If you danced at the Ad Lib club just behind the Empire Cinema on Leicester Square, as I did, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles might be grooving around next to you. David Bailey would be in the corner, romancing Jean Shrimpton. In another corner Roman Polanski was with Sharon Tate.
My flatmate was Terence Stamp. My barber was Vidal Sassoon. My tailor was Douglas Hayward, the tailor to the 1960s and such a star in his field that he ended up making Ralph Lauren's suits. When I played a bit part in Dixon of Dock Green I was paired with an unknown actor called Donald Sutherland. When I understudied another unknown actor making his West End debut in one of the first British plays about ordinary soldiers, Willis Hall's The Long and the Short and the Tall it was Peter O'Toole. The play made him a star and I took it on tour while he went off to become T. E. Lawrence in David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, the start of a towering theatrical and movie-making career.
Even the failed actors became household names. When the rest of us were still out of work and broke, we used to pass the time in the basement cafe of the Arts Theatre, just off Leicester Square. They would let you sit there all day over one cup of tea. One afternoon I was sitting in this warm haven for the destitute with two other broke actor friends. One of them, John, was particularly down. He had just been fired from a very low- standard repertory theatre and was humiliated and unhappy. He announced that he was going to give it all up and had already written a play instead. "What's it called?" I asked.
"Look Back in Anger," he replied.
"I'm writing a play as well," said our other friend, an actor called David Baron. "And you can be in it, Michael. Only I'm not going to write it under my acting name. I'm going to use my real name."
"What's that, David?"
"Harold Pinter."
"Well, good luck to both of you," I said. I didn't hold out much hope for either of them.
Michael Caine "Blowing the Bloody Doors Off" (2018)
