I live for the day ... I don’t live for tomorrow and I certainly don’t live for yesterday
AT 85, SIR MICHAEL CAINE IS RELISHING EVERY MOMENT LIFE HAS TO OFFER AS HANNAH STEPHENSON DISCOVERS
WELCOMING me into his penthouse flat overlooking London’s Chelsea Harbour, Sir Michael Caine is clearly relishing life in his 80s.
Shelves are lined with framed pictures of the award-winning actor and his family, snaps of him holding one of his two Oscars, with his wife Shakira, a petite and beautiful tour de force who bustles around in the background today.
At 85, he’s still making movies, despite breaking his ankle earlier this year. It’s taken a while to heal but he’s now walking without a stick again, he reveals.
Sir Michael has also written his third book, Blowing The Bloody Doors Off, in which he highlights where he’s come from (workingclass, never expected to do much) to where he’s arrived (stardom, wealth, all-round success) and how he got there (push-backs, heartbreak, good movies, bad movies, dogged determination).
What’s different about this one, compared with his previous two autobiographies, is that Sir Michael offers his life lessons to the reader.
It’s thinly disguised as a guide for actors – learn your lines, turn up on time, have fun, use failures and difficulties to move forward – but the messages can really be adopted by anyone.
Sir Michael is good company. His brain has stayed sharp, his humour is quick, and that trademark Cockney accent which helped break class barriers in the 1960s is as recognisable as ever.
He laments that Shakira, his wife of 45 years, is going to New York for four days – the longest they’ll have ever been apart – to see her mother, who is unwell, and he doesn’t quite know what to do with himself.
“I’ll go home to the country, watch TV for four days. I’m taking a cook so I don’t have to do anything – and I’ll probably get a little bit p***ed,” he says with a chuckle.
The star of Alfie, The Ipcress File, Get Carter, The Italian Job, Educating Rita, The Cider House Rules, King Of Thieves and more than 100 other films, has lost many great friends in recent times, including Sir Roger Moore who died last year, and reflects that these days, weddings and birthday parties give way to hospital visits and memorial services.
“And each successive death does not get any easier to bear. I have, though, found that as our little group has become smaller and smaller, it has also become closer and closer. I have also enjoyed getting to know my friends’ widows better than I did when their husbands were alive,” he writes.
Today, he says he never thinks about his own mortality.
“I could be sitting here talking to you and then die from a stroke and wouldn’t know anything about it at all. My mother lived to 92, one grandfather 94, and another grandfather 96. I might have 10 years yet.
“I live for the day. I don’t live for tomorrow and I certainly don’t live for yesterday. I say to my kids, ‘Don’t look back, you’ll trip over’. I relish every moment.”
Sir Michael’s acting roles have become meatier since he became too old to be cast as the leading man and began to get cast as the dad, he reflects.
“A producer sent me a script and I sent it back saying the part was too small. He sent it back, saying, ‘I didn’t want you to play the lover, I want you to play the father’. That ended my career as a movie star.
“The point is that it’s never too late to change your life. I went on to win an Academy Award for The Cider House Rules and I’m still at it, yet I could have retired.
“I’ve always said, ‘You don’t retire from the movies, they retire you’, otherwise I would have retired at 65.”
He’s currently working on Medieval, a war film being shot in the Czech Republic, and is considering a TV comedy series – which he’s never done – centring on people in a care home. He also wants to write a novel.
Indeed, Maurice Micklewhite (his born name) has come a long way. The son of a Billingsgate Market fish porter and a charlady, he was brought up in a two-room flat with an outside toilet and no hot water, in one of the grottiest areas of London.
He survived rickets and poverty as a child, the trenches of Korea as a young soldier, and received a succession of knock-backs when he decided he wanted to act; people told him he’d never be a movie star.
“I became an actor not to be rich and famous. I had a Cockney accent, wasn’t very good-looking, there was no hope for me. All I set out to do was to become the best actor that I could be.”
Of course, he proved his detractors wrong long ago, and while several of his movies were turkeys, he regrets nothing.
Jaws: The Revenge, one of his stinkers, paid for a very nice house for his mum, he reflects.
He is still surprised at how far he has come, though: “I’m the most amazed person at my own success in the world.”
Sir Michael says the Sixties revolution altered the course of his life, when working-class heroes and angry young men became fashionable in the movies.
His career in later life has been a joy, he reflects, but his family is now Sir Michael’s top priority. He is relishing the time he spends with his two daughters, Dominique and Natasha, and grandchildren Taylor, 10, and nine-year-old twins, Allegra and Miles.
“Family is everything. Shakira’s incredible. We’ve been married 45 years and haven’t had a row yet.
“The secret of a happy marriage is separate bathrooms,” he states with a laugh.
His grandchildren keep him young, he says proudly. “You grow old and one day you think, ‘I’m going to die soon’. Then you have grandchildren and you forget all about that. Your whole life starts again.”