Published 24 February 2008 Irish Independent By Barry Egan
Film director and bon vivant Michael Winner loves the good life, including fine food, yet a dodgy oyster nearly killed him. Now that he is fully fit again, and a lot lighter, the man who's never afraid to speak his mind tells Barry Egan about his new diet book and getting engaged for the first time
Winner's sinners, anyone? Michael Winner has been stitched-up twice by girls who sold kiss 'n' tell stories to the News Of The Screws. "Once," he says, "by a black girl and once by a Jew." He pauses to get his breath from laughter. "So, I said 'I'm p***** off at the minorities now'," he laughs.
"It is not that I'm anti-black or Jew," smiles Winner, who was born in London in 1935 to Jewish emigrant parents, "but they were the only people to turn me over."
It was 20 years ago now. He remembers the headlines as if they were written today. "There were five of them," he smiles, recalling them in all their ghastliness . . .
'Death Wish' Director Whipped Me And Used Me As Sex Slave.
Jenny's [as in Seagrove] Movie Mogul Says No Sex No Part.
He Called Me His Black Bitch.
With Tits Like That I Could Make You A Star.
Get Your Clothes Off, He Said.
"This black girl had been a willing partner in occasional sex," he says. "She was a nice girl. The Jewish girl was from Grange Hill, the famous TV series. I thought: 'That's safe. She's Jewish. She won't want to be disgraced within the community for having had a do with me.' Boy, was I wrong. She sold to the press five times. And then her parents sold to the press."
He adds that when the first kiss-and-tell was printed - 'Movie Mogul Says No Sex, No Part' - he was incandescent with rage. "I have never used auditions for sex. I never said 'no sex, no part' ever." He immediately dashed off 500 letters to the prime minister, all the cabinet and the shadow cabinet, the head of the film producers' association, Stanley Kubrick, "everybody", enclosing an article he had written on the matter for The Independent.
He received a number of "incredible letters back. The best one was from . . . she was a very ugly woman. I'll think of her name later," he rambles, beautifully. "Her letter read: 'Dear Michael, you are absolutely right and when the Labour government takes office in February, I will be introducing legislation to prevent this sort of behaviour by the press.' "
At the bottom of the letter was a handwritten P.S.: "If you are doing these wonderful things, why don't you ask your friends around?"
He proclaims it the greatest letter he ever received. He also received letters of support from half the British film industry, and beyond. It appears Michael Winner knows, and is adored by, everyone. I'm not even being remotely sarcastic.
"Joan Collins," he begins, "she always wears wigs, and I hate wigs. So I said to her: 'Whatever you do, dear, please don't wear wigs.' She said: 'I promise you, Michael.' She comes on the set the first day and I had my own hairdresser who I had on picture after picture. And Joan says, 'Of course it is not a wig. Pull it, Michael! Pull it! So I pulled the hair and you don't want to pull too heavily in case you hurt her. So we do the film. And then, on the last day of the movie, she kisses me goodbye and walks a few yards away and takes the wig off and waves it at me!"
He is entertainingly non-PC and non-pious in his enjoyment of wealth and life. He has gone to Sandy Lane hotel in Barbados every Christmas for the past 25 years. "It is £2,000 a night for bed and breakfast over Christmas," he says. He flew in to Dublin from London on the day we meet on Sandy Lane proprietor Dermot Desmond's jet with fiancee Geraldine Lynton Edwards. He has that air about him. He has no limit on his Gold Amex card. He thinks nothing of spending £4,000 on a bottle of wine. "Why should I?"
Winner's lack of political correctness is also manifest in the fact that he has no qualms in describing OJ Simpson as a friend of his. "For a double murderer he is a very nice person," Winner smiles, his tongue decidedly in his cheek.
I ask him would he say that to OJ's face. "Yes! I did!" he laughs.
Would you leave Geraldine alone with him?
"He came to the house in London about two years ago. He rang the bell. I said to Geraldine: 'You open the door. If he's got a knife, throw yourself in front of me.' I like OJ. It's a terrible thing and I don't condone it. I can only view people how they behave to me."
Winner says he was "amazingly successful" with women, despite his belief that he was "extremely ugly. I went to a school where they were blond and beautiful. So I thought I was always very ugly. Nevertheless, I was determined to get laid as much as possible. Which is always a good idea." He recalls his old mucker Marlon Brando on his hotel balcony telling him that he always hated acting. To which Winner asked him why he went to drama school. "To get laid," was his reply.
Winners goes on, "I was very successful because I was a trier and I suppose I was quite amusing. In fact, when I look at photographs of me now when I was young, I actually look bloody marvellous." "It has been downhill since!" he roars.
"I had a wonderful time," he continues. "People say to me: 'You never had a family.' I do have a family. I have all these girlfriends. I still talk to them. I look after them if they're in trouble."
Geraldine is out shopping. He professes himself not to be the marrying kind. However, they got engaged a year-and-a-half ago. "I was 71," he says. "I said: 'Darling, it has taken me 71 years to get engaged. Don't hold your breath for the wedding.' But she is a lovely person. And I have never been engaged before, never mind married."
