Blowing the Bloody Doors Off

WHEN I LOOK AROUND me now, and look back to where I've come from, and then, just to be sure, check out the view again, I still sometimes think: What? Me? No. You're having me on. It still sometimes seems like an impossible dream. Lesson number one: I am living proof that, whatever your start in life, you can make it. Emphasis on "can"—not "will." No promises.

I was born about a million years ago in 1933, in the middle of the worst depression this country has ever known and six years before it was brought to an end by an even bigger catastrophe, the Second World War. My mother was a charlady who, though I didn't learn this until after her death, already had one son, who she was loving and caring for in secret. My father was an intelligent but completely uneducated—or undereducated, which was typical of the working class at that time—fish porter at Billingsgate market. We lived in a cramped two-room flat in a converted Victorian house in Camberwell, then one of the poorest parts of grimy, smoggy London: three flights up from the street and five flights up from the one toilet in the garden. I suffered from rickets, a disease of poverty that causes weak bones, and I tottered up and down those stairs in surgical boots.

Three years after me came another son, Stanley, and another three years after Stanley came the Second World War. As the Blitz flattened London, my brother and I, aged three and six, were evacuated, and found ourselves at the tender mercies of separate and rather disappointing new families. Mine fed me one tin of pilchards on toast a day and kept me locked in a cupboard under the stairs when they went away for the weekends. My mother barged in and rescued me, covered with sores, as soon as the Germans stopped bombing the railway lines, but not before I'd developed lifelong claustrophobia and an absolute detestation of any cruelty to children.

I left school at sixteen with a small handful of exam passes, found and got sacked from a handful of menial office jobs, and at eighteen I got called up for National Service, where I first did my level best to help with the Allied occupation of a defeated post-war Germany and then headed off to be shot at by Communists in Korea.

Britain then was one of the most class-ridden nations in the world, and I was, I was daily informed, at the bottom of the heap. Of course there were millions of people all over the world living lives much worse than mine, but I didn't know about that. I just knew that I was poor and working-class.

In many ways it was not a great start—for anything, let alone movie stardom. But to its star—Maurice Joseph Micklewhite, as (poor sod) I was known back then—my childhood never felt like a sob story. It was what I knew, I was loved, my mother and father were great parents and even the worst of times seemed to bring me something good.

The Second World War was one of the most horrific, tragic events of the twentieth century. But for me, it was one of the greatest things that ever happened. For this scrawny six-year-old slum-dweller, it meant evacuation and escape from the Blitz—with my brother and mother the second time around. We were transported from smoke-choked London to the bliss of the Norfolk countryside where I could run around in the fresh air, nick apples and have a massive bleeding carthorse called Lottie as a pet. Like everyone else I was forced to eat organic food for five years: there were no chemicals to put on the land or in food, because they were all being used in explosives and ammunition. There was very little sugar, no sweets, no fizzy drinks, but free orange juice, cod liver oil, malt extract and vitamins. For most people rationing was terrible but for people like me the wartime diet was a great improvement. My rickets was cured and I shot up like a weed.

Because of the war I got the opportunity to take the so-called eleven-plus exam to get me a place at a good grammar school: very unusual at that time for a boy from my background. My father survived Dunkirk, El Alamein and the liberation of Rome—I still have the card he sent me for my sixth birthday from Dunkirk, and the rosary the Pope gave him in thanks in 1944—and came back to us, tireder, sadder, but a daily reminder of how lucky we were: the telegram we had dreaded every day for the six years of the war had never arrived. And when I came back to London after the war, twelve years old, still lanky but now six foot tall—already four inches taller than my father—we were rehoused in a prefab in the Elephant and Castle. It had electric light, hot water, a proper bath, a refrigerator and, best of all, an inside toilet. These were all firsts for us and it felt like luxury.

I learnt early on that everything, no matter how tragic, can have its good side for you personally. I learnt to find the good in terrible situations. Looking back I would add another lesson that I couldn't possibly have known at the time (I wish I had): if I can make it, there's hope for us all. No matter where you start in life, you can get up and out.

 Learn what you can from what you get

None of us chooses our childhood. We don't choose our families, or our circumstances, or the era we are born into. But no matter where we find ourselves, there is always something we can learn. And now, more than ever, I realise what great lessons I learnt from the good bits and the crappy bits of my early life.

My father taught me that I wanted more out of life than I was supposed to get. My mother taught me the things I needed to be able to go out and get it. Together, they provided me with a wonderful launch pad—and a wonderful grounding.

