Great Scott, Good Knight

The last time I met him, he was holding court in the swankiest of London hotels, dressed glossily, in fashionable black from head to foot and chewing on a huge cigar. A larger than life figure, discussing his latest hit. A man whose provided some of the loudest and most successful movies to Multiplexes on both sides of the pond.

He was the centre of attention then: he knew it and I suspect quite enjoyed being an uncrowned king in his own country.

I'd first met him twenty three years before when he'd just completed his first feature movie... a brilliant but very odd film about Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, shot on a shoestring in the middle of a snow covered Scottish moorland ... starring Harvey Keitel and Keith Carradine. Of course in those days, the rough edges hadn't quite been smoothed away. The accent was a little less, shall we say, ...less refined and he wasn't quite so confident as when he came back to London as the conquering hero.

But he was a director alright. A director of commercials from a pretty ordinary background in the industrial north east of England, who was desperate, like hundreds of others, to make feature movies for a mass audience. What now places Ridley Scott apart from all those others, is that he made those movies and made them in spades. Blade Runner, Hannibal, Black Hawk Down, Thelma and Louise... big, successful movies. Mind you, he never forgot his roots. never got too big time to go back to being a salesman.... everyone in the States I know who watched the 1984 Super Bowl seems to remember his Apple Macintosh commercial.

But Ridley Scott will never have to make another commercial. Because, if he hasn't quite got a crown, this blue collar lad from the English town of South Shields has made it to the top of Britain's social tree. Knighted by the Queen at Buckingham Palace, he's now Sir Ridley Scott. One of the hottest directors and producers in Hollywood, with a studio base in London and no fewer than nine movies at some stage of production. But as Michael Caine once said, with a knighthood, you never have to plead for a seat in a theatre, or a table at a restaurant, again.

By Simon Bates