Michael Caine in The Ipcress File (1965, dir. Sidney J. Furie) (via)
The dark side of fame:
“A long time ago I interviewed Michael Caine. He came to America to make a movie called Hurry Sundown, after having become a success in Alfie and The Ipcress File. And I said, ‘What does it feel like to be a movie star? And he said, ‘You can’t go into a dirty bookstore anymore.’
He said, ‘I tried it. In England we don’t have the kind of pornography you have over here, but I’d heard about the stores in Times Square. And so I looked in through the window of one of them; I was curious. With my trained actor’s eye, I quickly realized that there was no eye contact in a porno store. Everybody looks as tunnel vision, nobody looks at anybody else, and I realized this is a way… An actor would notice this. And I congratulated myself, I said Michael, you can walk right in there because nobody will look at you, so I walked right in.
‘Unfortunately, there was a gent on an elevated stool with a microphone whose job it was to say, ‘Okay gents, this isn’t the library, make your purchases.’ And he got on his microphone and said, ‘Look who we have in the rubber wear section - Michael Caine!’”
-Roger Ebert, Fresh Air, orig. airdate March 21, 1996
