How Michael Caine landed his big-screen breakthrough in Zulu

5 December 2024, 08:46

How a struggling actor became a global superstar.

When Michael Caine burst onto the big screen as Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead in 1964 classic Zulu he felt like an overnight success.

The truth was, he was an overnight success that had been over 15 years in the making, with the then-31 year old actor having struggled to make his mark as an actor until he won the role.

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Born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite in Rotherhithe in London on March 14, 1933 to a cook mum and fish porter dad, Michael Caine grew up in Southwark but was evacuated to Norfolk where he had his very first acting roles.

That was just in the local village school, though. When he returned to London after the war and the family settled in Elephant & Castle, he got another acting gig at the age of 10: Cinderella's dad in the school play.

Caine's first indirect brush with the movies was when he picked up jobs as a filing clerk and messenger for a film company and movie producer Jay Lewis.

Then came national service, still a thing in the UK after WW2. He did a couple of years in the Royal Fusiliers in Weast Germany and then in the Korean War.

Zulu – original movie trailer featuring Michael Caine

After that he threw himself into acting, adopting the stage name Michael White.

An early uncredited walk-on role in 1950s Morning Departure didn't develop into anything, but he then got a job as an assistant stage manager for the Westminster Repertory Company in Horsham, where he'd also get bit-part roles in their productions.

He then moved to Suffolk and continued to toil with little visible reward at the Lowestoft Repertory Company.

On his return to London his agent told him there was already a Michael White on the scene.

Looking around his phone booth he saw The Caine Mutiny was on at the Odeon, and he at least had his new stage name, though not yet the roles that would make it famous.

Caine continued to work, understudying for Peter O'Toole in Lindsay Anderson's West End staging of Willis Hall's The Long and the Short and the Tall in 1959, around the time he moved in with fellow actor Terence Stamp.

O'Toole winning the title role in Lawrence of Arabia was good for both him and Caine, who took over on the stage both on the West End and on a four-month UK and Ireland tour.

Then came a role in a war movie, but not yet Zulu. He played a private in 1956 film A Hill in Korea. Around this time he was also picking up small parts on various TV dramas.

A major stage role came opposite Johnny Speight in Frank Finlay's The Compartment, and things were on a role, culminating In being cast as Meff in James Saunders' Cockney comedy Next Time I'll Sing To You.

That role was the essential brick on the road to Zulu.

During a run at the Criterion in Piccadilly directed by Michael Codron, Caine was visited backstage by Stanley Baker, who he had met on the set of A Hill in Korea some years back.

Baker had been hired not just to play the lead role of Lieutenant John Chard in Zulu, but was also one of its producers.

He urged Caine to meet the director Cy Endfield and sound him out about playing a Cockney officer.

The only problem was that Cy had already cast James Booth, one of Caine's pals, as the Cockney Private Henry Hook.

"Movie stardom relied on the fact that Cy was an American and not an English director," Caine told the BBC many years later.

"When I was walking out, I got right to the door and he said, 'You don't look like a Cockney to me'. He said, 'You don't really look that tough or anything. You look like one of those upper-crust officers. Can you do that?'."

After Caine told the director he was fully capable of playing posh, he was given the role of Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead.

Zulu was a massive box office smash, and won rave reviews all round – especially for its breakout star Michael Caine.

Caine immediately followed it up as the lead in 1965 British spy classic The Ipcress File, a reunion with Zulu's Nigel Green.

A year after that, he consolidated his position with the title role in comedy drama Alfie. Michael Caine had very much arrived.