The real-life movie inspiration Michael Caine was forbidden from meeting: “The police wouldn’t let me”
The majority of actors will play a real person at one stage or another during their careers, but on one of the many occasions Michael Caine dipped his toes into biographical waters, he was banned from heading straight to the source.
Stars who embody genuine people have plenty of ways to prepare for their performance and get into character, whether it’s combing through footage and articles to gather the mannerisms and characteristics or talking to those who knew them best to gain a deeper insight or understanding.
One of the easiest ways to go about it is to sit down face-to-face and hear it straight from the horse’s mouth, something Caine was hoping to utilise to his advantage. Unfortunately, the authorities had other ideas, denying the two-time Academy Award winner the opportunity to pick the brain of the subject.
No stranger to incorporating real-world figures into his filmography, Caine has plenty of experience transplanting actual events onto the screen. When he was hired to play an ageing thief and criminal, it was right there for the taking, only for his requests to be shut down and outright denied.
James Marsh’s 2018 heist thriller King of Thieves regaled audiences with the story of the infamous Hatton Garden burglary, where a team of crooks lifted an estimated £14million in valuables from a safety deposit box. Carried out by six elderly gentlemen, they were all arrested and received prison sentences after pleading guilty.
The ringleader was Brian Reader, who was 76 years old at the time of the robbery. A known figure in the London underworld who’d spent decades with his fingers in any number of illicit pies, as the mastermind behind the operation, he was slapped with a sentence of six months and three years behind bars.
Whether or not it would have been beneficial for Caine and Reader to have a chinwag ahead of production remains up for debate, not that the actor ever got the chance to find out. “I tried to meet my character,” the legend admitted to The Independent. “But the police wouldn’t let me.”
King of Thieves itself was nothing to write home about, even if there was plenty of novelty value to be found in seeing Caine, Jim Broadbent, Michael Gambon, Ray Winstone, and other stalwarts of British cinema gathering together for a light and breezy crime caper that pit a sextet of elder statesmen against the system in a battle they initially won before losing the war.
Caine was as reliable as always, though, even if he wasn’t granted the chance to immerse himself that little bit deeper into his performance when it was decreed by those above his station that Reader wouldn’t be taking visits from celebrities, movie stars, and knights of the realm.
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