page_title: Michael Caine
section_title: 1960s
hierarchical_section_title: Michael Caine / Acting career / 1960s
caption_attribution_description: English: Michael Caine in trailer for "Zulu" (1964)
context_page_description: Sir Michael Caine CBE is an English actor, producer, and author. Known for his distinctive Cockney accent, he has appeared in more than 130 films during a career spanning over 60 years, and is considered a British film icon. As of February 2017, the films in which he has appeared in have grossed over $7.8 billion worldwide. He is ranked at No. 20 on the list of highest-grossing box office stars.
  Caine made his breakthrough in the 1960s with starring roles in British films such as Zulu, The Ipcress File, Alfie, The Italian Job, and Battle of Britain. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Alfie. His roles in the 1970s included Get Carter, The Last Valley, Sleuth, The Man Who Would Be King, and A Bridge Too Far. He earned his second Academy Award nomination for Sleuth and went on to achieve some of his greatest critical success in the 1980s, with Educating Rita earning him the BAFTA and Golden Globe Award for Best Actor. He received an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Hannah and Her Sisters.
  Caine played Ebenezer Scrooge in The Muppet Christmas Carol.
context_section_description: Caine continued to appear on television, in serials The Golden Girl and No Wreath for the General, but was then cast in the play The Compartment, written by Johnny Speight, a two-hander also starring Frank Finlay. This was followed by main roles in other plays including the character Tosh in Somewhere for the Night, a Sunday-Night Play written by Bill Naughton televised on Sunday 3 December 1961, another two-hander by Johnny Speight, The Playmates, and two editions of BBC plays strand First Night, Funny Noises with Their Mouths and The Way with Reggie (both 1963). He also acted in radio plays, including Bill Naughton's Looking for Frankie on the BBC Home Service (1963) and Ping Pong on the BBC Third Programme (1964).
  A big break came for Caine when he was cast as Meff in James Saunders' Cockney comedy Next Time I'll Sing To You, when this play was presented at the New Arts Theatre in London on 23 January 1963. Scenes from the play's performance were featured in the April 1963 issue of Theatre World magazine.
  When this play moved to the Criterion in Piccadilly with Michael Codron directing, he was visited backstage by Stanley Baker, one of the four stars in Caine's first film, A Hill in Korea, who told him about the part of a Cockney private in his upcoming film Zulu, a film Baker was producing and starring in. Baker told Caine to meet the director, Cy Endfield, who informed him that he already had given the part to James Booth, a fellow Cockney who was Caine's friend, because he "looked more Cockney" than Caine did. Endfield then told the 6'2" Caine that he did not look like a Cockney but like an officer, and offered him a screen test for the role of a snobbish, upper class officer after Caine assured him that he could do a posh accent. Caine believes Endfield offered him, a Cockney, the role of an aristocrat because, being American, he did not have the endemic British class-prejudice. Though he tested poorly, Endfield gave him the part that would make him a film star.
  Location shooting for Zulu took place in Natal, South Africa, for 14 weeks in 1963. According to his 2011 autobiography The Elephant to Hollywood, Caine had been signed to a seven-year contract by Joseph E. Levine, whose Embassy Films was distributing Zulu. After the return of the cast to England and the completion of the film, Levine released him from the contract, telling him, "I know you're not, but you gotta face the fact that you look like a queer on screen." Levine gave his contract to his Zulu co-star James Booth.
  Subsequently, Caine's agent got him cast in the BBC production Hamlet at Elsinore (1964) as Horatio, in support of Christopher Plummer's Hamlet. Horatio was the only classical role which Caine, who had never received dramatic training, would ever play. Caine wrote, "...I decided that if my on-screen appearance was going to be an issue, then I would use it to bring out all Horatio's ambiguous sexuality."
  Caine's roles as effete-seeming aristocrats were to contrast with his next projects, in which he was to become notable for using a regional accent, rather than the Received Pronunciation then considered proper for film actors. At the time, Caine's working class Cockney, just as with The Beatles' Liverpudlian accents, stood out to American and British audiences alike. Zulu was closely followed by two of his best-known roles: the spy Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File (1965), and the womanising title character in Alfie (1966). He went on to play Palmer in a further four films, Funeral in Berlin (1966), Billion Dollar Brain (1967), Bullet to Beijing (1995) and Midnight in Saint Petersburg (1995). Caine made his first film in Hollywood in 1966, after an invitation from Shirley MacLaine to play opposite her in Gambit. During the first two weeks, whilst staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel, he met long-term friends John Wayne and agent "Swifty" Lazar.
  Caine starred in the 1969 comedy caper film The Italian Job as Charlie Croker, the leader of a cockney criminal gang released from prison with the intention of doing a "big job" in Italy to steal gold b
caption: Caine in the trailer for Zulu (1964)
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