Michael Caine: It was just keeping going at what I did. I tried to make myself better every day and eventually, someone noticed it. Namely, Cy Endfield, who was the director of Zulu. He saw me in a play, my first play in the West End, called Next Time I’ll Sing To You. And I played a cockney in that, and he wanted to cast me as a cockney. It was about the military, and I was going to be a cockney corporal.
I went for the audition, and I didn’t have a phone, and he said, “I’m sorry, Michael. We’ve cast the corporal, you know, but I couldn’t call you. You don’t have a phone.” I said, “No, I don’t have a phone.” I said it was okay because I’d been turned down for a lot of parts. I was in a very long bar at the Prince of Wales Theatre in West End in London — a very long bar — and I always regard that long bar as the secret of my success because if it had been shorter, I wouldn’t be here.