around in, and now we’re bombing down the mountain. It’s about one o’clock in the morning and we’re both quite bruised up after taking a few good clumps (as well as having had a fair bit to drink). John sees a bend coming up and puts his foot down hard on the brake – never the best idea when you’re driving
on black ice. As the car starts to spin, I’m looking out of the window and it’s a good thousand feet down the side of the mountain. I’m not exaggerating – the Pyrenees are high. I’m thinking, ‘This is it, I’m gonna die.’

The car spun and it spun and all I could see was down. There was no panic – just a total feeling of calm and knowing there was nothing we could do about it. Then we smashed into a wall and came to a dead stop. It was a bit too much like the end of
The Italian Job
for comfort.

We sat there for a minute in silence, probably shaking a bit and just getting used to the fact that we were still alive. Then we started to think, ‘What are we gonna do now?’ The car was a write-off and no one who came past seemed that into stopping, so we had no choice but to walk down the mountain. It took us about an hour, and when we finally got to the town we went into this little place and ordered some strawberries and cream and a bottle of champagne. It was almost like ‘this is the first day of the rest of the life which just nearly ended’.

Brushes with death notwithstanding, I was primed for going abroad by then. I love going to places I’ve never been to before, and the great thing about the kind of travelling I do now in the film industry is that you don’t necessarily go to the same places as normal tourists do. You’ll end up in the parts of a country where people actually live. I suppose my lucky escape in Andorra was a foretaste of things to come in that area. These days I try to get into and out of a place without participating in a mass brawl like you’d get in an old-fashioned Western, although I was fine with that back then. I didn’t know who or what I was meant to be fighting for, I was just hitting everybody who came near me. I was a mercenary doing it for love – Margaret Thatcher’s son Mark had nothing on me.

John Walford changed his surname to Segal later on and became quite a successful actor for a while. There was a David Niven-ish quality about him that the birds liked (and he liked them back), almost a gentleman-fraudster kind of thing. His mum was a survivor as well. She was still a good-looking woman and it turned out she knew the chief of police in the town, so the whole flare-gun thing got nicely smoothed over and I managed to get home to Blighty without having to bring the consulate into it.

Obviously not everyone who went to Corona got the chance to have a career as a professional actor when they left – in fact, if you did you were kind of the exception that proved the rule. Even my old
Zoo Story
sparring partner David Morris never really got a break, which was a shame because he was good enough to make it – he really was.

What tended to happen was that you might get a few little chances as an extra or in small speaking parts and whether or not anything came of it was kind of in the lap of the gods. I could tell you that I was grateful for any opportunities that came my way and did my best to grasp them with both hands in an appropriately appreciative and professional manner, but that would be a complete load of bollocks.

Truth be told, I was a bit of a handful at this stage in my life. I’d found it quite easy to adjust to the kind of discipline boxing required, but knowing how to behave at casting calls was a completely different matter. I wasn’t used to people treating me like a piece of shit in normal life, and I wasn’t ambitious enough to accept it in the interests of getting a part.

The first audition I ever turned up for was in Reading, and I was late ’cos I had to get the train and I didn’t really know what I was doing. It was for something called
The Perils of Pauline.
I’m not sure if it ever even came out because the most recent film with that title
which I could find on the internet was made in America in 1967. Anyway, I finally got in there and the casting woman really had the hump. I said, ‘I’m really sorry, I got lost. I’ve never done this before.’ She was really short with me and just sort of hissed at me, ‘Sit down, you’re not in this scene.’

I remember thinking, ‘I ain’t gonna like this much if that’s the way they’re gonna talk to me.’ But the scene they were filming at the time was some kind of basketball game, and at that point someone blew a whistle and all the girls took their tops off. Turned out it was one of those things they made a lot of in the mid-seventies that are a bit raunchy but not quite raunchy enough to be soft porn. Either way, there were threepennies everywhere, and even though I didn’t get the part, I did get the train back to London thinking, ‘Maybe there’s something to this acting game after all.’

Not long afterwards, I went up for a part in the Ken Russell film
Lisztomania.
We all had to stand in a row and this woman with blue hair came down the line with the great man. It was for a little Hitler scene where you had to have your hair cut like
der Führer
(Adolf, not Ken), so she was going down the line kind of barking at us: ‘You, get your hair cut. You, get your hair cut . . .’ She wasn’t even looking at us properly as she was saying it, and it seemed like she was channelling the spirit of the Nazis a little bit too effectively.

So when she got to me, I just told her: ‘I don’t want my hair cut.’ When she told me I’d have to if I wanted the part, I asked her how much extra you got paid for having your hair cut and she said, ‘Nothing.’ Then she asked me if I even wanted to be in the film and I said, ‘No, because I don’t want to fucking look like you.’ Part or no part, I wasn’t having someone treating me so disrespectfully. And I didn’t regret standing up to her, even when I found out she was Ken Russell’s wife.

It would be wrong to characterise this as an isolated incident. There was another time when I got sent up for some work as an extra in
Get Some In.
It was an ITV sitcom about National Service which my mate Karl Howman – who I’m going to tell you about in a minute – ended up starring in. He hadn’t got there yet, though; I think Robert Lindsay was doing it at the time, maybe before he did
Citizen Smith.
Anyway, all of us extras were standing there in our RAF bits while the actors did their piece. And instead of just asking me to move, the director kind of picked me up and moved me by my shoulder.

