The “run of disasters” that almost ruined Michael Caine: “My celluloid life was in the doldrums”
Every movie career, especially one that rumbles on for seven decades, will experience a sticky patch or two. Michael Caine knows that better than most, having survived several sketchy periods that threatened to consign him to the irrelevancy bin permanently, but he always found a way back to the top.
That’s impressive in itself, considering so many actors have let a string of poor decisions or terrible movies derail their professional life and leave them well past the point of no return. They say that it only takes one bad film to ruin a career, a sentiment Caine made an utter mockery of.
By his admission, he’s made some wretched pictures. Obviously, he got away with it because he’s a two-time Academy Award-winning legend and one of the United Kingdom’s greatest-ever acting exports, but Caine would be the first to agree that he was leading a charmed life for a while.
After the highs of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which saw him appear in hits, classics, and award-winning favourites like Alfie, Gambit, The Italian Job, Get Carter, Sleuth, and The Man Who Would Be King, Caine’s permanent relocation to Hollywood coincided with a drastic downturn in fortunes.
He was well within his rights to take the odd paycheque gig, but the short-term financial gains left him in a precarious long-term position. “My celluloid life was in the doldrums,” he acknowledged in his autobiography, The Elephant to Hollywood. Even more concerningly, the most egregious offenders had been released within two years.
The Swarm lived up to its label as a disaster movie for the wrong reasons, Ashanti was so terrible that Caine urged people not to see it, and Beyond the Poseidon Adventure was an embarrassment to its illustrious predecessor. Ironically, knowing what was to come, 1980’s The Island was a particularly sore point.
“As it was written and produced by the team who made Jaws, it ought to have been good,” he recalled. “But very definitely wasn’t.” Still, being burned by an adaptation of a Peter Benchley novel did nothing to deter him from starring in the diabolical Jaws: The Revenge a few years later, which cost him the chance to collect his first Oscar in person. On the plus side, he was paid handsomely for his efforts.
“Even the good reviews I had picked up for California Suite with Maggie Smith couldn’t disguise the fact that I badly needed a success,” Caine lamented. As was often the case in his career, though, a quickfire string of successes swiftly alleviated the threat of permanent exile from Hollywood.
Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill and Lewis Gilbert’s Educating Rita helped get Caine’s ’80s off to a much stronger start, and by the time the decade had drawn to a close, he was a resurgent Oscar winner. Unfortunately, he experienced much the same thing in the ’90s when he was ready to retire after another set of derided outings, but he recovered from that setback, too.
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