The child actor Michael Caine thought would become a star: “He knows stuff”
The impact that Michael Caine has made on the cinematic medium is simply astonishing. From his early days in British classics like Zulu, The Ipcress File and The Italian Job up to his later Academy Award-winning performances in Hannah and Her Sister and The Cider House Rules, Caine has always proven his quality.
A distinctive Cockney voice and a sharply dressed public persona afforded Caine the appeal of a star, and he has worked with some of the biggest names in the industry. Championed on several occasions by Christopher Nolan, Caine is simply one of the most prominent British acting heroes of all time.
While Caine is indeed a true British cinema icon, he’s been accepted on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and, as such, he has occasionally had to sharpen up his American accents. In fact, when appearing in Tim McCanlie’s comedy-drama Secondhand Lions, Caine had to try and master the Texan accent with the help of a dialect coach.
The film tells of a shy young boy, played by Haley Joel Osment, who is sent to live with his crazy uncles on a farm in Texas. After working with the dialect coach for three months, Caine finally began to understand how to speak like a true Texan, and he was ready to perform with Osment and Robert Duvall.
Caine was blown away by Osment, and in an interview with the BBC, he spoke of his overall impression of the actor. “The thing about Haley is that he isn’t a child actor. He’s an actor who is a child,” Caine said at the time. “It’s just like acting with another actor. You don’t have to help him or do things for him.”
Osment had an early role as a child actor in 1994’s Forrest Gump before making his breakthrough with The Sixth Sense and going on to star in A.I. Artificial Intelligence. When performing in Secondhand Lions, Caine and Duvall showed Osment no “mercy” and “just treated him like an actor.”
Caine had believed that Osment would go on from being a child actor to a full adult actor, owing to the fact that he has such a “great family”. While Osment had indeed continued to act, it’s fair to say that he’s never quite matched his early success as a child actor during his adult life, and most of his most notable performances occurred in his early life.
Still, Caine wanted to profess that talking with Osment back at the beginning of the 2000s, when he was still a child, was like “talking to someone who’s 45.” He said, “He knows stuff. I know a lot of stuff. I’m well known for knowing stuff, and he knows nearly as much stuff as I do – and I’m 70, and he’s 14!”
According to Caine, Osment had been telling him facts about the laws of Vietnam that he’d learned from watching The History Channel and the Discovery Channel, which led to Caine feeling like he needed to “catch up”. Evidently, Osment left a deep impression on Caine, even if his “bet” of him becoming a longstanding movie star didn’t quite come to fruition.
Still, Osment is still around in the film industry and has recently provided voice acting work for the Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie. Even if he hasn’t quite managed the success that Caine once tipped him for, Osment’s early career made an undoubted impact on the course of American cinema.
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