The only time Michael Caine finds it acceptable to follow in Jack Nicholson’s footsteps: “I know him really well”
With a legendary career that spanned 70 years and won him two Academy Awards, it’s not even remotely hyperbolic to call Michael Caine a genuine legend of the silver screen and one of the United Kingdom’s greatest-ever cinematic exports.
Bursting onto the scene in the 1960s and becoming the epitome of British cool, Caine endured his fair share of ups and downs but emerged on the other side of several difficult and turbulent periods to settle nicely into his groove as a veteran character actor with gravitas to spare who could elevate any role through nothing more than his persona and performance.
Along the way, he worked with some of the most notable legends in Hollywood history, and he called many of them close friends. Caine lived the dream, whether flying on a private plane with Frank Sinatra or getting into fights in comedy clubs with Sean Connery, but it was Jack Nicholson who became his unlikely guardian angel.
The star was so disenfranchised with the direction his acting career was heading in the late 1980s and early 1990s – which was admittedly fair enough because it was only going one way and it wasn’t up – until his buddy Nicholson stepped in and shook him out of his stupor with an offer to co-star in Bob Rafelson’s 1996 crime thriller Blood and Wine.
Referring to the three-time Oscar-winning legend as his fairy godmother, the film lit the touchpaper on Caine’s reascension up the industry ranks. They were incredibly close on a personal level, but on a professional one, cinema’s most famous cockney was constantly enthralled by Nicholson’s effortless mastery of his chosen craft.
With that in mind, Caine was entirely within his rights to raise an eyebrow or two when he discovered the handsome and charming Heath Ledger was set to step into his running buddy’s shoes to play the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins sequel, The Dark Knight. Nicholson’s take on the ‘Clown Prince of Crime’ was already iconic, and he voiced his concerns to Empire that the bar may have been set too high.
“If I put myself in a producer’s shoes, I think: ‘Wait a minute, we are making a movie about the Joker,” he said. “Now, we have had Jack Nicholson, who is one of the greatest Jokers and one of the greatest characters in this kind of movie. I have worked with Jack, and I know him really well.”
Inheriting a role from one of the best ever is about as tall as orders can get in the movie business, and Caine was under the impression there was only one successful way to walk a path such a formidable figure had already trodden. “You do not really want to follow Jack into anything,” he mused. “Unless it’s a nightclub.”
Of course, there’s a reason why hindsight is always 20/20, with Ledger delivering a tour-de-force of his own in The Dark Knight that won him a posthumous Oscar for ‘Best Supporting Actor’. He was so impressive in the part that Caine even forgot his lines the first time they came face-to-face, which was when he knew the shadow of Nicholson was no longer looming large.
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