CAINE AND ABLE
Why Sir Michael is still in demand at the age of 85
At times while talking with Sir Michael Caine, one can feel like they’re being driven home to south London by an old-school black cab driver. The sort who recalls the slums and bomb sites, who shakes his head at the glass towers that replaced them, but without sentiment because he only ever wanted to get on, to get out.
Two days a week Michael comes in from Leatherhead, Surrey, with his wife Shakira (71), for meetings and lunch with friends. At 85 he no longer drives, but then he never enjoyed it much. He bought a Rolls-Royce with his first big pay cheque before he had a licence. From the window of the Chelsea Harbour Hotel he points to his apartment over in the next tower. Beneath us was once Canteen, the most fashionable restaurant of the 1990s, which he co-owned with Marco Pierre White. This is plutocrat London: soulless, sealed, swish and bland.
“You don’t realise,” says Michael, “if you weren’t born or growing up at that time, what it was like before the 1960s. It was terrible. Very dreary and very, very dull. Because working class people changed everything. Dress, food, restaurants, music, drama, films. Everything.”
Before the 1960s, Michael watched only American war movies, because From Here To Eternity focused on the squaddies, while British films were about officers. The lower orders, as in Shakespeare, were companions or comic turns. Michael believes he only got his big movie break as a lieutenant in 1964’s Zulu because director Cy Endfield was American − a Brit would never have cast him as upper class.
Then, all of a sudden, being working class was cool, modern, iconoclastic, and Michael was Alfie, the Jack-the-lad; and Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File, the anti-Bond. David Bailey’s portrait of him in that era − carefree, fag dangling − captured a new masculinity. Michael is well made, handsome,1.88m and charismatic, but never macho.
His hair is white now, but Michael is upright and trim.
He is polite but not warm, a professional who apologises for being one minute late. His default mode is anecdote: stories of Frank Sinatra, Jack Nicholson, Woody Allen and Liz Taylor, some oft-told but most great. How does it feel seeing clips of himself in his pomp. Nostalgic, sad?
“No,” he says. “I feel very happy, because those films were successes. I mean, The Ipcress File made me a star in England, Alfie made me a star in America and I got nominated for an Academy Award. I was off and running.“
Before the 1960s saved him, Michael had a whole other life. He was born in south London into misery memoir poverty: an outside toilet, Friday baths by the fire. His mother was a charlady, his dad a Billingsgate porter who died, as Michael describes in his autobiography, with four shillings in his pocket “after 56 years working like a beast of burden”.
So how exactly did he escape that fate?
“The Second World War was the best thing that happened to me,” he says. “We got bombed out and put in a lovely prefab with an indoor bathroom. More importantly, I was evacuated from a slum to the country.”
Yet the first family he lived with in Norfolk hit him “for anything − if we came in with our shoes on, we got a great walloping”. Every weekend his hosts went away, locking Michael and another boy in a cupboard under the stairs from Friday to Monday.
“They used to leave us pork pies to eat, and water. We were six,” he tells. When his mother found out, “She nearly went to prison because she beat the woman up.”
Michael was luckier with his next lodging, falling under the wing of a headmistress who spotted his intelligence, and fed his mind with books and his body with country food (he shot up 0.3 metres).
Michael, who joined a school drama club to kiss girls, saw acting as a route to an easier life. But then came national service in Korea, nearly dying on patrol, then recurring cerebral malaria. He returned to England, living hand to mouth, and fell in love with one of his leading ladies, Patricia
Haines. He married her at 22, had a daughter,
Dominique, and then, unable to a cope with bedsit poverty, fled guiltily back to London and a whole other life of grotty digs, debt, dead-end jobs and failure without a safety net.
When fame came with Alfie, he was 32 and London was shaking off the war. The Italians took over Soho with coffee, cheap food, and concerts where you could dance until 3am
“and meet beautiful people of whatever sex you’re looking for”. Michael was single throughout most of the 1960s. He shared a flat and directed air traffic control for the incoming squadrons of women, of which Michael had his share. “I was a romantic,” he says. “I was never a one-night-stand man.” Never?
“Well, occasionally,” he chuckles. I wonder if the #MeToo movement has made him rethink how women were treated back then. “I’m a fully paid-up feminist,” he declares. “Oh, yes. I’m all for the ladies.”
Of the Harvey Weinstein revelations he says, “Well, let me tell you. I knew they were there. But the gravity is a surprise to me. I’ll give you Harvey in one sentence. I had a row with him once and I called him dishonest. And he said to me, ‘Michael, I’m an honest man. I would only ever stab you in the chest.’
