The movie studio that fired Michael Caine on his birthday: “You’re on your own now”
In 1964, Michael Caine was a young actor on the rise. Zulu had been released that January, and his supporting role in the picture increased his profile in the movie business hugely, although he still hadn’t quite been given the opportunity to lead a film. If Hollywood legend is to be believed, though, that would all change one night in the famed Pickwick Club in London’s Soho.
On that evening, Caine was having dinner with his buddy Terence Stamp, who had received a ‘Best Supporting Actor’ nomination the year before for 1962’s Billy Budd. Suddenly, a waiter surreptitiously palmed Caine a note, which turned out to be from Canadian movie producer Harry Saltzman, who was eating in the restaurant with his family. The note simply asked if Caine would like to join him for a coffee, and Caine eagerly agreed. You see, he knew Saltzman was one of the producers behind the James Bond series, and he wondered if he was about to be offered a part in his pal Sean Connery’s next 007 outing.
Instead, Saltzman told Caine he’d just watched him in Zulu – according to Caine’s recollection, on that very day – and loved his performance. He asked Caine if he had read Len Deighton’s Cold War spy thriller The Ipcress File, to which Caine replied that he was currently halfway through the book. In other versions of this tale, Caine actually had the book at his table, but whatever the absolute truth was, he was certainly very aware of it.
So, when Saltzman asked if he’d like to play the lead in a movie adaptation, Caine practically bit his hand off. Things got even better, though, when Saltzman offered him a seven-year contract with his company, Lowndes Productions, and set up a lunch meeting the next day.
According to Caine, his head was swimming when he walked back to his table and told Stamp that he believed he’d just become a leading man movie star. An incredulous Stamp supposedly exclaimed, “But you’ve only been gone two minutes!”
Caine was still singing this tune in 1969 when he told Films and Filming, “Looking back, people imagine that my break came with Zulu. But quite honestly, that’s just what didn’t happen; it was a year later. The Ipcress File made me a star.”
Caine’s performance as the bespectacled spy Harry Palmer was so beloved that he immediately returned for two sequels in 1966 (Funeral in Berlin) and ’67 (Billion Dollar Brain). Palmer and his world were expressly designed to be the polar opposite of a Bond movie: more realistic, with fewer globetrotting action sequences, more low-key spycraft, and a working-class agent who actually respected women instead of seeing them as sex objects.
To Caine’s chagrin, though, his tenure as Palmer didn’t last anywhere near as long as Connery’s as Bond. He was 32 when Saltzman plucked him from relative screen obscurity to play the lead, but by the time he was 35 and three Palmer movies were in the can, that bumper seven-year contract had started to become a problem.
“When my birthday came around again,” Caine wrote in his memoir What’s It All About, “I waited for Harry Saltzman to give me my usual present. Most people who knew him would say that in business, Harry was mean, tough and ruthless, but I saw a vastly different side to him.”
Caine claimed Saltzman was a true gentleman about the contract, accepting that his profile in the industry quickly outgrew the meagre money he was paid for The Ipcress File. Instead of holding Caine to this outdated agreement and lowballing him on the sequels, which he had every right to do, he renegotiated the actor’s deal every year on his birthday, getting him to sign a new contract each time “at the proper going rate.”
So, on his 35th birthday, Caine waited for his new, more lucrative contract to arrive, as it had done in the previous two years. To his shock, though, when he opened Saltzman’s envelope, “It contained the contract itself, torn into small pieces and with a note that just said, ‘You’re on your own now. Happy Birthday.'”
Saltzman had even signed the missive, so Caine knew it wasn’t a gag. Unsurprisingly, he never worked with the producer again.
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