How two icons turned Michael Caine’s “dreadful experience” into one of his most delightful
Miserable experiences are unavoidable for any actor with a lengthy career, but Michael Caine was at least fortunate to avoid one of them, thanks entirely to the company he kept.
The two-time Academy Award-winning legend is very familiar with having a terrible time at work, whether bees are shitting on him in his first indicator that The Swarm was going to be a disaster or plunging himself into freezing waters for a Poseidon Adventure sequel that nobody cared about.
Caine turned Harry Palmer into an icon when The Ipcress File was released in 1965, but there he was three decades later, freezing his bollocks off in Russia, shooting a pair of back-to-back sequels that made him realise just how far his star had fallen since he first emerged as one of British cinema’s finest experts.
Thanks to the sheer volume of miserly productions he’d worked on, Caine developed his own method of deciding on which roles to play. If his terms and conditions weren’t met, then he’d flat-out refuse to take part, but that’s only the sort of non-negotiable clause a performer can dictate when they’re firmly established as a star.
Fortunately, that had applied to Caine since the 1960s, but he wasn’t beyond bending his rules on the odd occasion. Based entirely on his own assessment, he wasn’t entirely enthused about venturing to France and Morocco to shoot on location for an extended period of time, and he probably wouldn’t have done it at all were it not for the esteemed company who came along for the ride.
Caine’s favourite director had always been John Huston, so when the filmmaker reached out with an offer to star in The Man Who Would Be King, he wasn’t going to hesitate. It was a two-hander, though, which provided another fortuitous stroke of luck when one of his oldest and closest friends was drafted in to round out the double-act.
Sean Connery and Caine had been buddies for 20 years at that point, but they still had to grit their teeth for a shoot that took place under great heat, wretched humidity, and plenty of dirt and mud. The latter confessed that The Man Who Would Be King “could’ve been a dreadful experience if it had been done with two other men,” but salvation came in the form of his co-star and director.
“It was one of the most delightful films I’ve ever made in some of the most uncomfortable conditions,” he informed Alex Simon, with the powerhouse pairing of Connery and Huston making Caine’s misery worthwhile. It’s also one of the best movies of his career, which definitely helps, although having his all-time favourite auteur and one of his best mates on board would have made it memorable either way.
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