The experience Michael Caine described as “terrible”
A genuine beacon of light in British cinema for six decades, Michael Caine has delivered magnetic performance after magnetic performance, whether in his early British roles like Zulu, The Ipcress File and The Italian Job or his later efforts in The Dark Knight, The Cider House Rules and Hannah and Her Sisters, the latter two of which saw him win Academy Awards.
With a remarkable amount of films to his name, Caine has forever written himself into the very history of cinema’s rich fabric, and his legacy will extend throughout the ages. When it comes to the silver screen, there are few actors with the status of Michael Caine, and he’s a true icon in every sense of the word. But where Caine is a champion of the screen, it’s fair to say he’s never quite conquered the theatre, and for good reason.
When Caine was interviewed by Michael Parkinson, he was asked whether or not he would consider returning to the stage, but Caine admitted that he did not enjoy his early experience in the theatre. “No,” he responded. “Never. I had a terrible time on stage. It was a terrible thing for me, very rough.”
Adding: “I was a very shy person, and to go on stage for me was torture anyway. I always regarded the stage as a woman who always treated me badly no matter how well I treated her. Movies is a woman who always treats me superbly no matter how badly I treat her, so she’s the one I love.”
As far as Caine’s limited career on stage goes, early into his career, he’d been cast in a 1953 production of Wuthering Heights before moving to the Lowestoft Repertory Company, where he appeared in nine plays at the Arcadia Theatre. He then became Peter O’Toole’s understudy for The Long and the Short and the Tall in 1959 before making his first film appearance on A Hill in Korea. Finally, Caine starred in Next Time I’ll Sing To You in 1963, just prior to his breakthrough performance in Zulu.
While Caine certainly seems to have not enjoyed his time on stage, he had also explained that he developed his stoic philosophy for life of “use the difficulty” when he’d been rehearsing a play as a young actor. “I had to come in the scene; it was a stage play; I’m behind the flats waiting to open the door,” Caine explained to Parkinson. “There was an improvised scene between a husband and a wife going on inside. And they got carried away.”
The actor continued: “They started throwing things, and he threw a chair, and it lodged in the doorway. And I went to open the door, and I got my head around, and I went, ‘I’m sorry, sir, I can’t get in’. He said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘There’s a chair there’. He said to me, ‘Use the difficulty. If it’s a comedy, fall over it. If it’s a drama, pick it up and smash it. Use the difficulty.’ Now, I took that into my own life. There’s never anything so bad that you cannot use that difficulty.”
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