The actor Michael Caine says saved his life: “We’d never met”
With well over 100 movies to his name, Michael Caine is one of the most recognisable and revered actors of all time. More than 70 years since he first stepped foot on a film set, he took his final bow last year with The Great Escaper, providing us with one last dose of his charming Cockney accent and versatile acting skills.
Caine had been honing his craft since his first appearance on-screen in 1950’s Morning Departure. In the years that followed his debut, he would win over audiences and acclaim with a series of huge roles, including numerous outings as ’60s spy Harry Palmer and an Academy Award-nominated performance in Alfie. Rounding out the decade with an iconic role in con movie classic The Italian Job, the decade saw Caine beginning to forge his long-standing legacy.
When he wasn’t attending award shows or adding to his mammoth filmography, it seemed that Caine spent most of his time smoking. During the 1960s, the Cockney actor was drinking heavily and going through several packets of cigarettes each day. Assuming there were around 20 in each pack, that’s a huge number of cigs to run through every 24 hours. But, come the early 1970s, Caine had quit.
His decision to do so came, quite literally, at the hands of fellow legendary actor Tony Curtis. “I smoked a lot,” he recalled, “but Tony Curtis saved my life.” As Caine recalled during a conversation with The Guardian, the Some Like It Hot star approached him at a party while he was “chain-smoking by the fireplace.”
He grabbed the packet of cigarettes that Caine was storing safely in his pocket and chucked them straight into the flames. “We’d never met,” Caine acknowledged, “but he said: ‘I’ve been watching you, Michael. You’re going to die if you keep doing that, you idiot.’ So I quit.”
The actor left his habit largely in the 1960s, though he would later pick up a new one. Replacing cigarettes with cigars, he eventually gave the latter up, too, thanks to a snooker star. While watching Alex Higgins play, Caine witnessed the damage that cigars had done to the sports icon and resolved to quit that habit, too.
“I knew Alex quite well,” he remembered, “and one night I was smoking a cigar while watching TV. Alex came on the screen with a voice-box and I would see he was dying. I stubbed the cigar out in the ashtray and never smoked again.”
After Curtis saved his life by encouraging him to quit in the early 1970s, Caine would go on to hone one of the lengthiest careers in the business. After securing his start in the 1960s, he went from strength to strength in the decades that followed, adding countless classics to his catalogue and securing another Oscar nomination for Educating Rita in 1983.
His acting career continued well into the 2000s, when he began his friendship and working relationship with Christopher Nolan, becoming his lucky charm. Between Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men and his performance as Alfred in the beloved Batman trilogy, Caine continued to create some of his best work, finding new collaborators and endearing himself to new audiences.
Without Curtis’ words of disapproval by the fireplace, which helped him find the resolve to stop smoking multiple packs a day, he might never have had the opportunity to live his life and career to the fullest, and to eventually choose retirement last year.