The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [111]
Little Voice was a great success both critically and financially – and for me it confirmed the establishment of my new career. I had needed two miracles really, to sort both home and career, and I was very happy and grateful for one – where, I wondered, was the other one going to come from?
Back from Scarborough, I prowled round my house in Oxfordshire, cooking and gardening and visiting London less and less the further away it got. I scanned every paper looking for my dream house and read the usual bunch of crap scripts and waited for my agent to call. To really consolidate this new phase of my career, I needed a film that would work in America as well as Britain. In 1998 at least one of my prayers was answered with a script for a film version of John Irving’s great American classic The Cider House Rules. That was a strong enough pedigree to hook me in, but the director Lasse Hallstrom was also very talented, and the cast included Charlize Theron, who would go on to win an Oscar for Monster, Tobey Maguire who would become the hugely successful Spiderman, and my two cohort nurses Kathy Baker and Jane Alexander, both great actresses to work with. I play a doctor who runs an orphanage.
The old adage about not working with animals or children is always trotted out, but I’ve done both and survived. In The Cider House Rules it was children and there were about a hundred of them and they were delightful – except for the babies. In movies there are strict rules for working with small babies: they can never work for more than half an hour and their eyes must be protected from the bright lights at all times so someone has to shade their eyes to prevent them from staring at the lights and burning their corneas. As a grandfather of two tiny babies, I understand all this, but it makes the acting quite hard work. As the acting time is so short companies usually cast identical twins, which sounds sensible but of the twins I worked with on Cider House one never stopped crying and the other never stopped laughing. If that wasn’t bad enough there was a strict lady inspector from the authorities looking over your shoulder the whole time, which could be a bit daunting.
But I loved the movie – and I loved my part. Given the iconic one-liners from The Italian Job and Get Carter, I’m always on the alert for lines that will stick in people’s minds in the future and in The Cider House Rules I thought I spotted one quite early on in the line I say to the boys every night when I turn out the lights in the orphanage dormitory: ‘Goodnight, you Princes of Maine, you Kings of New England.’ It’s a line I love, and I’ve been proved right: American men often come up to me and say, ‘Do you know what I say to my boys just before they go to sleep?’ And I have to act surprised . . .
One of the most enjoyable aspects of getting to my age in movies is watching all the young stars come up, and Charlize Theron is one of the most talented – and beautiful – of them all. She was a pleasure to work with on Cider House. We had to play a potentially embarrassing scene together in which my doctor character gives her an obstetric examination with her legs open and up on stirrups. We were all waiting to see how she would handle this and she did it in typical Charlize fashion. When the time came for the shoot, she got up on the stirrups, gave her wickedest smile and opened her legs to reveal the nastiest pair of old man’s underpants I have ever seen – although being Charlize, she still managed to look sexy in them!
I have a list of younger actresses that I love to work with and Charlize is right at the top of it, along with Nicole Kidman, Beyoncé Knowles and Scarlett Johannson. They are all brilliantly talented, but they are also funny and they have the same kindness that I see and love in Shakira.
I have always been fascinated by beautiful women.