The Way I Was: First hurdle on the career path: Nigel Havers tells Nicholas Roe how 'Chariots of Fire' not only made his name, but also made him fit

THIS is a shot of me running round the quad at Eton, taken from Chariots of Fire, a film that changed my life and my career all in one hit. We made it in 1980, so I would have been 29 at the time.

We were supposed to shoot this scene at Cambridge University, where the race actually happened. There was a great tradition at King's College that the undergraduates should run round the quad before the clock stopped striking at midday, and Harold Abrahams did it: he beat the clock. But someone sent the script to the college - which you must never do - and they read it and decided that it portrayed the university as anti-Semitic. So they banned us.

I was asked by David Puttnam whether my father could have some influence: he was at Cambridge and could talk to these people. But they wouldn't budge. So in the end we'd practically wrapped the whole film before we could shoot this scene, at Eton. It took two days and we bused in about 400 extras, all undergraduates from Cambridge.

After the first day they went on strike for more money. They were very clever about it, and they won.

So this was the last scene we shot, and it was very emotional. After that, we'd done it, you know? We'd finished. And I knew that the film would be a success, even while we were making it, though it took a lot of people by surprise.

We were on the payroll for two months before filming started - learning to hurdle, learning to run the way Harold Abrahams did, so that when we came to do the acting we were very much a team and we felt like a team.

We had an Olympic coach who wasn't used to dealing with chaps in their late twenties; he normally trained 15- and 16-year-olds, so he didn't think we'd cut the mustard. He also thought that actors were a lot of old poofs - and told us so before we started. But he was immensely surprised because we did everything we were expected to do, we took it seriously.

I went running every morning and then did the whole routine, training at White City and about three different tracks, three or four hours a day, five days a week. At the end of the two months I started to feel nervous because it was the first big movie I'd ever made. But physically I felt very good - we were ready to shoot.

By the time we came to the last scene I was great friends with Ben Cross, who's right behind me in the picture. We were not competitive, but terribly supportive. I can't really describe it, it was a strange relationship - the training, the running, made acting much easier, I suppose because there was a sense of going through things, doing things that absolutely exhaust you. Also by then Hugh Hudson, the director, had become a great friend and although I don't see Ben so much now because he lives in America, I still see Hugh every week.

I think the film bump-started all of us into being offered other work - and it made us all some money, enough to put a deposit on a house.

And we all kept our fitness routine. Running became like a drug to me after that - I hate not to do it now and I feel much better for it, much fitter. I run three or four times a week, seven miles.

(Photograph omitted)