“I was the only person who could play it”: how an unlikely role brought Michael Caine’s career full circle
Full circle moments can regularly emerge from the most unexpected of places, and for Michael Caine, he found his in a comedy sequel that couldn’t have existed if it wasn’t for the work he’d done more than three decades previously.
By the early 2000s, Caine was in the beginnings of a resurgence that would carry him right through to his eventual retirement 23 years later at the age of 90, having persevered through the wilderness years that left him so disenchanted with acting he was ready to give it up entirely.
In the 1960s, Caine’s unique blend of charm, screen presence, and stoic gravitas had turned him into an international superstar, winning him plenty of fame and plaudits. Looking at the run he embarked on in the span of less than ten years, there was no denying that at the time he was far and away British cinema’s brightest shining star.
His breakthrough in Zulu was swiftly followed by his first Academy Award-nominated performance in Alfie, heist comedy Gambit, crime caper The Italian Job, war epic Battle of Britain, gangster flick Get Carter, and his second Oscar-nominated turn in mystery thriller Sleuth, so it would be an understatement to say he was firing on all cylinders.
None of those served as the catalyst for his eventual full circle experience, though, with a bespectacled secret agent fulfilling that remit. Harry Palmer’s debut in The Ipcress File saw Caine anchor one of the finest British films ever made, but the character would go on to represent the highest and lowest points of his career.
Rapid-fire sequels Funeral in Berlin and Billion Dollar Brain capitalised quickly on the popularity of the opening instalment and continued the star’s ’60s hot streak, but fast forward 30 years and he was in the midst of the worst time of his professional life when he reprised the role in made-for-TV movies Bullet to Beijing and Midnight in Saint Petersburg.
Caine had hit his lowest point in the 1990s and was preparing to ditch acting in favour of being a full-time restauranteur until Jack Nicholson intervened and re-energised his creative juices, with their collaboration on Blood and Wine releasing in the United States just three months before a smash hit that owed him a huge debt of gratitude.
Arriving in May 1997, Mike Myers pointed to Caine’s Harry Palmer as one of the major inspirations behind the character of Austin Powers, the shagadelic spy who lampooned the espionage genre with gleeful abandon. When he needed somebody to play his on-screen father in the third entry, Goldmember, there was only one person who could possibly fit the bill.
“I realised Mike had based it on a character I played many years ago; Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File,” Caine told the BBC. “The ’60s, the glasses, and the accent; I knew it was me. So I felt like I was the creative father of the character anyway. I felt not only was I ideal to play it, I felt I was the only person who could play it.”
The two-time Oscar winner explained that by Myers having the person who inspired the title hero involved as a performer, Caine “meant more to him in the casting than just casting an actor who could play the part as well.” He’s played plenty of memorable roles over the years, but none of them sums up his career quite like Harry Palmer.
After all, he inaugurated the part in one of his best-ever features during a time when he was taking the cinematic world by storm, and three decades later, he was reduced to playing the character again – being thoroughly miserable while doing so – because he’d effectively been written off an industry afterthought.
Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery premiered shortly after the film that revitalised Caine’s love of his profession, channelling the spirit of Palmer in the process. When Myers wanted his fictional dad to be representative of not only who Austin was but a tribute to the genre he’d so lovingly poked fun at over the course of the previous two films, there was realistically only one place and one person to which he could turn.
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