The actor Michael Caine called a revelation: “Absolutely natural”
With a career spanning multiple generations, countless classics, and more than a few cult favourites, it is fair to say that cockney cultural hero Michael Caine has seen it all over the course of his expansive and illustrious career. Nevertheless, the actor never became jaded by the acting talents of his various co-stars.
Caine was not a natural candidate for the silver screen, at least not by the standards of the film industry back in the 1950s. At that time, there was little room for a working-class actor amid the mountains of classically trained, frightfully posh Shakespeare disciples and theatre school graduates.
The fact that Caine was able to break through into the industry at all is a testament to both his incredible skills and sheer determination, along with the cultural shift that occurred during his younger years.
During the revolutionary age of the 1960s, spurred on by the rapidly changing music world along with the blossoming kitchen sink genre, working-class voices in film became far more prevalent, and Caine got his first taste of stardom.
As his career progressed, he had the chance to work alongside a vast range of different actors, from his early contemporaries back in 1960s London to established heroes of the stage and screen – Laurence Olivier, Sean Connery, and Noël Coward forming only a handful of the highlights. One actor who particularly blew Caine away, however, was John Gielgud.
Although the veteran actor probably needed no introduction to Caine when the pair came to work together on the set of 1986’s spy thriller The Whistle Blower, his credentials were utterly staggering. With a career stretching back to the 1920s and involving virtually every iconic theatre stage in the known world, Gielgud was firmly a part of the old school of British acting, having spent most of his life reciting Shakespeare.
There are, however, a multitude of differences between film actors and stage actors, and Gielgud’s on-screen filmography was dwarfed by his co-stars in that 1986 film. Nevertheless, as Caine recalled in a 2021 interview, “John Gielgud was a revelation.”
Explaining, “This great Shakespearean turned out to be a brilliant film actor, absolutely natural. He should have been a camp old theatrical thing, but he wasn’t at all.”
Then again, it is worth remembering that, by the time The Whistle Blower came to be, Gielgud had already earned himself an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in Arthur, so perhaps Caine’s initial shock that this Shakespearean obsessive, of acting’s old-school, could translate his skills onto the silver screen was somewhat misplaced.
Regardless, though, Michael Caine struck upon a lifetime’s worth of appreciation for Gielgud over the course of that particular production, and although The Whistle Blower is not often recalled among the actor’s greatest works, its extensive and legendary cast succeeded in uniting the old and new schools of British acting in a way which few other productions ever had done before.
Never Miss A Tale
The Far Out Michael Caine Newsletter
All the latest stories about Michael Caine from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.