Read The Elephant to Hollywood for Free Online Page A

to do with acting ability. Charisma – you’ve either got it or you haven’t. Who’s got it today? I’d pick Jude Law, Clive Owen, Matt Damon and of those, I identify most strongly with Jude Law. After all, he looks a bit like me – and he’s remade two of my movies. I identify with him in another way, too. The press spend a lot of time attacking him personally. When we played in Sleuth together, one of the critics mentioned that he’d screwed the nanny and I thought – hang on a minute – he didn’t screw the nanny in the movie! He’s a wonderful actor, a great dad to his kids, and he’s a bit of a jack-the-lad, like I was, although perhaps I was smarter at not being caught. But back when my pals and I were living the high life and dating a lot of girls, we didn’t have to contend with the paparazzi or the celebrity magazines the way stars do now.  We’d never get away now with what we got up to in those days.

3
    Learning the Ropes

    People still ask me if the character of Alfie is based on me. Around the time the film came out, interviewers would say, ‘Alfie’s you, isn’t he? You’re a young Cockney lad, you like girls.’ ‘Is that it?’ I’d say. ‘I’m a Cockney and all Cockneys are exactly the same? All Cockneys who like girls are exactly the same?’ What they misunderstood then – and some of them still misunderstand now – is that, yes, I’m a Cockney; Alfie’s a Cockney. I like girls; he liked girls. But the way Alfie treated them is the complete opposite of the way I would treat a woman.
    In fact I based Alfie on a guy called Jimmy Buckley who turned up one day at Clubland and made an instant impression on all the girls there. Jimmy had charisma. I didn’t recognise it at the time (and I certainly couldn’t have spelled it), but I could see that it worked for him and Jimmy Buckley became my new best friend. Unfortunately, none of his success with the girls rubbed off on me – although I was so desperate by now I would have taken even his rejects. But I did notice that he didn’t seem bothered who he went with and, in due course, neither was Alfie. I, on the other hand, have turned out to be quite fussy.
    In the end it wasn’t Jimmy Buckley who led me towards the promised land, it was another friend who invited me to his sixteenth birthday party. I wasn’t drinking at that point and I was sitting morosely in the kitchen, nursing my lemonade and watching all my friends get hammered when the back door opened and my friend’s auntie beckoned me out into the garden. She was drunk, too, but far from incapable, although mysteriously she did appear to have lost her skirt. I made a half-hearted gentlemanly attempt to help her find it, but after a bit it didn’t seem to matter any more. As I bowled back home with a whole new spring in my step, I couldn’t believe my luck – so that was what it was all about!
    I may have been gaining an education in some of the most fundamental aspects of life, but school continued to fail to capture my interest and I don’t know who was more relieved, me or the headmaster, when I left Wilson’s at the age of sixteen with a handful of passes in my final exams. I was free at last to pursue my show business dream.
    My first job was as an office boy for Frieze Films – a film company, certainly, but a highly specialised one, in this case offering eight millimetre tourist films of London and, at weekends, Jewish weddings. As a consequence, I was the only boy at Clubland who knew all the words to ‘Hava Nagila’. One Sunday evening we were filming a wedding cabaret featuring a band called Eddie Calvert and his Golden Trumpet. Everything was going according to plan. We dimmed the lights, the bride clutched the groom’s hand, a ripple of excitement ran through the guests and Eddie Calvert himself began to emerge from beneath the stage playing – yes – ‘Hava Nagila’ on his Golden Trumpet. I was in charge of the lighting, and, anxious to capture