Cockney Caine’s quite a character
Blowing the Bloody Doors Off And Other Lessons in Life,
Michael Caine has been looking back, and on the whole he likes the view. Regrets? He’s had few.
The 85-year-old star of Alfie, Get Carter and The Dark Knight – among many, many others – reminisces fondly in Blowing the Bloody Doors Off, whose title adapts a line from his 1969 heist caper The Italian Job. It’s part memoir, part advice manual for aspiring actors and anyone else nursing an elusive dream of success. Most of the advice is resolutely old-fashioned.
Learn your lines. Work hard. Be nice to people. And be lucky. Caine knows he has been extremely fortunate.
He describes his success as a sequence of lucky breaks. His first big movie break, as a British Army officer in Zulu in 1964, was followed by a role as a world-weary spy in The Ipcress File. On the back of that came his breakthrough as a callous manabout-town in Alfie. That film made blond, bespectacled Caine a symbol of swinging London, brought him American fame, and earned him the first of six Academy Award nominations.
He went on to win two Oscars. Later came a stint as butler and mentor Alfred in three Batman movies directed by Christopher Nolan. Along the way, he became an icon, and his signature glasses and Cockney accent spawned a thousand imitators. Born Maurice Micklewhite into a working-class London family, he was a child during the London Blitz and, as a teenage conscript, was sent to fight in the Korean War.
‘‘I have found it pretty easy to be happy since then,’’ he notes in the book. ‘‘Once you’ve been on manoeuvres in Korea, everything else seems like quite a lot of fun.’’ When he returned to London and a dead-end job in a butter factory, Caine resolved to be an actor, although he had little idea how to go about it.
‘‘My father was an example of what I was and how lucky I was to have been born all those years later,’’ he said.
Answering a classified ad led to small parts in a provincial repertory company. Then came work on the London stage, television parts, movie roles and global stardom. If he has a secret, he says, it’s that he kept going when others gave up.
‘‘If someone rejected me, I never worried about it,’’ he said. ‘‘I tried again, because my only alternative was working back in the butter factory.’’ Caine was starting out just as a new generation of writers was emerging – playwrights such as John Osborne and Harold Pinter, telling stories about working-class life.
‘‘Suddenly every workingclass boy who was going to work said: ‘Sod this. I’m going to do something I want to do and do it my way’,’’ he recalled.
The 1960s made Caine a star, and he wasn’t alone. Suddenly, he writes in the book, ‘‘everybody I knew seemed to become a household name’’.
Caine enjoyed fame, when it came, but also worked extremely hard, at one point making
12 films in four years.
The result is a resume of more than 100 features, of varying quality. Caine is cheerful about the low points, films such as schlocky shark sequel Jaws: The Revenge or The Swarm, where Caine and his co-stars learned you should never work with bees.
‘‘None of us realised it was a disaster until about halfway through, when the bees turned up,’’ Caine said. ‘‘We were doing a scene and they all s . . . on us.
‘‘I learned from them – also earned from them,’’ he said of his critical duds. ‘‘I got the same money for the flops as I did from the successes.’’
Caine is now contentedly unretired, balancing work and time with his family: Shakira, his wife of 45 years; his two daughters; and his three grandchildren aged 9 and 10, with whom he is ‘‘besotted.’’
‘‘I have such great times with them,’’ Caine said. ‘‘What astonishes me is the things they know. It’s like talking to a 20-year-old.’’
‘‘I don’t play the leads in movies now – I’m too old to be getting up every morning at half past six,’’ he said. ‘‘I just take little character parts and have a bit of fun.’’