Michael Caine explains the difference between an actor and a movie star: “It’s all very different”
It sounds oxymoronic, but just as the biggest movie stars aren’t necessarily the best actors, the best actors don’t necessarily get to be the biggest movie stars. It’s hardly impossible to do both, though, as Michael Caine spent decades showcasing to legendary effect.
He began his film career in the late 1950s, but it would be almost ten years before he found stardom. The turning point was historical epic Zulu, which was swiftly followed by spy thriller The Ipcress File, his first Academy-Award nominated performance in Alfie, crime caper Gambit, and heist classic The Italian Job.
By the turn of the 1970s, Caine was a certified movie star, not that he ever got swept up in the trappings of fame. He still sought out the strongest material to test himself as a performer, earning two more Oscar nods along the way when Sleuth and Educating Rita saw him shortlisted for ‘Best Actor’ before he was struck with a jarring realisation during a period of downturn.
Caine’s standing had gradually diminished throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s before a well-timed intervention from unlikely fairy godmother Jack Nicholson saw the rejuvenated star gain a second wind that would carry him right the way through to his retirement in 2023 at the age of 90.
As he explained to NPR, there’s a distinct difference between being an actor and a movie star, and he was completely unprepared when he aged out of being regarded as the former. “If you’re a movie star, you get the girl, you lose the girl, and then you get her back,” he said. “But if you’re a character like me, you lose the girl, then you get another one, then you get another one, then you lose them all, then you lose your life. It’s all very different. And it’s fascinating for me.”
On the moment when it dawned on him that casting agents and producers no longer regarded him as a star in the conventional sense, Caine revealed a producer sent him a script he wasn’t interested in: “I sent it back and said, ‘The part’s too small. I don’t want to play it.'” It was a story about two lovers and a disapproving father, and he’d completely misread the room.
“And he sent it back and said, ‘I didn’t want you to play the lover; I wanted you to play the father,'” Caine admitted. “And I thought, ‘Oh my god’. I rushed in the bathroom, had a look in the mirror, and there wasn’t the lover looking at me: There was the father.”
Fortunately, Caine’s late-career surge as one of the industry’s most in-demand and reliable veterans lasted decades and kept him gainfully employed, even if the end of his movie star days had passed him by as he remained completely unaware of it.
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