Michael Caine’s desperate efforts to meet Marilyn Monroe: “I kept going over to their set”
It’s very difficult to imagine someone of Michael Caine’s stature being starstruck, but when you add Marilyn Monroe to that equation, everything becomes instantly clear.
Even in her brief cameo in John Huston’s gritty 1950 noir The Asphalt Jungle, one of her first on-screen performances, it was evident to everyone in the audience that Monroe was going to be a capital-S Star. And it wasn’t just the film world that sat up and took notice, the American actor went on to become a central part of the zeitgeist.
Of course, a major drawback always linked to Monroe’s rise to stardom was the reductive label of a “sex symbol” that followed her around, but she was much more than that. Her image dictated the way in which the rest of the world viewed American culture, and it remains that way even today. It’s because of Monroe’s larger-than-life mythology that so much is often said about her star power, but there was always raw talent fuelling her takeover of Hollywood.
Whether it be her iconic work in the era-defining Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or her breathtaking performance in Billy Wilder’s timeless caper Some Like It Hot, Monroe’s body of work is now studied by scholars interested in the evolution of American popular culture and mainstream Hollywood productions. It was all of this combined that intrigued a young Michael Caine to try his best to meet Monroe, a wish that almost everyone his age had but lacked the same access.
In his autobiography Blowing the Bloody Doors Off, Caine shared a cracking little story about the fraught production of Laurence Olivier’s 1957 film The Prince and the Showgirl, where he also appeared alongside Monroe. According to multiple reports, including Caine’s, Olivier and Monroe had heated arguments and falling-outs, escalating to an infamous incident where Olivier asked her to “try and be sexy”.
Writing about a minor role he was playing that was being shot in the next set over from the Monroe-Olivier joint that failed to particularly impress the critics or the box office, Caine said: “I never met Marilyn despite my best efforts. I must have had a bit part in a movie at Pinewood Studios when Laurence Olivier was directing Marilyn in The Prince and the Showgirl on the next set, each of them completely infuriating the other.”
Seeing that it might be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, Caine decided to try his luck by attempting to repeatedly sneak onto the set of The Prince and the Showgirl: “I kept going over to their set, but Marilyn was always with her coach, Paula Strasberg, and eventually, the third assistant director, Colin Clark, threw me off the set. When I saw Colin portrayed by Eddie Redmayne in the 2011 film My Week with Marilyn, I understood a little better why.”
Maybe Caine would have had the opportunity to eventually meet Monroe, seeing as he made his breakthrough in the ’60s with projects like Zulu and The Italian Job, but the American star tragically passed away in 1962, leaving a permanent void in Hollywood.
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