Page "Michael Caine" Paragraph 10

When his career took him to London in 1954 after his provincial apprenticeship, his agent informed him that there was already a Michael Scott performing as an actor in London and that he had to come up with a new name immediately.

Speaking to his agent from a telephone box in Leicester Square, London, he looked around for inspiration, noted that The Caine Mutiny was being shown at the Odeon Cinema in 1954, and decided to change his name to " Michael Caine ".

( Humphrey Bogart was his " screen idol " and he would later play the part originally intended for Bogart in John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King.

) He has joked in interviews that had he looked the other way, he would have ended up as " Michael One Hundred and One Dalmatians ".

( This quip is obviously tongue-in-cheek as the film One Hundred and One Dalmatians was not made until seven years later in 1961 and thus the title would not have been seen by him on a Leicester Square cinema marquee in 1954.

) In 1959, he was Peter O ' Toole's understudy in Lindsay Anderson's West End staging of Willis Hall's The Long and the Short and the Tall.

He took over the role when O ' Toole left to make Lawrence of Arabia ( 1960 ) and went on to a four-month tour of Britain and Ireland.