The three stars with “qualities essential for a great actor” Michael Caine admires most
Thanks to a stellar career of his own that spanned almost 70 years from beginning to end, Michael Caine is a performer future generations of actors will look up to, admire, and seek to emulate. It’s an endless cycle of influence and inspiration that’s been part and parcel of the performing arts since the beginning of time, and one the star himself benefitted from immensely.
As he rose through the ranks, Caine ended up encountering many of the icons he’d grown up watching, whether it was having words of wisdom dispensed to him directly by John Wayne, or getting the opportunity to work with his favourite director twice, allowing him to experience a John Huston production first-hand.
He never did get to work directly with the trio he held the utmost admiration for in a professional capacity, largely because in his own words, “The three actors I admire the most are all dead.” Anyone with even a passing familiarity of the star will be fully aware Humphrey Bogart is his most prominent influence, and not just because he derived his stage name from The Caine Mutiny.
Casablanca is also his favourite movie of all time, and it helped convince him that a career in acting was something worth striving for. As part of the persona he created around himself – and one that defined many of his greatest roles – Caine projected an assuredness, confidence, and toughness, which was nonetheless layered with vulnerability.
As a result, when he named Bogart, Spencer Tracy, and Jean Gabin as the cream of the crop to Interview, his explanation makes their influence even clearer. “They’re all very natural, sort of masculine without being overly macho,” the two-time Oscar winner said. “They each had a sense of humour and humility, both qualities essential for a great actor. I admired Marlon Brando as I grew up. I though he was one of the finest screen actors around.”
In his autobiography, Caine shared how watching 1939’s Le jour se lève for the first time opened his eyes to the possibility that his self-proclaimed lack of leading man looks wouldn’t be a hindrance, with Gabin playing the lead. “He featured everything that I thought could hold me back: fair hair, a big nose and a small mouth,” he wrote. “He was the biggest star in France, so everything was now possible.”
He wasn’t quite so effusive about Tracy, noting how he “always looked for his marks” on-screen. Caine could tell as a viewer that “in a Tracy movie, he walks in, looks straight down at his mark, finds it, looks up, and speaks. It became the Spencer Tracy style.” That doesn’t mean he didn’t maintain admiration for his work, but the difference between how he talked about Tracy compared to Bogart and Gabin indicates that maybe he was a definitive third on the ‘most admired’ list.
Michael Caine’s three favourite actors:
- Humphrey Bogart
- Spencer Tracy
- Jean Gabin