He lives with Geraldine in a 46-room mansion in Holland Park, which, he says, will be left to the nation as a museum after he passes. When I enquire how Geraldine feels about this, he laughs and says that she is "not keen about me leaving it to the nation as a museum, I must tell you. Shakira Caine at dinner two nights ago said to me: 'Oh, you can't be doing that! You've got to leave it to the ISPCC!' I said: 'I tell you what, Shakira, children will get in free!' he roars with laughter.
He describes himself as shy and lonely as a child, and turned, "like most directors", to the solace of cinema so he could have a relationship without getting hurt. He spent endless hours at the cinema, watching Olivier's Henry V 17 times. The Third Man and Citizen Kane weren't far behind in the amount of times watched. He became "deeply friendly with Orson Welles. It was magical." He still has the cables Orson sent him when The Jokers opened in New York. "He was wonderful to direct," Winner says, "He was a very wounded man."
Winner's hugely read restaurant column (Winner's Dinners) in the Sunday Times has left many a restaurateur badly wounded too, of course. Ask him what was the worst restaurant he has eaten in in Ireland and he doesn't shrink from the question. "I'll tell you the worst restaurant I have ever eaten in in Ireland: Patrick Guilbaud. I thought it was terrible. It was a long time ago but he still had one star, I think. And bless him . . . it is not against him. I don't like that sort of over-fussed, over-worked plate-decorated food. I don't like it. And Gordon Ramsay is beyond belief good, when he is personally cooking in the kitchen. Once every three years it is worth going."
Food, of course, was nearly his undoing; he almost died after eating raw fish a few years ago. He was, he says, pronounced dead five times. He had 19 full-anaesthetic operations. He caught this rare disease from eating an oyster and his leg was severely damaged.
"My leg was rotten, rotten, for weeks. The first five of the 19 operations were not to repair. They were to cut away more rot. They ended up cutting my two balancing tendons and my Achilles tendon. So I am not fully ambulant as we walk.
"What really pissed me off was when people said: 'Well, of course you lost three-and-a-half stone, because you were ill.' I lost the three-and-a-half stone before I was ill," he says. "Now, when I became ill, I was a lump lying in bed for months. You tend to put on weight. I can't exercise. So my diet is even more important. If I - who was the fat pig - can lose three-and-a-half stone, and keep it off, there is hope for everybody."
He is preparing to have dinner with Louis Murray and Geraldine at Murray's Balzac restaurant on Dawson Street. He pads about the Grace Kelly suite at the Shelbourne. Once upon a time, the sybarite's stomach possibly wouldn't have got into his room. These days Michael Winner, however, is on his own unique Fat Pig Diet (he is here in Dublin to promote the book of the same name). So his new physique can sashay slimly around the Princess Grace suite without bumping into the 18th-century furniture or embarrassing himself. Three stone the lighter or not, Winner hasn't lost his gravitas nor any of his lacerating Jewish wit. On occasion, he is not averse to turning it on himself.
"The biggest misconception about me is that I'm a total a**ehole," he says with a wild chuckle. "It's getting less and less. But I say that as a gag because I always say worse things about myself than anybody else can."
In truth, there is a sense of fun where ever Winner goes. He laughs like a drain throughout our conversation - and soon has you laughing with him. You start to imagine that when certain people say that Michael Winner is a total a**ehole that perhaps the comment says more about them than Winner himself.
Of course, he is full of himself, the wittiest people usually are, and occasionally he is full of it. What of it? He will tell you he turned down James Bond and King Kong and The French Connection. He believes that he never fully received the credit he deserved as a film director. He adds that Death Wish in 1974 with Charles Bronson "changed the direction of American cinema. They still give lectures on it. It was the first film in the history of film where a civilian was the hero and yet that civilian killed other civilians." He adds that he tried to sell the script for five years but no one would touch it. He met Bronson at an airport and told him the movie plot: a man, his wife and daughter are mugged "and he goes out and kills muggers. So," Winner remembers, "Charlie said: 'I'd like to that.' I said: 'The film?' 'No, I'd like to kill muggers!' "
He has an unending stream of anecdotes about his times with Bronson, Joan Collins, Stanley Kubrick (a long-term friend), Sophia Loren (with whom he was rumoured to have had a fling) and Jenny Seagrove (who had a long-term relationship with him).
He is particularly insightful on Brando. "I remember Brando saying to me: 'I never knew you could make films like this. First of all, very quick. And secondly, light and bright.' "
He recalls one scene where Brando was required to walk down the street at 7am. The legendary actor turned to Winner and asked: "If Ingmar Bergman was here, Michael, what would he think of the ethos and underlying sensitivity and motivation of the scene?"
Winner looked at the empty chair and then at the door and said: "Marlon, Ingmar has just left. And I don't f***ing blame him! All you've got to do is walk down the f***ing street!
"Oh, and Burt Lancaster," he laughs, "he tried to kill me three times. He held me over a 2,000-foot drop screaming obscenities at me! Who cares? He was a lovely man!"
You're not so bad yourself, Michael Winner. That's the real skinny on Mr Nasty.
