Stardust Memories by Ray Connolly

Author:Ray Connolly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Talking about my Generation
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1983-05-21T16:00:00+00:00

March 1971

Michael Caine

Michael Caine can speak fluent French. I bet you didn’t know that. He’s also very good at German. Practically no one knows that either, but he’s quietly proud of the fact.

It’s an accomplishment of which no one considers him capable. Sometimes when he’s in a restaurant and he speaks to the waiter in French, the company he’s with just gape in stunned astonishment, because they just know that he ought not to be intelligent enough to have learned a foreign language.

‘And you know,’ he says, ‘I just have to go off into the gents and take a good look at myself in the mirror to see if I really look like the dumdum that seems to be my image. I mean it makes you wonder about yourself. Somehow I seem to have got the image of the world’s luckiest half-wit. But in my view I’m not half-witted and I’ve never had an ounce of luck in my life.

‘I’ve never been given any credit as a craftsman, and my whole press image has always been rather frivolous. And, of course, there’s always been the crumpet thing about me.

‘Everyone always assumes that the parts I’ve played have been parts where I haven’t had to think about creating a character. Oh God, it annoys me to death to be written about as though I were the real village-idiot, a real, lazy, stupid, good-for-nothing, like one of those actors in the old days when it was said that the studio electrician used to put the sparkle in his eyes.

‘I suppose the press wanted a Cinderella story and I was it. But Cinderella was lucky.’

I’m being very lucky tonight. I’m gliding along in the polished cream leather back seat of Michael Caine’s metallic blue Rolls (he had it copied from one owned by a Texas millionaire) on the way back from Shepperton Film Studios to his Grosvenor Square apartment.

Caine’s chauffeur drives with a royal grace as though we are a couple of delicate eggs, and the journey has a royal super-suspended elegance to it.

Now and then we pull gently to a halt at an unobliging red light, and Caine chuckles as he watches the cheaper family cars line up for the inevitable racing start.

‘It’s always like a Le Mans start when we’re in the Rolls. As soon as the lights go amber they all start pissing across the road grinding their gears to get away ahead of us. But we’re not speedy or flash. If I were flash I’d have the car number MC 1 but I just took what I was given. I like to think I was born cool.’

He is not flash. During the last fourteen weeks he’s been filming X, Y and Zee (Edna O’Brien’s formerly titled screenplay Zee and Co) with Elizabeth Taylor and Susannah York. Whenever Elizabeth Taylor went on the set a caravan of four or five limousines made their way down to Shepperton — His, Hers, and presumably a couple more for the dogs and dogsbodies, I understand.

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