Michael Caine names the actor who does the best Michael Caine impression
Many of cinema’s finest actors have the innate ability to master all kinds of accents, but Michael Caine didn’t need to change a thing in order to become one of the industry’s most widely-impersonated talents.
He has adopted a different brogue on occasion, but there’s something jarring about hearing Hollywood’s most successful cockney trying to pass himself off as an American. Caine has a voice like nobody else, which has been both a huge benefit to his career and iconography, while also making him an easy target.
Alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger, Marlon Brando, Christopher Walken, Al Pacino, Sean Connery, and Clint Eastwood, no impressionist or imitator feels complete unless they’ve tried to replicate Caine’s dulcet tones at least once. He’s been lampooned and parodied a thousand times over, but one A-lister does it best in the opinion of the man himself.
Not to shatter the illusion, but other than when he’s playing it for laughs, Caine has never actually said “not a lot of people know that” on-screen. He knows exactly who was responsible for popularising the apocryphal phrase, though, with Peter Sellers the culprit.
“It was Peter,” he admitted to Shortlist before diving into the origin story of the most famous quote he never said. “I’ll tell you where he started it, on his telephone. When we got the first answer machines, his was my voice and it just said, ‘This is Michael Caine speaking. Peter Sellers is not in at the moment. Not many people know that.'”
Thankfully, Caine has never been too precious about his reputation and took it in stride, making a point of saluting the best impression of his own voice he’s ever heard. “Do you know the best one I ever saw? Tony Hopkins is the greatest impressionist in the world. He is great. But the surprising one for me was Tom Hanks on Saturday Night Live,” he said. “Yeah. Google it. It’s great.”
Not that two-time Academy Award winner Hanks was doing it for the sole purpose of mocking his fellow double Oscar champion, with the impression coming from a place of love. He told Caine at a party that seeing Zulu at a drive in theatre was what helped him decide he wanted to pursue acting, and according to his inspiration, “That’s why he ‘does’ me.”
From Sellers to Hanks via Hopkins, legends of the game have all gotten in on the act at one time or another, with Caine wearing it as a badge of honour. At this stage in his life, he’s probably heard far too many impersonations to keep track of, so it means something coming from the subject to hear him celebrate Hanks as doing the best Michael Caine of them all.
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