The movie that pulled Michael Caine back from the brink: “It gave ma another 20 years of career”
Every actor with designs on longevity is going to reach a crossroads at least once during their career, and Michael Caine was in severe danger of letting his misery and self-pity get the better of him when he felt like he was being forced into the last chance saloon against his will.
It’s an unstable profession at the best of times, and having first broken through in the 1960s to become an international superstar, Caine knew that he’d have to work twice as hard as ever to stay there. Unfortunately, things didn’t quite turn out that way after his initial move to Hollywood coincided with some of the worst movies he’d ever make.
The Swarm, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, and Jaws: The Revenge may have all been mindless cack, but things were still going swimmingly when Caine’s performance in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters gave him his first Academy Award win. However, another downward slide had begun by the middle of the next decade, and the star was beginning to believe this one might be permanent.
It was flop after flop after flop for Caine in the early 1990s, with the underrated drama A Shock to the System, fantasy comedy Mr Destiny, conman caper Bullseye!, the farcical Noises Off, crime thriller Blue Ice, and Steven Seagal’s risible directorial debut On Deadly Ground all crashing and burning, compounded by his abject experience returning to the role of Harry Palmer for the first time in three decades.
On the plus side, Caine’s side gig as a restauranter was thriving, and he was ready to give it all up until Jack Nicholson came calling with what turned out to be the offer of a second lifetime. With Bob Rafelson at the helm, the despondent icon agreed to star in Blood and Wine, rejuvenating his passion for acting and setting the stage for three decades of silver screen ubiquity.
“Although the movie wasn’t a big box office hit or anything, it was with me,” Caine told NPR. “The actual act of working with Jack, who’s such a wonderful actor and man, restored my faith in the business. It gave me another 20 years of career. Not as a character actor, but as a leading actor.”
Instead of working the room at his eateries as he’d been doing between projects, Caine decided that he wanted to become booked and busy for the first time in a long time. Sometimes, all it takes is one movie to shake a performer out of a stupor, and it always helps to have a friend like Nicholson refusing to take no for an answer when they come knocking at the door with a juicy part.
Caine carried on acting until announcing his retirement at the age of 90 in 2023, but he could have drawn a line under his filmography decades sooner if the right film at the right time hadn’t landed in his lap.
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