The director Michael Caine called his good luck charm
When it came time for director Lewis Gilbert to cast Alfie, the swinging 1960s was initially supposed to play a lower-level Cockney soldier, but when he was asked if he could affect a convincing aristocratic accent, he reportedly scoffed, “I’d been in rep for nine years, and I can do any bloody accent!”
The role in Zulu wasn’t quite enough to make Caine a star in America, though. When Gilbert suggested him for Alfie, it’s believed Paramount Pictures execs exclaimed, “Michael who?” According to Caine, the part was then “offered to every actor in England.” In 1982, he admitted to The New York Times, “I knew about it because I wasn’t famous, so nobody tried not to hurt my feelings.”
Of course, Gilbert wound up selling Caine to the studio, and the young star was able to use his natural accent in Alfie. To play a character who regularly had women falling at his feet, Caine joked to Venice Magazine, “The greatest part about Alfie, of course, was the research,” and confirmed that he did “a lot of fieldwork.”
In the end, Alfie was a megahit at the box office, and it launched Caine to superstardom. It was also nominated for five Academy Awards, including ‘Best Picture’ for Gilbert and ‘Best Actor’ for Caine, vindicating Gilbert’s choice to push for the unproven actor to be his leading man.
Fast-forward to 1983, and Caine re-teamed with Gilbert for Educating Rita, a comedy-drama that landed both him and leading lady Julie Walters Academy Award nominations. In the film, Caine played an over-the-hill Open University professor, which was a far cry from the effortlessly cool, man-about-town characters he’d become known for. In 2002, he told Venice Magazine, “It was a big character change for me because up until that point, I’d been playing ‘Michael Caine-ish’ in everything.”
Playing so far against type – and in opposition to his own personality – was extremely creatively fulfilling for Caine. He gushed: “The most extraordinary thing about that role for me was the fact that it was a character in which I could find nothing of myself. He was the farthest away from myself I’d even been with a character, which is the ideal place for an actor to be.”
He loved working with Walters on the film, who had previously starred in the stage version of Rita. He revealed, “She’d never done a movie before. She’d done the play, so she was very into the character, but I thought she played down, into the style of film acting, just beautifully. A lot of theatre actors would have gone over the top with it.”
Perhaps best of all, though, was that Rita allowed Caine to work with Gilbert again – the director who had such a large hand in making him a star in the first place. He smiled, “Lewis was something of a good luck charm for me – both times I worked with him, I got nominated!”
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