But by his own admission he frequently did just that. After he moved to New York in the early 1970s, his career dwindled into an uneven mix of stage and film work. He tried to salvage his career with appearances in film productions such as Excalibur (1981, in which John Boorman, the director, cast him as Merlin opposite his former lover Helen Mirren, to the dismay of both) and The Human Factor (which he described as “just awful”).