Michael Caine’s most embarrassing audition: “Automatically disqualified”
The most embarrassing audition for Michael Caine occurred so early in his career that he was still known by the stage name ‘Michael White’. The man born Maurice Micklewhite was an inexperienced 19-year-old when he managed to land an audition for The Red Beret, a big Hollywood film shooting in England in 1952, but it turned out to be so dismissive and perfunctory that it’s incredible he wasn’t put off the idea of pursuing acting altogether.
Put yourself in the shoes of a young Caine, whose CV consisted of one walk-on role as a teaboy in the 1950 film Morning Departure, when he embarked upon this audition. He arrived for the casting session and sat among a large group of fellow young hopefuls. As the hours passed, and nerves continued to build, the group were told that the casting director was late, but they’d be seen in alphabetical order when he arrived.
“Being called Caine, I was asked in first,” the iconic Italian Job star revealed in his memoir What It’s All About, before adding a piece of classic Caine wisdom: “By the way, if you’re going to be an actor, choose a surname starting with a letter as near to the front of the alphabet as possible. That way, if you are ever in an all-star cast, with billing in alphabetical order, your name will be at the top of the list.” Genius.
After what seemed like an eternity, Caine was excited to finally impress the casting director, so he opened the office door and strode into the room. Before a word could escape his lips, though, the director bellowed, “Next!” and a bemused Caine was bundled out of the room by an assistant. He didn’t understand what he had done wrong, and poured his sorrows out to the secretary. However, when she revealed why he wasn’t even permitted to say a single line of his audition, it all made perfect, ridiculous, soul-crushing sense.
To Caine’s astonishment, the secretary explained there was a mark on the doorframe inside the casting director’s office. This mark denoted the height of The Red Beret’s star Alan Ladd: a fairly diminutive 5-feet-6-inches. The director had been told that any auditionee who stood taller than that would be “automatically disqualified”, without even getting to read for the part.
“Anyone who was over the mark was out,” Caine ruefully recalled. “It was my shortest audition. You had to be shorter than Alan Ladd.”
Ladd, the star of countless popular noirs and western classics like Shane, spent his entire career employing Hollywood smoke and mirrors to disguise his actual height. The most famous example was in Boy on a Dolphin, in which a trench was dug in the sand for a beach scene requiring him to walk side by side with his statuesque love interest, played by Sophia Loren.
“No wonder the guy was a drunk,” the Get Carter legend told Roger Ebert in 1998, clearly still harbouring a bit of a grudge, even after nearly 50 years. “I mean, the humiliation of all that. He was about 4-feet-11 or something”.
Caine, whose 6-feet-2-inch frame later helped him become one of the most enduring leading men of his era, concluded with one final poke at the vertically-challenged Ladd: “You wonder how a guy like that becomes a star, you know, because he wasn’t a stage actor with a great reputation”.
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