{"id":10745,"date":"2023-03-14T14:04:49","date_gmt":"2023-03-14T14:04:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=10745"},"modified":"2023-03-30T14:57:57","modified_gmt":"2023-03-30T14:57:57","slug":"why-michael-caine-faced-every-film-with-dread","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=10745","title":{"rendered":"Why Michael Caine faced every film with dread"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

By Ray Bennett<\/p>\n

LONDON \u2013 Almost forty years ago, I created a weekly movie supplement in Canadian TV Guide called Bigscreen. I wanted a big name for the first edition and Hollywood publicist Jerry Pam facilitated a Q&A with his longtime client, Michael Caine. As Caine turns 90 today, here\u2019s what he had to say when he was nominated for an Academy Award for \u2018Educating Rita\u2019 (above with Julie Walters).<\/p>\n

Q: Did you think that \u2018Educating Rita\u2019 would be as well received as it has been?<\/p>\n

Michael Caine: Yes, I did, because \u2018Rita\u2019 was a two-character play set in one room. Sometimes you see a play and you think, well, this would have to be extended to make a movie. \u2018Rita\u2019 looked like a movie that been crushed into one room. Every time anyone came in, they had to spend five minutes saying what had happened to them. In a movie, you can show it.<\/p>\n

Q: Do you feel differently about your Oscar chances this time?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Caine: Yes, I do. I was absolutely\u00a0sure with \u2018Alfie\u2019 (left) that I wouldn\u2019t get it up against Paul Schofield in \u2018A Man for All Seasons\u2019 and I was absolutely sure with \u2018Sleuth\u2019 (pictured with Laurence Olivier below) that I wouldn\u2019t get it up against Marlon Brando in \u2018The Godfather\u2019. This time, I think it\u2019s a horse race. I think, probably, Robert Duvall has the edge but it really is an open field.<\/p>\n

Q: How do you feel about the competitive aspect of the Oscars?<\/p>\n

Caine: Well, I\u2019ve been a completely non-compettive person throughout my life. I don\u2019t have any sense of competition about the Oscars. I mean, it\u2019s not the best actor or best performance, it\u2019s the preferred performance of the year. I don\u2019t think there is a winner.<\/p>\n

Q: Is \u2018Educating Rita\u2019 your best work?<\/p>\n

Caine: I think it is the best work I ever did because it\u2019s the performance of a man who is completely unlike me, with whom I have nothing in common, and yet it\u2019s obviously convinced people that I was that man. I\u2019ve always tried to hide the machinery of acting so that you only see the person rather than an actor giving a performance. That\u2019s the closest I ever came to it.<\/p>\n

Q: How have you managed to avoid being pigeon-holed in one kind of role?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Caine: I think it\u2019s because my early training was in repertory doing one play a week, which is fifty-tw0 characters a year. Quite subconsciously, I\u2019ve treated motion pictures as repertory. I never, ever, saw myself as a great massive star persona who\u2019s going to be adored for his good looks or blue eye. I always felt myself to be, rather than a star, a leading actor and if you\u2019re a leading actor you\u2019ve got to come up with something different every time.<\/p>\n

Q: What impact did moving to Hollywood have on your career?<\/p>\n

Caine: Oh, enormous, tremendous. Not only in Hollywood, or America, where I became better known obviously but from the point of view of non-American producers in England. They took much more interest in me. There was that old thing about, \u2018You\u2019re not an internarnational name.\u2019 I always remember British war films used to be full of fading American film stars wandering around with \u2018Canada\u2019 on their shoulders. I thought I\u2019d do the opposite: go to America and become an \u2018international name\u2019.<\/p>\n

Q: Do you ever think of returning to live in England? What would draw you back?<\/p>\n

Caine: I never left England until I was 46 so I was already ingrained in the English countryside. It\u2019s the actual English countryside that would draw me back. I love the weather, which might sound kind of masochistic but I like the change of seasons. Plus, of course, there are silly things that you miss. Certain types of food. Plus, the English voice, I miss. I don\u2019t suppose I ever will go back to live but that\u2019s what often makes me think of it.<\/p>\n

Q: Is it a coincidence that four of the Best Actor nominees this year are British or does Britain somehow produce superior actors?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Caine: No. I think it\u2019s just a coincidence. I don\u2019t think that Albert Finney or \u00a0Tom Conti or \u00a0Tom Courtenay or myself are any better actors than Duvall, DeNiro or Hoffman. It\u2019s just that America has the money to make gigantic pictures, special-effects picture. Britain , of necessity, being financially strapped as far as movies are concerned, has to make small pictures and small pictures must concentrate or performnce. There are great actors here, it\u2019s just that years ago if you wanted to find a film star, soomeone to put under contract, you went down to the beach at Malibu and found the biggest guy who could stand on his hands the longest and you put hiim under contract, which of course is entirely the wrong thing to do. The material is there; I just think that for years motion pictures went to the wrong source.<\/p>\n

Q: Your acting is described as effortless. Do you feel underappreciated or that you\u2019re not give credit for the hard work?<\/p>\n

Caine: I do in a way but I don\u2019t think you can grumble about it. It\u2019s rather like watching Fred Astaire dance. You think, well, I can do that but of course you can\u2019t. As opposed to watching Gene Kelly where you think, I couldn\u2019t do that and you couldn\u2019t either. It\u2019s just whether you make it look difficult or make it look easy. If you make it look difficult, I do think you get more recognition quicker. But, as proven with \u2018Educating Rita\u2019, I\u2019ve finally been recognised for the fact that I\u2019ve cut back on the histrionics and just gone for the character. What I do is not easy. I face every new movie with complete and utter dread. To make it look effortless is absulutely draining and I\u2019m always drained at the end of a movie.<\/p>\n

[Robert Duvall did win the Academy Award in 1984. Caine went on to earn three more nominations winning for best actor in a supporting role for \u2018Hannah and her Sisters\u2019 (1986) and \u2018The Cider House Rules\u2019 (1999). He returned to live in England in the late 1980s.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Ray Bennett LONDON \u2013 Almost forty years ago, I created a weekly movie supplement in Canadian TV Guide called Bigscreen. I wanted a big name for the first edition and Hollywood publicist Jerry Pam facilitated a Q&A with his … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6,1263,2257],"tags":[5333,5332,2874,296,1968,936,5334],"class_list":["post-10745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","category-interviews","category-memory-lane","category-recalling","tag-alfie","tag-educating-rita","tag-sleuth","tag-academy-awards","tag-michael-caine","tag-oscars","tag-tv-guide"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10745"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10745\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10773,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10745\/revisions\/10773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}