The three words that changed Michael Caine’s career forever: “I took that into my own life”
Posted On
(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
As tends to be the case for any actor who enjoyed a remarkable 70-year career that took them to the very top of the industry, Michael Caine became a treasure trove of anecdotes and words of wisdom that helped inspire multiple generations who sought to follow in his footsteps.
In fact, Caine accumulated so much knowledge about his craft that he literally wrote a book about everything he’d learned, which was inevitably a best-seller. After all, which aspiring thespian wouldn’t want to pick up the tips and tricks that elevated the two-time Academy Award winner from a working-class lad into one of Britain’s greatest-ever silver screen exports?
Not that it was a guaranteed playbook on how to achieve success, though, especially when Caine went through a bizarre phase of refusing to blink. Well, it was less of a phase and more of an era because he somehow managed to keep it up for eight years, but there are plenty of worthwhile pearls dispensed in the pages of Acting in Film to make it a worthwhile read for anyone who dreams of treading the boards or taking themselves to Hollywood.
Beginning on the stage, Caine gradually worked his way into pictures, but it wasn’t until 1964’s Zulu that he felt like he’d truly arrived. After that, there was no stopping him;
his first Academy Award nomination for Alfie began an unstoppable ascent that eventually saw him take his place as a bankable leading man, versatile character actor, and ultimately distinguished veteran.
However, none of that may have happened if it weren’t for three words. Back in his earliest days, Caine was involved in a mishap that wasn’t of his own making, only for a handful of syllables thrown his way by the director fundamentally altering his approach to not only acting but life in general.
“I was rehearsing a play when I was a very young actor,” he explained to Michael Parkinson. “And I had to come in the scene. It was a stage play; I’m behind the flats waiting to open the door. There was an improvised scene between a husband and a wife going on inside. And they got carried away.”
During their heated argument, “they started throwing things, and he threw a chair, and it lodged in the doorway.” Caine was trapped and couldn’t get onto the stage as planned, causing panic to set in. “I went, ‘I’m sorry sir, I can’t get in,’” he told the director. “He said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘There’s a chair there’. He said to me, ‘Use the difficulty.’” Just like that, a lightbulb went off.
“I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Well if it’s a comedy, fall over it. If it’s a drama, pick it up and smash it’. He said, ‘Use the difficulty’. Now, I took that into my own life,” Caine offered. “And so, there’s never anything so bad that you cannot use that difficulty. If you can use it a quarter of 1% to your advantage, you’re ahead if you didn’t let it get you down. That’s my philosophy; use the difficulty.”
It might sound completely reductive to suggest that all of the success Caine enjoyed in the years to come boiled down to an errant thrown chair wedging him behind a doorway during one of his first stage performances, but there’s more than a shred of truth to it when the mantra has served him so well.
Related Topics
