Oscars sensation: the movie Michael Caine called “the best I’ve ever done”
With a film career that began through an uncredited role as a teaboy in 1950’s Morning Departure and continued until 2023’s The Great Escaper, Michael Caine spent over 70 years navigating the often-tricky obstacle course that is an acting career, securing legendary status along the way.
He is a two-time Academy Award winner, three-time Golden Globe winner, Bafta recipient, Knight of the Realm, and Christopher Nolan’s lucky charm for almost two decades. There isn’t a lot that Caine hasn’t either seen or done during his esteemed stint as not just one of the industry’s most esteemed thespians but one of the greatest British actors in history.
There’s been plenty of ups and downs along the way, which is understandable when there’s barely an actor past, present, or future who doesn’t appear in at least a couple of abject stinkers. However, Caine’s infamous turns in Jaws: The Revenge and The Swarm both proved to be valuable experiences after he bought himself a lovely house with his earnings for the former and worked with some legends of cinema in the latter.
Every cloud has a silver lining, then, but Caine has soared high among many of them. These range from Zulu, The Ipcress File, Alfie, The Italian Job, and Get Carter to his collaborations with Nolan via an eclectic array of on-screen endeavours covering drama, thrillers, action, comedy, superheroes, fantasy, horror, and everything in between. The long-tenured star evolved from a leading man into a supporting player without losing a shred of his gravitas along the way.
Everybody has their own favourite Caine performance, but where does the man himself stand on the matter? Suitably, he plumped for The Quiet American, Phillip Noyce’s searing literary adaptation that netted him the second Oscar win of his career for ‘Best Supporting Actor’, in what was the film’s only nomination.
Caine’s grizzled journalist Thomas Fowler lives with Đỗ Thị Hải Yến’s young Vietnamese mistress, Phuong, doing his best to stay out of the bubbling tensions in the region in the early 1950s. Brendan Fraser’s Alden Pyle – a CIA operative posing as an aid worker – arrives on the scene – to throw a spanner into both the socio-political and romantic works, having made repeated advances on Phuong in his spare time not spent doing his best to destabilise the region.
It’s a complex and nuanced performance that requires Caine to stretch his range to the limit. Whether he’s passing as a kindly old journalist trying to enjoy a quiet existence, a suspicious figure growing increasingly concerned about Pyle’s activities, or a duplicitous character who manoeuvres events to his advantage, he’s always brought his best.
For Caine, though, playing somebody flecked with such obvious shades of grey was straightforward. “It’s easy for me to play morally ambiguous characters because I’m not. You always want to be what you’re not,” he explained per The Hollywood Interview. “I’m able to live and play out all these terrible things on film, while in reality, I’ve never done any of them.”
Fowler isn’t a terrible person, but he does some very questionable things throughout the course of The Quiet American, which necessitated Caine to pull one of his finest performances out of the bag. In fact, according to the two-time Oscar winner, it’s the single best piece of acting he’s ever had committed to film.
“I think it’s the best I’ve ever done as well,” he continued. However, never one to rest on his laurels, Caine maintained that despite his status as an elder statesman of cinema, there’s always room for improvement. “I can’t do any better than that at the moment, although hopefully I will next year.” On a rather bittersweet note, given his retirement 20 years later, The Quiet American marked the sixth and final time he ever found himself in the running for an Oscar, so he arguably never did any better before his retirement.
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