“Such a generous man”: The song Michael Caine couldn’t live without
Michael Caine has had such an intense impact on the film industry that it’s hard to imagine it without him. In fact, it almost feels like he’s always been there, with a career spanning over five decades and including titles that changed the industry forever. So when it comes to music, it’s no surprise that Caine’s favourites have deep connections to his own life, much like the score of a movie.
The start of Caine’s story is one that most can relate to. Working at it for years before making a name for himself, Caine learned firsthand the challenges of making it in a brutally competitive business filled with long-established names and an even tougher hierarchical system. It wasn’t until Alfie that he finally became an established player, soon to be brushing shoulders with several names he looked up to.
While the following years saw him star in some of his most career-defining roles, like The Italian Job, Caine also held a certain charm that pulled audiences in, sparking the beginning of another phenomenon that’s seemingly difficult to curate unless you’re a figure who truly has something worth paying attention to. Whether authenticity or his British patriotism, Caine had a sparkle that most merely dreamed of, bringing nuance and rawness to everything he touched.
At the same time, he remained humble. For instance, one of his proudest achievements is playing Ebenezer Scrooge in The Muppet Christmas Carol, mostly because he was able to make a film his daughter could finally see, and one that tied into one of his favourite seasons: Christmas. After all, for a self-proclaimed family man, his discography doesn’t exactly warrant family viewing sessions, yet this one scored gold.
Still, connecting with others—no matter the source—has always been important to Caine, which is likely also why, when he first befriended Frank Sinatra, he likely thanked his lucky stars he ever got the opportunity to cross paths with such a pivotal childhood hero. The singer also shaped Caine’s industry experience in more ways than one, from travelling in his private jet to getting his blessing to date his daughter.
“I adored Frank,” Caine later told GQ. “He was such a generous man. He thought I was very funny. Well, he thought my accent was funny. And he always had this thing that I made too many movies. We’d meet, and he’d go, ‘Hey Mikey, how ya doing? How many movies you make today?'” This deep-rooted admiration also explains, therefore, why one of Caine’s favourite songs of all time is ‘My Way’.
Incorporated into his Desert Island Disks episode, ‘My Way’ entered Caine’s life at a strange juncture, initially presented to him through a different artist and song, Claude François’s ‘Comme d’habitude’. He was in Paris the first time he heard it, and only stumbled across Sinatra’s version many years later at a welcome party in Hollywood. “Sinatra starts singing, and I’m sitting there thinking, ‘I know this song.’ And Paul Anka, who’s a friend of mine, was there with us,” he said.
Anka revealed he had revised the song for a modern composition, the version by Sinatra that Caine was hearing at the time. It quickly became his favourite song of all time, as he revealed during the Desert Island Disks interview. Their budding friendship embedded it even deeper, arriving at a time when Caine’s life was taking a drastic turn in the one industry that would change his world forever.
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