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He could be one of many United Kingdom’s greatest-ever actors and a real legend of the enterprise, however like virtually each single different thespian within the historical past of cinema, Michael Caine has made quite a lot of horrendous movies throughout his 70-year profession.
With two Academy Awards and three Golden Globes simply the tip of a trophy-laden iceberg, although, he’s by no means been one to dwell on the misses for too lengthy when the subsequent hit is lurking across the nook. If something, he’s handled each as a studying expertise and even managed to search out the positives.
Jaws: The Revenge was terrible and price him the chance to overlook out on amassing his first Oscar in individual, however he did a minimum of get pleasure from spending months taking pictures in such sun-kissed and glamorous places whereas the cash earned from the function allowed him to purchase himself a quite good new dwelling.
When it got here to the equally abysmal The Swarm, working with a laundry checklist of Hollywood legends gave Caine perception into the variations between Stateside productions and people again dwelling, however he struggled to justify his choice to signal on for a Steven Seagal vainness venture that was deservedly torn to shreds for being self-indulgent claptrap that existed solely to stroke its star and director’s ego.
The mid-Nineties wasn’t essentially the most fruitful interval of Caine’s profession, in equity, one thing he was joyful to confess when reflecting on how he’d “reached the period of my life I called the twilight zone”. Ageing out of main man roles, he was struck by the realisation that “the spotlight of movie stardom was fading, and it all seemed gloomy.”
A defeatist angle, positive, however Caine’s existential disaster started to devour him. “Soon the scripts started to dry up completely – even the bad ones – and if there is one thing worse than being offered bad scripts it’s being offered none at all,” he wrote for The Every day Mail, so a minimum of he was conscious that aligning himself with Seagal for On Lethal Floor was a catastrophe ready to occur.
And but, he broke his personal self-appointed ‘cardinal rule’ of dangerous films to take action. “The danger is, of course, that the wait for a decent movie makes you desperate, and I got desperate to the point that I accepted a picture in Alaska with Steven Seagal, the martial arts expert,” he defined. “The movie was called On Deadly Ground and the title was to prove apt.”
By his personal admission, Caine had “broken one of the cardinal rules of bad movies” by signing on: “If you’re going to do a bad movie, at least do it in a great location.” As a substitute, there he was within the harsh and unforgiving terrain of Alaska, freezing his arse off for a movie he believed was going to be terrible. It turned out as anticipated, funnily sufficient, however from that day ahead, he “vowed never to work in a tough location again”.
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“Well bless their hearts.”
