The only director who fired Michael Caine: “You can piss off back to Shaftesbury Avenue”
When he first set his sights on becoming a working actor, Michael Caine could never have dreamed that he’d retire at the age of 90 after a seven-decade career that’s seen him go down in the history books as one of the United Kingdom’s all-time greats.
He’s won two Academy Awards, worked with some of the biggest names of the last 70 years on either side of the camera, and enshrined himself in the zeitgeist through a number of iconic performances and an unmistakable accent that’s made him a favoured target of impressionists and comedians.
Obviously, he didn’t wake up one morning as a superstar; it was something he worked hard for. Caine started out treading the boards before upgrading to cinema, but it wasn’t until Zulu – his 18th appearance in a feature – that he finally gained mainstream attention. Striking while the iron was hot, he was a transatlantic sensation soon after.
The Ipcress File gave him a franchise to call his own, Alfie earned him his first Oscar nomination in the ‘Best Actor’ category, and he sparred with Shirley MacLaine in Gambit, his Hollywood debut. The Italian Job, Get Carter, and Sleuth followed soon after, and by the mid-1970s, he was one of Britain’s most recognisable thespians and an in-demand name in America.
Still, any performer with eyes on longevity who wants to carve out a successful career will face rejection along the way, and it was fortunate that it happened to Caine early. He basically retired from theatre after Zulu because he’d always wanted to be a film actor, which is just as well because famed director Joan Littlewood didn’t think he had a chance of succeeding on stage when a fresh-faced Caine was booted from her Stratford repertory.
“She fired me because I wasn’t very group-minded,” he recalled, per the Irish Times. “I was too starry. ‘You are not a group actor, Michael. You can piss off back to Shaftesbury Avenue!’ Those were her last words to me. Yeah, I was too establishment. I wasn’t a communist. I had just spent a year in Korea fighting the communists.”
Clearly, Littlewood wasn’t a fan of Caine. It’s ironic that she blasted him for being too starry, though, because all he wanted to be was a movie star. He was aware that he needed to get his reps in by treading the boards and working his way up towards the silver screen, but the confidence and self-belief that made it happen eventually evidently didn’t leave her too impressed.
It would be fascinating to find out what Littlewood thought when the person she’d forcibly ejected from her theatre company would crack Hollywood and become an awards season fixture and A-lister little over a decade later, with Caine never again experiencing the ignominy of being fired by a director.
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