The two movies Michael Caine wished he’d starred in: “I never got a part that hadn’t been turned down”
Any career that lasts for 70 years will always bring with it a regret or two, but Michael Caine has constantly favoured the approach of finding the positives, even when the negatives are right there for everyone to see.
He missed out on collecting his first Academy Award in person because he was too busy shooting Jaws: The Revenge, which was an awful movie. However, he got paid very well for it, so he wasn’t too disheartened that his crowning achievement happened in absentia.
Much the same can be said of The Swarm, which is undoubtedly one of the worst entries in a stacked and storied filmography, albeit a B-level creature feature that allowed Caine to rub shoulders with a litany of Hollywood icons, legends, Oscar winners, and veterans to turn a dismal experience into an unforgettable one.
Whenever things went badly for Caine professionally, he always emerged on the other side smelling of roses. When he was slumming it in risible Steven Seagal vanity projects and made-for-television sequels in the mid-1990s, he reached his lowest ebb and contemplated retirement. However, the unlikely combination of Jack Nicholson and Jane Horrocks dragged him out of his stupor, and he was off to the races again.
Despite Alfie strapping a rocket to his back and making him a cross-continental star as far back as the 1960s, Caine claims he was rarely the first choice for any of the parts he played. In fact, the role that netted him his first Oscar nomination and laid the table for everything that was to come only ended up in his hands because everybody above him on the producers’ wish list knocked it back.
“For years, I never got a part that hadn’t been turned down by somebody else,” he told The New York Times. “Alfie was offered to every actor in England. And I knew about it because I wasn’t famous, so nobody tried not to hurt my feelings. I’ve never turned down anything.”
That said, he developed an inadvertent arch-nemesis after one name kept repeatedly snagging the parts Caine desperately wanted to play. They were born three years apart and travelled in many of the same circles as British thespians who’d graduated from stage to screen and split their time between local productions and Hollywood, but he eventually became a thorn in Caine’s side for reasons he couldn’t control.
“The films I’d like to have done are usually done by Albert Finney,” he admitted. “I’d have loved to do Two for the Road and Shoot the Moon.” Stanley Donen’s romantic caper with Audrey Hepburn and Alan Parker’s Palme d’Or nominated drama with Diane Keaton were two completely different films made on either side of the Atlantic that were released almost a decade and a half apart, but Caine wished he’d been in both of them.
In the former, Finney sparred with Hepburn as a married couple reflecting on their marriage during a road trip from England to France, and in the latter, the actor played half of another fracturing couple as the gradual decline of he and Keaton’s partners wreaked havoc on their four children. Caine had envious eyes for those pictures, only for Finney to get the nod, and it’s something he never forgot.
Never Miss A Tale
The Far Out Michael Caine Newsletter
All the latest stories about Michael Caine from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.