“And I knew he was a bit of
‘ Working class people changed everything. Dress, food, restaurants, music, drama, films. Everything’
a, you know. It was called ‘the casting couch’ in Hollywood. And it was almost a joke. But to me, the casting couch was Harvey and a pretty young actress comes in and he says,
‘To get this part you’ve got to do this.’ And she says, ‘No, I won’t.’ And he says, ‘You haven’t got the part,’ and she walks out.
“I had no idea that he would be exposing himself or doing physical harm to the girl.”
But, wasn’t it bad enough if a part depended on sex?
“Oh, I know. And we knew that some of them did that. But he didn’t do it to the majority of people. Charlize Theron was in The Cider House Rules with me [Weinstein produced it] and he certainly never did anything with her. It’s when they’re slightly unknown and they need it. Do you know what I mean? You can’t tell Elizabeth Taylor, ‘You’re going to have to screw me to get this part.’
“But I mean, he never tried anything on with me. I felt quite unattractive,” he laughs weakly. “I did three pictures, I spent ages with Harvey − Little Voice,
The Cider House Rules, which I won an Academy Award for, and The Quiet American, when I was nominated for another one. So he wasn’t making crap pictures − he was an extremely good producer.”
Michael won his first Oscar for Hannah and Her Sisters, which was directed by Woody Allen. How does he feel about actors who now regret appearing in his films after allegations that he abused his daughter Dylan (which Allen denies)?
“I mean, we didn’t commit a crime, working for him,” he says. “In fact, I introduced him to
Mia Farrow. She was married to a friend of mine, Frank Sinatra, and she wanted to meet
Woody, and I knew Woody from [Allen’s favourite New York haunt] Elaine’s restaurant.
“I loved Woody; I thought he was a great guy. And I’m stunned. Absolutely stunned.”
Michael’s own single life ended at 38 when, jaded by stardom and partying, he saw a model on a 1971 Maxwell House coffee ad. He tracked her down and she refused to see him, but he persisted. Working with gorgeous women every day, Michael says, he needed to marry the most beautiful of all to avoid temptation. Shakira calmed down his drinking, eased his stress and his self-obsession. They moved to the Home Counties, outside of London, where Michael started gardening and they had a daughter, Natasha, in 1973.
Though he escaped hardgrind poverty, Michael hasn’t shed his working class values. There is a solidity about him, a work ethic and self-preservation that has assured his longevity. Unlike many contemporaries, he hated drugs, and never took them save for one giggly night smoking weed. He’s made more than 100 movies, great ones if available, but if not well-paying stinkers ( The Swarm, Jaws: the Revenge) did the trick.
He’s never directed because it’s harder and pays less. When I ask if there’s a book he’s always wanted to make into a film, he says his mind doesn’t work like that. “I like to go home early.”
He didn’t want to end up like his dad. “My mother said to me, ‘How much do you earn for a film?’ I said, ‘Millions... enough for you never to have to worry about anything again.’ I bought her a house. I took care of everybody. Rather selfishly, not for them but for my own satisfaction − it made me feel so good. Right to this day, I’m family, family, family.”
But Michael also thinks like a businessmen. He’s owned many restaurants, including Langan’s Brasserie which, along with his memoirs, absorbed his time during his late sixties when film roles eluded him.
Then one day his friend Jack Nicholson asked, “’Do you want to do a movie?’ So I said, ‘I don’t know.’ He gave me Blood and Wine. And I read the script, and it was with him. Jack brought me back to life.”
Since the late 1990s, Michael has found a new audience with the young now recognising him as Batman’s butler. So can he walk around the supermarket?
“I’ve just been there actually. I have a baseball cap and these glasses work. I wear a dull shirt and I keep my head down. I don’t speak to anyone,” he chuckles. “I remember, I was in Capri having dinner with Elton John and he said, ‘God, the paparazzi, they’re driving me nuts.’ And I said, ‘It might be a little bit less if you didn’t wear a bright yellow suit!’“
Now his generation has grown old, with dear friends such as Roger Moore dying off. Michael keeps fit though, he’s given up salt and sugar, and wants to stay alive for his grandkids. But just as they shook up what it meant to be young, his cohort is changing conceptions of age. Some of the most-loved stars now are Dames Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Helen Mirren. “Well, I have a theory about that, too,” Michael confides. “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel starred old people and it took almost $229 million. The studios took note.”
Last year Michael starred in Going in Style, a film about pensioners robbing the bank that fleeced them, co-starring Morgan Freeman and Alan Arkin. He also shot The King of Thieves, about the Hatton Garden heist.
“Ten years ago that would never have been made, with five guys over 65 doing a robbery. Now it was made because they were over 65,” he marvels.
The old are seen as funny, poignant, stoical and brave. “Yes, and the studios also think all these old actors will work cheaper than these bloody movie stars!” Michael says.
I bet you’re not cheap, I say. “Well, I’m not that cheap,” he replies. “But I’m cheaper than Tom Cruise.”