The one role Michael Caine swore he’d never play: “Emotionally, I couldn’t do it”
The boundary between art and life is basically non-existent; we float between the two, trying to bring more humanity to art and more artistry to our lives. You can’t separate life and art, and for Michael Caine, this proved to be an issue, the source material of a certain movie hitting too close to home.
The actor has taken on many diverse roles over the years, from womanisers and gangsters to Ebenezer Scrooge, winning several Oscars and becoming known as one of Britain’s most iconic stars as a result. Whether he’s wielding a gun or teaching night classes, the characters that Caine has embodied over the years have been nothing short of believable.
When Caine was offered the role of a man with dementia, though, the realism of the part proved to be an issue. You can’t separate the bleak reality of the illness from the real world, and Caine had lost a close friend of his, tailor and designer Douglas Hayward, to dementia in 2008.
Acting as someone with dementia could prove to be too emotional, and while he knew he had the skill to play a character with a neurodegenerative disorder, he just wasn’t sure if he could bring himself to dedicate himself to a part that would cause such a strong response within him.
He talked about the tough decision he faced in being presented with a character with dementia in an interview with Radio Times, revealing that he turned down a role because it reminded him too much of Hayward, and although Caine did play a man with early onset dementia in the film Is Anybody There?, it seems that this is a role that came at a later date that he turned down.
The actor had been friends with Hayward for decades, and watching his health deteriorate until they were essentially both unrecognisable to each other was a tough thing to stomach, with him explaining, “I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it, no. As an actor, if I’m going to play someone with dementia, I have to keep thinking back to someone I know who had dementia. And the only person I knew was Dougie. I saw it every day, I saw it coming.”
Caine continued, “Dementia is like watching someone disappearing over the horizon for two years. They get smaller every day. It finally happened when I went to Dougie’s place on Mount Street. He was watching television. I said, ‘Hi, Doug. How are you today?’ And he just looked at me and said, ‘Hello,’ and went on watching telly. And I realised he didn’t know who I was. It was so sad to see. I mean, he was 61, 62.”
As much as he was aware that he would’ve given an affecting performance, Caine knew that sometimes things just hit close to home, and the task of immersing yourself in a character that reminds you of something very real was not going to be an easy ordeal.
“I had become so knowledgeable about [dementia]. But I realised emotionally I couldn’t do it. All day, for two months, thinking about the worst side of Doug, which killed him,” he concluded.
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