An icon with ulterior motives: The only reason Michael Caine became an actor
There are plenty of reasons why anybody would choose to become an actor, whether it’s the desire for fame and fortune or the self-belief that chasing the performing arts will provide a sustainable and lifelong profession. However, the origins of Michael Caine becoming an icon of the silver screen were a lot more straightforward.
It did take him a while to get there, though, even if the young Maurice Micklewhite was first bitten by the acting bug when he was a child. Making his stage debut at the tender age of ten in his school’s production of Cinderella, he was inspired by audience interaction to consider it as a career path, even if the laughter from the crowd came from his fly being undone.
Once Caine had completed his national service – during which time he saw active combat in the Korean War – he was able to follow up on his ambitions. Cutting his teeth treading the boards, it wasn’t easy working his way up the ladder, with the star having previously described his first decade as a working professional as “more like purgatory than paradise.”
It wasn’t until 1964’s Zulu that he landed his breakthrough in cinema, which quickly opened the doors to Caine making a name for himself as one of the finest British talents of his generation. His next feature-length credit was the classic spy thriller The Ipcress File, and that was immediately followed by Alfie, which netted him the first Academy Award nomination of his career in the ‘Best Actor’ category.
Lewis Gilbert’s dramedy follows Caine’s title character as he shirks any sense of responsibility in favour of womanising promiscuity. Self-centred, arrogant, and with eyes only for his own self-gratification, his hedonistic lifestyle doesn’t quite compensate for the aching loneliness he feels from the lack of any genuine human connections.
Even though it was a tour-de-force performance, Caine admitted to The Hollywood Reporter that he didn’t have to look too far for inspiration to get into character. “I was a cockney working-class guy, which I am, and I do go out with ladies sometimes,” he confessed. “I based this on my best friend. My best friend was Alfie, and he was a terror with women.”
Long before that, Caine had very similar intentions, which was the reason he became convinced his future lay in acting to begin with. “I became an actor – an amateur actor – because I was in a youth club, and I noticed all the pretty girls were in a drama class,” he continued. “I was about 12, so I thought, ‘I’ll join that and I’ll get to kiss some of them’. So that’s why I became an actor.”
His intentions were far from noble, then, but it worked out very well in the end considering Caine spent 70 years as one of the United Kingdom’s leading cinematic lights before retiring with his head held high and his reputation as a legend secured.