The actor who blew Michael Caine apart: “In the eye of a hurricane”
Michael Caine is a master. By now, he’s seemingly done everything, traversed forms and genres, played eclectic characters and found a space for himself in each and every decade and era of his career. But as a man too, Caine’s life stories are just as vast, from Manson family run-ins to all the various heroes he’s met along the way, including this one.
Some people say you should never meet your heroes. That’s definitely true in certain contexts. You don’t want to run into a legend in your local shop and be bothering them. The likes of Martin Scorsese, Angela Bassett, even Michael Caine himself or whoever your idol might be, your impression of them would probably be pretty anticlimactic if you merely got a swift few minutes interaction, took a selfie and then watched them scurry off away from you.
But when actors talk about meeting these heroes, things are different. It’s a whole other ball game walking onto a shared set. The playing field is level. Suddenly, even if the actor in question never feels that way, they’re peers with their idol now.
Michael Caine had that experience many times in his career. He has worked alongside the greats and is now considered in their ranks, but even with plenty of experience under his belt by the time 1972 rolled around, getting to meet Laurence Olivier still left him awestruck.
“I learnt something amazing from Larry,” Caine said in 2001, with that nickname instantly giving away how well the two actors hit it off. They met on the set of Sleuth, and when that first encounter came around, Caine was terrified. Olivier was already an icon. He’d dominated the theatre world and had then turned his sights on film, coming to dominate there too, bagging himself countless awards in the field. Even though Caine was already enjoying success thanks to The Italian Job, it was nothing in comparison to his co-star. He felt like he was meeting royalty.
He asked Olivier what he should call him, and the looming legend made that fear even worse when he replied, “Lord Olivier”. However, they instead settled on ‘Larry’, hitting off a close friendship the second they started working together.
But that closeness didn’t stop Caine watching on, utterly amazed by his idol turned co-star. “He had an extraordinary dynamic. He could summon up energy from nowhere,” Caine said, recalling the way Olivier seemed able to snap into the scene in an instant, wasting no time and going all in, always. It was incredible to watch, but also kind of intimidating as Caine admitted, “The first time he did it, he blew me apart. It was like being in the eye of a hurricane.”
What is inspiration, if not a slight fear, with motivation? Don’t we all look at our legends with a kind of frightful amazement, baffled by how they do what they do, intimidated at the power of it, but wanting to try our best to match up? That was Caine’s takeaway as Sleuth, and Olivier taught him a lesson simply by being a mirror for what he wanted to be and so made himself into; “I can do that now. He showed me it was possible.”
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