"I was in an awful lot of pictures. In fact, I was in a lot of awful pictures." Michael Caine

Although he had dreamed of the actor's life while growing up as the rickety, jug-eared son of a Billingsgate fish porter, it would take more than thirty years for Maurice Joseph Micklewhite to become Michael Caine. In interviews granted over the years, Caine has claimed that his introduction to performing came when he was pushed by his mother out to meet bill collectors with the message that no adults were home. As was common for someone of his impoverished, unpromising background, the future star of Alfie (1966), Get Carter (1971) and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) went to work early at a series of menial jobs before being sent to Korea for his national service as a member of the Royal Fusiliers. After his demobilization in 1952, Caine was able to cash in on his military experience as a technical advisor for the film A Hill in Korea (1956), a British Lion release most remarkable for its cast (Stanley Baker, Stephen Boyd, Robert Shaw). In addition to providing insights on proper military procedure (largely ignored by director Julian Amyes), Caine played the small role of an army private and earned the princely sum of £100 a week with the promise of ten weeks' shooting in Portugal (subbing unconvincingly for the 38th Parallel). The finished film, shelved for several years before being released on the day England invaded Suez, did nothing for the career of the hungry young actor then billing himself as "Michael Scott."

Between 1956 and 1963, Caine appeared in 30 films and made 125 television appearances. (He also auditioned unsuccessfully for the role of Bill Sykes in the original London production of Oliver!.) For a BBC live broadcast of Jean Anoulih's The Lark, he was compelled by British Equity to change the name by which he would be billed, as they already had a Michael Scott on their roster. It was while passing the Leicester Square Odeon that the actor found his new stage name on a marquee announcing showings of The Caine Mutiny (1954). Newly christened Michael Caine and now in his early 20s, the actor usually appeared uncredited, often as policemen or soldiers. He was in uniform yet again in André De Toth's The Two-Headed Spy (1958), this time as a Gestapo agent in this fact-based tale of a British spy infiltrating the Third Reich. The film's working title was A Clock without a Face and the script the work of blacklisted American writer Michael Wilson, who signed himself "James O'Donnell." The role came Caine's way because producer Bill Kirby thought he bore a resemblance to one of Adolf Hitler's aides. The film's star was Jack Hawkins, fresh from David Lean's Academy Award® winning The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). Due to Hawkins' commanding performance, a sultry leading lady in Italian-Irish actress Gia Scala, a supporting cast rich in seasoned British talent (Donald Pleasence, Alexander Knox, Felix Aylmer and Kenneth Griffith as Der Fuhrer) and a grueling scene of Nazi torture on par with something out of Roberto Rossellini's Open City (1945), The Two-Headed Spy received strong notices from the critics but was a blip on the radar of Caine's slow-moving acting career.

Although Caine might have thought at the time of filming The Two-Headed Spy on location in West Germany that he hadn't much in common with the older, more worldly and far more successful Jack Hawkins, the lives of the two British actors shared a number of points of commonality. Like Caine, Hawkins had dreamed of becoming an actor while growing up the son of a master builder in the Midlands county of Middlesex. Both men had formative experiences connected to world wars; as Caine had as a boy been evacuated from London during the Blitz, so Hawkins had often hid inside the broom closet of his family's Wood Green home during air raids real and expected – and once saw a zeppelin shot down over nearby Potter's Bar. As would Caine during the Korean conflict, Hawkins served his national service during the Second World War in a branch of the Royal Fusiliers, albeit in India (where Caine's father had served.) As Caine was at the time weathering a doomed first marriage to stage actress Patricia Haines, so Hawkins had himself been married for ten years to American stage actress Jessica Tandy. (Furthering the similarities, both failed unions resulted in the birth of a single child, a daughter.) A few years later, Jack Hawkins would also wind up literally playing a part in the big break that would turn the tide of Michael Caine's acting career.

Divorced in absentia by Patricia Haines in 1958, Caine was constantly being threatened with jail time for nonpayment of support to their daughter Dominique. He was therefore only too happy to sign on to understudy Peter O'Toole in Lindsay Anderson's West End staging of Willis Hall's WWII play The Long and the Short and the Tall in 1959. When O'Toole left the production to star in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Caine took over his role and kept it throughout a subsequent four-month tour of Britain, Scotland and Ireland. (During this time, he made the acquaintance of another young actor, Terence Stamp, who was for several years thereafter his flatmate.)

More stage work followed with a leading role in James Saunders' Cockney comedy, Next Time I'll Sing to You but this low paying gig paid Caine an unexpected dividend. When the successful production moved from the Arts Theater to the larger Criterion in Piccadilly, Caine was visited backstage by his A Hill in Korea castmate Stanley Baker; the Welsh actor announced that he was producing and would star in the upcoming actioner Zulu (1964) and thought Caine would be just right for a role alongside himself and Jack Hawkins. Although the part Baker had in mind for Caine went instead to James Booth (and despite the fact that his screen test was purportedly the worst director Cy Endfield had ever seen), Caine was cast as an inexperienced British army officer out of his element during the 1879 battle of Roark's Drift... a performance that pointed Michael Caine on the path to super-stardom.

Producer: Bill Kirby
Director: Andre De Toth
Screenplay: James O'Donnell, Alfred Levitt; J. Alvin Kugelmass (story)
Cinematography: Ted Scaife
Art Direction: Ivan King
Film Editing: Raymond Poulton
Cast: Jack Hawkins (Gen. Alex Schottland), Gia Scala (Lili Geyr), Erik Schumann (Lt. Reinisch), Alexander Knox (Gestapo Leader Muller), Felix Aylmer (Cornaz), Walter Hudd (Adm. Canaris), Edward Underdown (Kaltenbrunner), Laurence Naismith (Gen. Hauser).
BW-93m.

by Richard Harland Smith

Sources:
What's It All About? Michael Caine: An Autobiography
Arise: Sir Michael Caine, the Biography by William Hall
Candidly Caine by Elaine Gallagher
Starring Michael Caine by David Bishop
Michael Caine biography by Dominic Wills
Anything For a Quiet Life by Jack Hawkins
De Toth on De Toth: Putting the Drama in front of the Camera, a Conversation with Anthony Slide