My father was a brilliant, intelligent and funny man, a hero to my brother and me. He could make a wireless from scratch out of small parts. But like many of his generation he wasn't very good at reading and writing, and because he was uneducated he was unsuited for anything but manual labour. My father was not a chirpy Cockney sparrow. He was, in truth, never truly happy. He deeply resented his situation yet felt hopeless to change it. I used to look at him and think: Blimey, with an education, what could this man have done? And then: Blimey, I need to get an education or I'll end up like him, getting up at four every morning to spend the day carting freezing cold fish about, then blowing all my wages on the horses. When my father died in St. Thomas's hospital at the age of fifty-six, I was with him. He had three shillings and eightpence in his pockets, and that was all he had to show for a lifetime of working like a beast of burden. As I walked out of the hospital ward I swore I would make something of myself, and my family would never be poor again.

My mother set me on my path to success by giving me my first acting role. At the age of three I had a regular gig in a two-hander, opening our front door to a varied cast of unsuspecting co-stars—the local debt collectors. I had only one line to deliver: "Mummy's out." Slam door, exit up the three flights of stairs back to our tiny flat.

It's a nice story and it's true. But what my mother gave me went a lot deeper than that.

My mother made me the man I am.

When my father went off to war, I was six and my brother Stanley was three. My mother didn't cry as my father got on the army truck and it drove off out of sight. She turned and looked at us and said, "Your father's gone. Now you two have to look after me."

"Right, Mum," we both said. "Of course we will. Don't you worry."

Of course it wasn't true. We couldn't possibly look after her, and she didn't need us to: she was tough as old boots and could look after herself. Which was lucky because my father didn't come back for four years. But that solemn moment gave me an incredible sense of responsibility that stayed with me all my life. I have always wanted to take care of the people around me and always felt a terrible sense of guilt when I haven't been able to.

At the same time, Mum taught me how to relax, have fun, laugh and not take myself too seriously. She had a hard life but, unlike my father, she was not weighed down with bitterness or self-pity. She loved to laugh and she smiled her way through the humiliations of the grinding poverty that comes with being married to a gambler, six years of war waiting for the telegram boy in his silly hat and the lifelong strain of caring in secret for her beloved first child, David.

And, later, when stardom came, boy, did my mother keep me grounded.

When I had grown up (a bit) and settled down (a bit), my wife Shakira and I used to have my mother over to our house in Windsor every week for Sunday lunch. Sometimes it would be just the family and other times we would have friends there too—by this time, often very successful movie-business friends. This Sunday must have been just after I'd finished making The Man Who Would Be King, a 1970s escapist buddy caper set in a remote made-up land near India. The great director John Huston and the producer John Foreman, who, together with my co-star Sean Connery, had made working on that movie such a joy, were tucking into their roast dinner and my mother was earnestly engaging John Foreman on the topic of the price of milk. It was on her mind at the time, because it had just gone up by twopence, and John was agreeing with her that this was terrible. My mother always remained herself and always treated everyone the same.

She had excellent instincts about people. She knew who was a kind person and who could be trusted. And she knew that that was what was important about a person. I remember one time in the 1970s, at a party at my house that was bursting with glamorous, successful people—Peter Sellers and Liza Minnelli were there, Sean Connery, Nanette Newman, Roger Moore—my mother quietly asked me, "Who's that over there?"

I glanced across the room, packed with stars, to where she was looking and said, "That's a very famous actress, Mum. She's very famous." And I told my mum the actress's name. She was as famous as you can get, very beautiful, vivacious, the life and soul of the party.

"I don't like her," said Mum, pursing her lips. "I really don't like her."

"Why, Mum?" I said.

And my mum said, "She's spoken to everyone in this room except the old lady: me. She's not spoken to anyone old."

It's easy to get swept off your feet with the glamour of it all, unless you have some sensible people keeping you grounded.

More simply, and more importantly, my mother gave me and both of my brothers (maybe the other two even a little bit more than me because I could usually look after myself) uncomplicated, unconditional, devoted love. So much so that what I remember most clearly about my childhood Christmases is not that my father was away fighting the war, or that there were precious few presents; what I remember is my mother going at a hard-boiled sweet—the last of our Christmas rations—with a carving knife, trying to cut it in half so that neither son should feel favoured over the other. When the knife slipped and she gouged out a piece of her thumb, she disappeared for a minute, came back with it bandaged and went back to sawing away until that sweet finally surrendered to her onslaught. (My father loved me, too, but he wasn't as good at showing it.)

When you have been shown love, you can show it to others. At the beginning of her life, when I was young and broke and desperate, I wasn't always the father I wanted to be to my first daughter, Dominique. But what I have done right, as a father to Dominique and later to my second daughter Natasha, and as a grandfather to three wonderful grandchildren, I learnt from Mum and the way she offered all her three sons unconditional, unjudgemental, unfailing love.

