Star for a day

Raymond Emmanuel was homeless, sleeping in a shop doorway, when he was spotted by casting agents and given a part in Guy Ritchie's new film. Now, he tells Patrick Barkham, things are looking up
Raymond Emmanuel
Raymond Emmanuel who was homeless until spotted on the Manchester streets and asked to be an extra in the new Sherlock Holmes film. Photograph: Howard Barlow Howard Barlow/Howard Barlow

For Raymond Emmanuel, going to the cinema was simply one way to keep warm for a couple of hours. A trip to see a Kiefer Sutherland movie, Mirrors, last autumn was a treat compared with riding the buses or sitting in the library. But Emmanuel's afternoon away from his usual spot in a derelict shop doorway in Manchester set in motion a series of events as unlikely as any Hollywood script. On his way out of the auditorium, the 56-year-old homeless man was spotted by a couple of casting agents. They liked his "dignified" look, called him in for a casting and the next thing he knew he was starring alongside Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law in Guy Ritchie's new Sherlock Holmes film.

The "tramp" who gets lucky is a comforting trope and the story of "Sherlock homeless" has flown around the world. Cynics may be surprised that Ritchie and the film's publicists had nothing to do with spreading the word. Emmanuel's day on set brought him a modest £95 fee as an extra and that was it: no calls from agents, no red carpets, no stardom. Nevertheless, since his unusual day out, his life has been completely transformed.

As he takes me to the door of an empty shoe shop that used to be his home, Emmanuel is hailed by shopkeepers and passersby who recognise him. With a stack of cardboard boxes - "the binmen learned not to take them away" - and two chunks of foam under his head and bottom, it was here he would wait until dark fell before curling himself into the corner, beneath a sticker that proclaims, "No place like Manchester".

"Every day I come down here and I walk past with a smile on my face," he says. He remembers the aggression of those who had homes to go to. "If you're on the street on Friday or Saturday night, there are respectable people with families who get drunk and if they haven't had a good night the homeless people are punchbags," he says. On one occasion he was deliberately urinated on by a passerby. Other times, lads threw heavy crates over him and hurled a lump of metal at his head. "You get a few little funny jibes along the way. You can't print them on paper. Sometimes it would be 'there's that loser' or 'look at the filthy tramp', which I wasn't, but there you are."

As with many homeless people, the story of how this well-mannered, fastidious man ended up sleeping with his feet sticking out from beneath his coat is complicated. He tells it with a curious mixture of wisdom and childlike wonder. His grandfather had taken a boat from Russia to Liverpool between the wars and accidentally ended up in Manchester, where he set up as a tailor in Strangeways. Emmanuel's father, who did some acting and scriptwriting, met his mother at a wartime dance in Salford and Emmanuel grew up with his older brother and sister in a four-bedroom house in Prestwich. He wasn't particularly clever at school, he says, and worked as a hairdresser before going into telesales.

His father died in 1994 and, at the end of the decade, Emmanuel quit his job to care for his mother after she had a triple heart bypass. He spent "13 wonderful years" with her. It's an unusual choice of words but Emmanuel was very close to his mother. He lived in his mother's old flat and went to her care home every day. "She wanted me there every day, and I was," he says. "She needed me around and it was fun to be with her. She was very attractive. Everyone loved her. She had a very kind manner, didn't see bad in anyone."

In 2005, she died. "I didn't go mad but there were some very low moments. When my mother died, my life just went like that," he traces a downward motion with his forefinger. His mother's flat was sold off to pay family bills but he doesn't blame his relatives for his homelessness. Although he says he does not drink, gamble or take drugs, he admits he spent money "frivolously" in the past - "clothes, going out, clothes, clothes," he says. "The medallion, the open-necked shirt, I was the lad in town at one point." He's still a snappy dresser.

After his mother's death, he was too depressed to work and ended up staying with Jewish charities and rabbis. "About seven months after she died, I went to a rabbi's house and he said, 'You've grieved enough,'" he says. "I walked out of the rabbi's house and thought, oh crumbs, I'm homeless. I have nowhere to go now."

He started living rough early last year. Other homeless people showed him where to find a free breakfast. He became an expert in eking out his day. "You go to the library, read some books. You go to the bookies and watch some races - you don't gamble - and that will take you to 5pm. Then you walk around Manchester and when it gets dark you go to sleep."

He says he didn't beg, but stood outside an opticians with a sandwich board advertising sunglasses to earn money. He visited supermarkets late at night to get cheap loaves of bread. He would occasionally pay £15 for a night in a hotel or invest in an all-day bus ticket and ride the buses out to Oldham or Wigan. Then there were his trips to the cinema.

He didn't mention his day's work for Ritchie to anyone at first - but a chance conversation with a local reporter doing a story on homeless people eventually travelled round the world. He is still dining out on it. He was not cast as an Edwardian vagrant, but played a Tory MP in the House of Commons, which was recreated in Manchester. Heated rollers were put in his wiry white hair and he wore striped trousers and a large cravat. "I looked like Christopher Lloyd [in Back to the Future], a mad professor," he says, "It was a beautifully crafted scene. I walked to the backbenches and one of the directors said, 'You with the hair, you're sitting down here,' and so I sat right near the front. Every so often somebody came up to me and back-combed my hair or dusted something off my shoulder. They gave us a lovely meal for lunch and you felt like falling asleep, like MPs do."

He enjoyed watching Law, Ritchie and Downey Jr at work. "Jude Law was quite open but Robert Downey Jr was very intense, very focused," he says. Emmanuel took it seriously too. "When the makeup was put on I went into character and I didn't come out of character all day. People call it 'method' but I just wanted to enjoy the day as much as I could." While he may only have a fleeting screen appearance, "you'll hear me", he promises. "You can hear me shouting. I sound like a mixture of Jonathan Ross, Jack Lemmon and Mr Bean. I invented a character and they didn't mind."

As winter set in, Emmanuel had begun to notice bruising down his side from where he slept against the cold ground. His day of filming was the start of good things to come, though. Shortly afterwards, Emmanuel was spotted by the outreach team for the English Churches Housing Group. He was found a room in its hostel in Manchester. "It was gorgeous. You got a lovely warm area to wait in, machines with chocolate in them, snooker tables, two televisions, washing machines and your own room was centrally heated." Walking to his hostel for the first time in the freezing weather before Christmas, he fell through ice into a pond. "It was like a baptism," he says.

Since then, he has got back in touch with his family and has been helped into his own rented flat. "When you wake up in your own bed, you think, it's all mine," he says. He can't stop eating. "That's what it's like when you're off the street, you're suddenly hungry all the time."

He certainly wouldn't turn down any more forays into the world of film - "If Indian people approached me and said we're doing a Bollywood film I'd be over to India like a flash, just to taste a real curry" - but knows it is unlikely. He has enjoyed the attention. "It's just the experience of having people say nice things," he says.

He is looking forward to another trip to the cinema when the Sherlock Holmes film is released in the autumn. "I know I'm going to grimace to see myself in a proper film. That's something else." Emmanuel would most like to thank the film star who, in an oblique way, started it all. "I'm going to meet Kiefer Sutherland one day and shake his bloody hand. I really am."

This article was amended on Wednesday 4 February 2009. This article has been amended to remove some personal information.