Caine’s many masks
Michael Caine has always had manageable ambitions, says Joanne Kaufman in The Wall Street Journal. “I never became a failed movie star,” the British actor says. “A lot of people who were movie stars, if you sent their agent a smaller part, the attitude would be, ‘Oh, don’t even give him that to read—he’s a star. Loads of these aging actors never worked again because they wouldn’t do a small part.” Rather than fall into that trap, Caine adjusted his career accordingly. “I have become a sort of leading character actor. The difference between that and a movie star is a movie star gets a script and he’s reading it”—here, Caine pretends to riffle through a screenplay—“and he’s saying, ‘Oh, Michael Caine would never talk like that, Michael Caine would never wear that, Michael Caine would never do that.’ . . . A character actor looks at the script and thinks, Hmm, I’ll put on weight for the part. I’ll shave my head and be a bit bald. He changes himself to fit the role, which is what I do.” Caine’s adaptability means he’ll never be out of work, but there’s a downside to being so durable. “You know what happens at a retrospective? They run all your movies in about half an hour and you watch yourself grow old. It’s terrible. I come bouncing on in Zulu, very slim and very young. And gradually I end up . . . crumbling!”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
