‘The Quiet American’: Did Michael Caine really deserve an Oscar?
Michael Caine doesn’t need Oscars to prove himself as an actor. He earned his place in cinema history way back in the 1960s, and he’s done nothing but reinforce it ever since. That said, awards don’t hurt, and he has plenty of them. He earned his first Oscar nomination in 1967 for his breakout role as a working-class playboy in Lewis Gilbert’s Alfie and followed it up shortly thereafter with another for Joseph L Mankiewicz’s Sleuth in 1973.
In total, Caine has earned six Oscar nominations and won twice for ‘Best Supporting Actor’. When he won for the first time for Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, he wasn’t able to attend because he was too busy filming Jaws: The Revenge. As that stark contrast in cinematic fortunes illustrates, the actor has certainly had his fair share of terrible movies, but his reputation has remained unscathed.
Of the many nominations that Caine has earned, one holds a special place in his heart and was, he thought, his best chance at finally securing a win for ‘Best Actor’. Phillip Noyce’s 2002 film The Quiet American saw the actor play a lonely newspaper reporter in Saigon who falls in love with a young Vietnamese dancer. Caine earned rave reviews for his performance, which is subtly heartbreaking in its portrayal of loneliness and longing.
He was up against steep competition that year for the ‘Best Actor’ award. In fact, the nominees were a call sheet of acting legends. Nicolas Cage was nominated for Adaptation., Adrien Brody was nominated for The Pianist, Daniel Day-Lewis was nominated for Gangs of New York, and Jack Nicholson was nominated for About Schmidt. Still, Caine felt that he had a decent shot at winning. In a conversation with Phase9 Entertainment in 2003, he jokingly agreed when the interviewer said that he’d been robbed of the award but quickly downplayed his disappointment at losing to Brody.
“You have to think in degrees,” he said, explaining that merely receiving a nomination for ‘Best Actor’ had a big impact on his status in Hollywood. “You often hear people say, ‘Oh, he said being nominated was enough, what a load of bullshit,’” he added. “But even with two Supporting Oscars, being nominated for ‘Best Actor’ does make a difference.”
This is a strange takeaway, considering that he’d already been nominated for ‘Best Actor’ three times already. But no matter how he felt on the night of the Oscars, he and his fellow nominees clearly harboured no antagonism toward each other.
“Jack Nicholson rang and said let’s have a drink up at my place and Nick Cage, and Adrien Brody and I went up,” he remembered, explaining that Day-Lewis couldn’t make it. “We all went up to Jack’s place and had a drink and to talk about what we were going to say if we won. Anyway, we ended up getting bombed, and by the next morning, we were ringing round each other because none of us could remember what we’d decided to say.”
When Brody won, Caine insisted they were all thrilled for him. Halle Berry probably wasn’t. After she read his name from the stage, Brody leapt from his seat, strode to the microphone, and grabbed her in an awkwardly long kiss.
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