STEPHEN LEWIS chats to a Winner who doesn't believe in taking all.

MICHAEL Winner seems in danger of being remembered mainly for starring in one of the most irritating adverts on British TV - you know, the one where he turns round and tells everyone to "calm down, it's only a commercial!".

You might expect a man with a string of hit movies behind him, a man who has worked with some of the greatest movie stars in the world and dated some of the world's most beautiful women, to be irked by that.

Not him. He is oddly, and engagingly, proud of his ads for esure. They were all his idea, he says. He thought them up, mentioned them over lunch to his friend Peter Wood, founder of esure, and was promptly asked to make them.

Esure's ad agency was sniffy and resigned their account when they realised Peter Wood was determined to get the ads made. "And they have been one of the great successes in the history of commercials," Winner says gleefully, lingering over that word commercial the way he does in the ads themselves.

"Until then, nobody had heard of esure. Now they have had to take on 600 extra staff."

It is hard not to like someone who is so openly enthusiastic about his achievements. He is big on the history thing, for example. Not only were the esure ads were one of the great successes in the history of commercials, but Death Wish, Winner's brutal 1974 hit movie starring Charles Bronson, "changed the whole history of cinema".

That's a big claim for what was essentially a shoot-'em-up vigilante revenge thriller. "Before that you couldn't have a hero who was a civilian killing civilians," Winner says. Death Wish set a new trend for films in which ordinary people took things into their own hands, in other words. Without it, there wouldn't have been a Kill Bill, he says.

And what was Charles Bronson like to work with? He was a very good screen actor, Winner says. "He had great tenderness. He was a very tender human being."

In the course of a film career spanning more than four decades, Winner has worked with many of the greats. Orson Welles was a "god", he says, particularly to a young and budding director in the Fifties. And the greatest screen actor of them all? Marlon Brando. "He is the greatest screen actor ever. He was meant to be difficult, but I found him the most wonderful, cheerful man."

In his new autobiography Winner Takes All, the director writes with wit and humour about his life in the world of film, and the people he knew.

From repeatedly electrocuting himself in his first role as a director to blowing up a Rolls Royce in Piccadilly Circus; from Oliver Reed being sick on Steve McQueen's shoes to Sophia Loren sunbathing topless; it's all here.

Winner also turns the spotlight on himself - his compulsive gambling, the girls, girls, girls, and the heartbreaking story of how he lost the love of his life.

Despite the rather Thatcherite title, he somehow manages to come across as a man who roots for the underdog. There is a surprisingly touching section dealing with his fight to set up the Police Memorial Trust in the wake of the murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher.

The trust exists to erect memorials to ordinary police officers who die in the course of duty.

He initially had a sniffy response from the Charity Commissioners, who didn't think it was appropriate to put up memorials to "mere policemen", only to the likes of Lord Louis Mountbatten.

That response only made him all the more determined, he recounts in his book, and after threatening to marshal the power of the press and TV, the Charity Commissioners quickly granted him charitable status.

That willingness to fight for ordinary people - one of his favourite school reports read "Winner always takes up the cause of any child who he feels is unfairly treated" - sits oddly with the title of his book. It's a terrible title, he agrees, and he never wanted to call it that but his agent insisted. "Nobody takes all, and nobody should want to. It's a well-known phrase, but it's a silly phrase and it does not sum up me. I've had a fairly successful career, but I did not take all! If I had, I would have won 26 academy awards!"

Winner Takes All: A Life Of Sorts by Michael Winner is published by Robson Books priced £17.95. Michael Winner will be at Borders in Davygate, York at noon on Friday to sign copies of his book.

Updated: 12:16 Wednesday, November 17, 2004