I would even say that my mother, in a way, gave me my wife of forty-five years, Shakira. I've told the story many times of how I first stumbled across, pursued and fell hopelessly in love with Shakira, and Shakira has begged me not to tell it again here. So if you don't know this incredible, unlikely story of the greatest run of luck I ever had, I'm very sorry but you'll have to find it somewhere else. But not so many people know the story of how this stunning, poised, intelligent woman fell for little old me. I had always assumed it was my smooth Cockney charm and suave good looks that had swept Shakira off her feet, until one day I was standing at the door eavesdropping on an interview my wife was doing for a newspaper. "What first attracted you to Michael?" the journalist asked, and I heard her reply, "It was the way he treated his mother."

Most successful people will have a story to tell about a great teacher, and I am no exception. The headmistress at the village school I attended in Norfolk was an intimidating and fierce-looking woman, about sixty years old, called Miss Linton. She had an unusual haircut for a woman—similar to my father's, I thought—was unmarried, smoked 100 cigarettes a day and was extremely tough with us children. Except that after a while her attitude towards me softened. She started to take a close interest in me, gave me special lessons, guided my reading, taught me to play poker to improve my maths and eventually got me through the scholarship exam for grammar school. I never saw her happier than the day she came rushing across the village green to tell me I had passed: the first child from the village school ever to do so.

Miss Linton was probably the first person I loved outside my own family. Initially strange and frightening, and ultimately an inspirational figure who changed the course of my life, she was an early study in character for me. Could she have guessed that the most important lesson she taught the boy she treated like a son was that people are not always as they first appear?

I got to grammar school but didn't make the most of it. I hated the school I was sent to once the war was over (and I'm sure the feeling was mutual) and played truant whenever I could. My main education from that point forward came from two sources: books and the movies. Books like Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and James Jones's From Here to Eternity, and movies like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Maltese Falcon and The African Queen, directed by John Huston, allowed me to escape from the grim, depressing reality of everyday post-war life, and reassured me that the world was bigger than the few bits I could see over the rubble of the bombsites and through the thick London smog. I can't recommend bunking off school to anyone who wants to get on in life, but if you are going to do it, you couldn't find two more richly educational surrogates than the cinema and the public library.

The Elephant (which is what anyone local called the Elephant and Castle, ideally accompanied by a hard, unblinking stare for extra menace) was a tough neighbourhood. I learnt from an early age the importance of having friends who've got your back.

Down the Elephant in the 1950s the most dangerous gangs were the spivs, and after that, the Teddy Boys, who were the children of the spivs. These gangs were viciously violent, hot-tempered and dangerous. As a skinny pale fifteen-year-old what could I do? Round my way, if you were on your own you had no chance. I had to join a gang myself. In my gang we were mostly very funny and very calm. We didn't go out looking for trouble.

I was reminded of this in 2009 when I was back in the Elephant, making a film called Harry Brown and getting to know some of the local young men, who started off hanging around the shoot and ended up actually in the movie, ably directed by talented young first-time director Daniel Barber. I was surprised and gratified that these lads were prepared to talk to an old man like me about their lives, and as they did, it dawned on me how much bleaker life had become on my home patch. Our prefab house had been small but what there was of it was ours: we had a little garden of our own, our own fence, our own front door. Behind it there had been a loving family and a decent education. These kids lived in dilapidated high-rise blocks full of dangerous corners and alleyways, many had difficult family backgrounds and had given up on school, and in place of the alcohol and fist-fights of my youth there were drugs, guns and knives. Worst of all, there was nothing for them to do and nowhere for them to go.

What a lot of people don't realise is that young lads in gangs, we are not there to attack you. We are there, most of us, so that no one will attack us. Young people who join gangs are not bad lads: they are making a rational choice to protect themselves from harm.

I was also, without really knowing it, gaining some useful skills. I was learning to get along by performing: acting like I was tough and wasn't afraid, when I was actually always afraid and not tough at all. And I was learning to watch and listen: to observe people carefully for a fast take on their character and mood. Malevolent? Trustworthy? Volatile?

My gang dropped me during my years as an out-of-work actor: I couldn't afford to get my round in the pub, and if I was an actor I was probably a poof, so I was out. By then I was part of a new gang of other out-of-work actors, writers and musicians. No one was coming at us with knives but we had each other's backs in different ways. Now, in my ninth decade, my friends are dropping like flies, and having their back more often than not means turning up to their memorial. The point is, whether you call them a gang, your mates or your comrades-in-arms, no one gets very far without friends—people who like you for who you really are, and who have your back. (Or if they do, they don't have much fun on the way.)

At the age of eighteen, along with all the other kids in my gang, I was called up for two years of National Service. In my case this meant two years as an infantryman in the British Army.

If my mother had started to make me into a man when my father went off to fight in the Second World War, and my teenage years of weaving a safe path through the Elephant had added street smarts, then National Service finished the job when it sent me off to fight in the Korean War. National Service was, at the time, the worst experience of my life. In the warm comfort of hindsight, it was still the worst bloody experience of my life up to that point and at any time since. But I can also see that it was one of the most valuable.