“One of my favourite books”: the novel Michael Caine used to name his daughter
Any actor with mainstream visibility is going to brush up against a literary adaptation at least once during their career, but Michael Caine hasn’t been afforded the opportunity to star in the big screen version of a personal favourite because nobody’s gotten around to mounting a new version for over 70 years.
The legend has found great success in that arena in the past, having won his second Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ in Lasse Hallström’s film based on John Irving’s The Cider House Rules, while he landed on the ‘Best Actor’ shortlist when he headed up the cast of Philip Noyce’s The Quiet American, hailing from Graham Greene’s novel of the same name.
Having initially been brought to the silver screen back in 1949 with Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal in the lead roles, any subsequent attempts to tackle Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead haven’t managed to claw their way out of development hell, despite several high-profile filmmakers having been circling the material at one time or another.
Michael Cimino wrote a script and planned for Clint Eastwood to star. Oliver Stone was circling it at one stage, with Brad Pitt being eyed for the lead role. Zack Snyder has also tried several times to make it happen, most recently revealing that Netflix turned down his pitch to use The Fountainhead as the basis for a sprawling TV series.
Caine may not have agreed with the author’s politics, but the philosophical battle at the heart of architect Howard Roark’s journey as he finds himself torn between individualism and collectivism made such a mark that the actor opted to make The Fountainhead a permanent part of the family.
Calling it “one of my favourite books” in an interview with Moving Picture Show, Caine revealed his appreciation goes much deeper than that. “In fact, my eldest daughter is named Dominique, after Dominique Francon.” Still, he was aware that Rand “was pretty far to the right and all that,” which wasn’t a belief system that mirrored his own.
“What I always liked about Howard Roark as a young actor – which is more of a left-wing idea, to me – was that, when they put the Doric pillars on the building, he went and blew the bloody thing up,” Caine continued. “He said, ‘That’s not my design’. That’s how I started acting: It’s going to be my way, or not at all.”
Beyond inspiring the name of his first-born daughter, The Fountainhead also instilled in Caine the belief that if he was going to make it as a thespian, the only way of going about it was in his own way and by becoming his own man. He certainly achieved that, and even though he’s not in agreement with the author’s politics, Rand became a huge inspiration in other ways.
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