Michael with his family on his bar mitzvah day.[Missing Credit]
One day Michael, whose real surname is Feldman, dared to hit his bully back. That evening Malcolm had his dark revenge shouting: “I’m going to beat the hell out of you k*ke.” Michael recalls it vividly: “I tried to swing one, but that was over in a second, and he started to pummel my face. Soon I was down on my knees. And only one kind person waited to check I was OK.”
Michael left school early, after which he worked for some New York wise guys – ironically, while studying law in the evening. “What came in the front door went out the back door and you didn’t ask questions,” he says. His job involved using shoe polish to change the bar code of goods. “I learned a lot from those guys, but at the same time, I was pretty lost and lonely and didn’t know what I was doing.”
A blind date would change all that. “This girl found my story of depression, loneliness and isolation, funny. Here was I, telling a stranger that I was lost, and she was laughing. I said, ‘What’s so funny?’ And she said, ‘You should be a comedian or an actor,’ and that lit a flame in the darkness. It was like a bomb went off.”
Young, and with nothing to lose, Michael wasted no time. “I walked into the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and saw an admissions door. This guy said, ‘Who are you?’ And I said, ‘Michael Feldman.’ And he asked, ‘Do you have an appointment?’ And I said, ‘No, but let’s just do this. How much is the cost?’ He said, ‘First you have to audition.’
“I asked him, ‘Let me get this straight. You want me to act before you’ve taught me? How does that make sense?’ And he looked at me and said, ‘So you’ve never acted?’ Then he told me to look to find a book with some scenes, learn one and come back. And I said, ‘Look, what will it cost and I’ll double it now.’ And he said, ‘I can’t believe you are trying to bribe me. Just do an audition.’
“I’d never even seen a play but I walked into a book store, bought Hamlet, flipped through it, found the ‘to be or not to be’ speech and learnt it. Within an hour I had the gist and I went back to the school to audition.
Michael as Dempsey in 'Dempsey and Makepeace.'[Missing Credit]
“They asked my name and I thought I needed a proper actor one. Marlon Brando was my favourite actor, so I became Michael Brandon. There’s this table of about ten people, including the guy I’d tried to bribe earlier. He knows I don’t have an appointment and that my name isn’t Michael Brandon, but when I said I was doing Hamlet he said, ‘This, I have to see.’ And I start doing this scene, and when I get to the line about a ‘bare bodkin’ – I knew that meant naked – I tore open my vest and shirt and the buttons went flying, ‘bing’ ‘bing’ bing’ bouncing off their glasses. They all thought it was the funniest thing they had ever seen.
“I took my bow and a week later the letter arrived; I was going to be an actor.”
Michael worked pretty much from the time he left his college. In 1974, while at an acting masterclass, he met actress Lindsay Wagner, and says he knew from the second they met that he was going to marry her. A few months after they got together, her small role in The Six Million Dollar Man got its own spin-off – The Bionic Woman. Suddenly his lady – who he married in 1976 – was a TV mega star.
Michael doesn’t go into why he was unfaithful, but he admitted his indiscretion to Lindsay and it blew up their marriage. A topic he is far more forthcoming about is the Playboy Mansion – which he discovered during their divorce.
Glynis and Michael posing in character for their show 'Dempsey and Makepeace'.[Missing Credit]
“There wasn’t, and there will never be, anything quite like it,” he chuckles. “Looking through a 2025 lens people may consider it a terrible place, but I can categorically say I never saw anything untoward or any woman abused during my time there.
“There was plenty of everything inside the mansion. It was like the best private club there ever was. The game room had video games, pinball machines and a few discreet very cushy rooms for privacy; sort of like bouncy castles for adults.”
It was around this time that he made a film called Rich and Famous, in which he enjoyed a very raunchy mile high sex scene with Jacqueline Bissett. While at the premiere party he found himself at the bar next to Elizabeth Taylor, who told him that having sex on a plane was one thing she had never done because she was too frightened of flying.
“I leaned into her and conspiratorially revealed, ‘I knew a lady once who was very afraid of flying, terrified I believe, but it took away her fear in the end.’ I then told her to imagine she was on a plane ‘right now’ and then I whispered ‘kiss me’. To my wonder she kissed me right there in the middle of the party, the real thing too. A lovely lingering kiss.” She then winked at him and walked off.
Michael was going through a bit of an acting drought, and was trying his hand at writing a script when Dempsey and Makepeace landed in his lap. Initially Dempsey was written as a super-rich Californian to go alongside the British aristocrat Makepeace, but Michael had other ideas, and suggested the part be made a tough-talking, working-class New Yorker.
The British producers pondered his idea on their way to the airport, and obviously liked it; they cancelled their flight, and returned to audition Michael for the part. “And the rest is history,” he smiles, as we talk about the show which changed his life.
He and Glynis didn’t get on when they first started working together in 1980. “I had been in Brown’s hotel on my own for a week, wearing a toy gun in a shoulder holster so I could get used to the feeling,” Michael recalls. “I was so caught up in my head that I almost walked into the police barricade outside the Iranian embassy siege.
Brandon pictured with wife Glynis, left, and parents.[Missing Credit]
“I went to the Ritz to meet her. The phone was ringing on the concierge counter and kept going and going until I yelled, ‘Is someone going to get that?’ Well! The look on her face. Glynis is very genteel, English, reserved, and she was shocked by my loud, rude, brash Americanism. So that was how we begun.”
Things did not improve for most of the first series. In fact, it was only once they’d finished filming and were travelling around the world doing interviews that they began to get close. “We were in LA and I introduced her to my friends,” says Michael. “They all loved her, despite what I had told them. They all thought she was really special with a great sense of humour. We said goodbye the next day – not knowing if there was going to be a second series – and there was a look in her eye that was interesting. There was a spark.”
When the series was renewed, Michael took over the lease of a huge flat, which came with a chef. His friend Richard Gere had just moved out of the property. “The guy that came with the flat was this amazing chef, and my first guest for dinner was Glynis. And over this gourmet meal, this smile remained in her eyes. She was breaking up with her boyfriend. The time we had spent apart had done what it need to do to incubate the proper feelings in the heart.”
Michael Brandon's new memoir, 'That's All I'm Sayin', is out now.[Missing Credit]
The two have now been married for 35 years, and England has become home for this New Yorker. “Dempsey and Makepeace gave me a whole new life, and was one of the best experiences of my career,” says Michael, whose recent credits include starring in the West End production of the multi-award winning musical Jerry Springer: the Opera, as well as voicing the American version of Thomas the Tank Engine.
Michael says writing his memoirs was always on his bucket list. “It took me back, and it was interesting looking at things from this angle. You can’t change the past but you can re-look at it, and by doing that you see it with different eyes. I realised that everything was exactly where it needed to be at the right time. And a bonus has been not just remembering these moments, but having emails from friends about different parts of the book. It is terrific. What an amazing time I’ve had.”
Michael Brandon’s That’s All I’m Sayin’, published by Chronos Publishing, is out now