I was a skinny little thing in those days, so he probably thought it would be OK. But it wasn’t, because I turned round and nutted him. He went sprawling over the chairs and I was obviously asked to leave the premises in no uncertain terms. At that point I was looking around to see if anyone else wanted to have a fight, but no one did, so I was out of there.

After that, Corona became a bit reticent to send me up for things, which I suppose I couldn’t really blame them for, as I was a bit of a little fucker and I probably wasn’t doing the school’s reputation any good either. Maybe I just wasn’t quite ready for the film industry, or the film industry wasn’t quite ready for me. Either way, to be honest, I’m still a bit the same today. Ask me nicely and I’ll do anything for you, but if you’re trying to mug me off, sitting in the director’s chair (or next to it) won’t get you a free pass.

It wasn’t that I wasn’t willing to learn. I got a part-time job as the token straight man with all the lesbians and gays in the wardrobe department at the National Theatre for a while, when it was still at the Old Vic. You’d get £28 a night or something like that, which wasn’t bad compared to what the Theatre Royal Stratford East was paying (and there was the added bonus that you didn’t have to give
any of it to Vanessa Redgrave). The three plays they were doing at the time – because they revolved them at the National even then – were
Playboy of the Western World, Hamlet
and another one. My job was looking after two actors called Patrick Monckton and Michael Keating, but sometimes a mate of mine (John Walford/Segal again) who was looking after Albert Finney would be off and I’d have to stand in for him.

Finney had been one of my favourite actors ever since I’d seen him in
Saturday Night, Sunday Morning.
It didn’t matter that he was playing a Northerner – I recognised that character, and that was the first time I’d ever seen the kind of person I could relate to from my own life up there on the big screen in such a convincing way. I used to love watching him in
Hamlet,
giving it the full Shakespearian thing, but doing it as a man, so I’d go missing during the play to watch him from the seats right upstairs at the back.

Unfortunately I was late getting back once and Albert missed his cue. As I went running round the back to help him, Susan Fleetwood came off the stage after the mad scene. I think she’d got a bit carried away during that one because she picked up my hand and placed it firmly on her left tit saying, ‘Feel my heart.’ I said, ‘It’s not your heart I’m feeling, Susan.’

I went in the bar afterwards knowing I’d fucked up, which I felt really bad about, as I had a lot of time for Albert Finney as a person, never mind how great his acting was. I still wasn’t quite ready to face the music, though, so when he came in looking for me, I ducked down behind a table. Through the forest of furniture legs I could clearly see Albert’s human ones walking across the floor, so I crawled off between the stools in the opposite direction.

When I came up for air, there he was standing right in front of me, like one of the twins in
The Shining,
only with Albert Finney’s
face. I don’t know how he did it; it was like he floated there or something. His first two words were not promising – they were ‘You’ and ‘cunt’ – but when I explained, ‘Albert, I’m so sorry I fucked up, I was watching you from up the back and I just missed the call’, it seemed to do the trick. All he said after that was, ‘What do you want to drink?’

Even though I was only in the wardrobe department, I was quite proud of the fact that I was part of the company for the crossover from the Old Vic to the new building on the South Bank, which might have been a bit of a concrete block but it had great theatres inside it. Being out and about doing that was much better than just being stuck in Corona doing little plays. Not only did the wages help pay my tube fare into college in the mornings, I was also getting paid to watch the kind of actors I admired go to work at close quarters. It wasn’t just Albert Finney, there were Angela Lansbury, Frank Finlay and Dinsdale Landen as well; all of whom were great technicians, far beyond any level that I could ever aspire to.

Not all of my early brushes with the film and TV industries were quite as disastrous as the Mrs Ken Russell and
Get Some In
incidents. Occasionally my ebullient approach to the kind of small parts I was getting offered at that time paid off. At the age of eighteen, I was cast in an episode of
The Sweeney
called ‘Loving Arms’. It was meant to be a non-speaking role where I was at a table in the pub with a guy who was buying a gun, but I couldn’t (or wouldn’t) stop myself improvising dialogue with him.

The director kept saying, ‘Excuse me, quiet, please. You’re not meant to talk in this scene.’ Now I didn’t know they had to pay you an extra £30 for talking – that’s why they want you to keep schtum – but John Thaw and Dennis Waterman obviously did, because they were standing at the bar laughing while I was arguing the toss. They
weren’t being horrible, they could just see how green I was. My point of view was: ‘It just seems silly that I’d be sitting here not saying anything when we’re doing something as important as buying a gun’, but the director still insisted I keep quiet, so I ended up taking the gun off the guy and having a look at it.

The director was climbing the walls at this point, telling me to put the gun down, but I was getting pissed off now. ‘Well, what do you want me to do?’ I asked him, ‘Just sit here and play with my cock?’ I suppose it was good of him not to just send me home after that, but this was one of my first-ever paid jobs so I didn’t know any better. And I got the last laugh at the end, because for the next scene we had to go out in the street where me and the guy with the gun had to run away. I was supposed to get caught, but instinct took over and I jumped over a fence and escaped. They didn’t have time to reshoot the scene so it had to stay in done my way. I’ve seen the episode quite recently – I think it’s out there on the internet somewhere – and it’s quite funny. One minute I’m running alongside the other guy, the next I’m gone.

Another of my first paid outings in front of the cameras brought me into contact with someone who’s still one of my best friends now. I’d got a day’s work as an extra on the David Essex film
Stardust,
down by the Thames at the Prospect of Whitby pub in Wapping. It’s one of the oldest – if not the oldest – riverside pubs in London, and Captain Cook lodged just around the corner for a while, so he probably would’ve had a drink in there at some point.