The fickle finger of fate can make or break careers

Michael Simkins reveals how coincidence and luck play their parts in actors' lives.

Emma Watson was reportedly angry that her agent did not push hard enough for her to star in La La Land. Jose Luis Magana / AP

In showbiz, as in life, timing is everything, and the difference between success and failure can often be wafer thin.

For instance, one of my biggest acting breaks, playing opposite John Malkovich in the hit play Burn This in London's West End in 1990, only occurred because I was queuing for a table in a restaurant when he arrived with his director to discuss who should replace a cast member who'd pulled out of the project with an injury. Ten minutes sooner or later, and it would have been just another case of being in the right place at the wrong time.

Such serendipity cuts both ways. I often wonder how my career might have developed if, as a young actor, I'd decided to accept the offer of a one-line part as a messenger in a lavish BBC adaptation of Shakespeare's The Taming Of The Shrew on television rather than plump for the alternative, less glamorous but more secure offer of six months at a small regional theatre.

Might my momentary appearance have been spotted by Hollywood’s movers and shakers? Would Scorsese or Spielberg have seen me uttering “My lord, the duke is without the portcullis” as they surfed channels in their hotel room? I often imagine the scenario: “That kid – the one at the back wearing the silly hat and clutching that piece of parchment – who is he? The way he delivered that line about the portcullis was genius. I want him in my next movie.”

Of course, I’ll never know. Yet it was to be another decade before I was to be offered my next TV part, by which time I was no longer young, no longer new and no longer trendy.

I've been musing on the vagaries of fate since reading of Harry Potter star Emma Watson's much-reported spat with her agent for not working sufficiently hard to secure her the lead part in La La Land, a role eventually played by Emma Stone.

The business is strewn with incidents of actors who have missed or secured life-changing opportunities. Take John Travolta. He allegedly turned down the part of the homespun philosopher Forrest Gump in the 1995 movie of the same name. Tom Hanks grasped it with both hands and turned in one of the decade's most memorable performances (and won an Oscar for best actor).

Yet Travolta himself has benefited from fortune's caprice. He was only offered the part of Danny Zuko in the 1978 film version of the musical Grease after it was spurned by Henry Winkler. Travolta's co-star in the film, Olivia Newton-John, only got the role of Sandy on the rebound from Marie Osmond.

Sean Connery missed out on an estimated $450 million (Dh1.65bn) in fees and royalties when he passed over the role of Gandalf in The Lord Of The Rings trilogy (he apparently "didn't understand the script"). Yet he, too, had once been the lucky beneficiary of fortune's wheel when he landed the part of James Bond only after Cary Grant inexplicably turned it down.

The point is that however great your talent and however vaulting your ambition, luck and instinct are often your greatest assets. You’re never more than a phone call away from glory, but only if you hear it ringing and can recognise opportunity as the caller.

One of the most startling instances comes from my own address book. Two decades ago I celebrated my 40th birthday by having dinner with some chosen friends, one of whom, an actress in her late twenties, announced to me over dessert that she was giving up the biz. “At nearly 30 I know now it’s never going to happen,” she said, “and I don’t want to sacrifice my best years waiting for the phone to ring.”

The next evening she received a call from Kevin Costner. He'd been going through a pile of audition tapes searching for an unknown actress to play opposite him in his movie The Postman. Two days later, she was screen testing in Hollywood; and two decades on, Olivia Williams is one of Britain's most successful and celebrated stars of both stage and screen.

As American author Bret Harte noted: “The only sure thing about luck is that it will change.”

Michael Simkins is an actor and writer in London

On Twitter: @michael_simkins