When asked what he thought about “Jaws: The Revenge,” Michael Caine (born Maurice Micklewhite in London on March 14, 1933) famously said, “I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.” That would seem to give the impression that Michael Caine’s career choices have often been driven by paychecks, but that would be a false one. While he’s done his fair share of bill-paying, the prolific British actor has, across a fifty-year career, remained one of the best-loved and most enduring stars we have, as well as a wonderful — and all too often underrated — actor.
Besides Jack Nicholson, Caine is the only actor to have been nominated for an Oscar in every decade from the 1960s to the 2000s (both are still awaiting a nod in the 2010s), and a man whose career runs from starring in the iconic “Zulu” in 1964 to 2012’s billion-dollar blockbuster “The Dark Knight Rises,” taking in gangsters, Woody Allen, killer bees and the Muppets along the way. The actor celebrates his 80th birthday today, and though he shows no sign of letting up any time soon (he’s got the magician heist thriller “Now You See Me” and drama “Mr. Morgan’s Last Love” on the way later in the year), it seemed like a good time to celebrate one of our favorites. Check out our picks for Caine’s ten greatest roles below, and argue for your own choices in the comments section below.
And a very, very happy birthday to Sir Michael.
“The Ipcress File” (1965)
It took a few years for Caine to make his name — he described the first nine years of his career as “really, really brutal,” but finally got some big breaks on stage, taking over from Peter O’Toole in “The Long and the Short and the Tall,” and then appearing in the comedy hit “Next Time I’ll Sing To You.” His first starring role on film came with “Zulu” in 1964, the same year that he played Horatio to Christopher Plummer‘s Hamlet on the BBC, but Caine truly cemented his screen presence as anti-Bond Harry Palmer in Sidney J. Furle‘s still-thrilling 1965 adaptation of Len Deighton‘s spy novel “The Ipcress File.” He plays an army sergeant transferred to British intelligence, to help solve the “brain drain” of seventeen top scientists, who’ve been kidnapped and returned with their knowledge of technical matters gone. Palmer is a working class chap, forced to become a spy after being court-martialed for black market racketeering, and Caine plays him as if Jimmy Porter from “Look Back In Anger” had been drafted into MI5. And yet, in his own way, he can be just as suave as 007, womanizing and brawling, but there’s much more of an edge to him, as he carries a subtle resentment toward his higher-ups (who reprimand him for insubordination). And Caine gets better material than Connery ever did as Bond, impressive and heroic as he’s kidnapped and brainwashed over weeks, possibly even months. While the film isn’t as well known these days as it should be, the influence of Caine’s performance (which he’d later reprise four more times, to increasingly poor effect) certainly lives on: Daniel Craig‘s James Bond owes as much to Caine’s Palmer as it does to any previous 007s, and there’s a trace of him in Gary Oldman‘s George Smiley too.