Michael Caine reflects on life
‘Blowing the Bloody Doors Off’ is part memoir, part advice manual for aspiring actors
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. Out now, 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.
“The luck I’ve had, you couldn’t make it up,” Caine said during an interview in his riverside London apartment, with a pano- ramic view up and down the Thames. “I mean, even once I was a success, I made a lot of flop movies. But I only made three at a time before I had a hit.”
In print and in person, Caine describes his success as 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 — for Hannah and Her Sisters and The Cider
House Rules. 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.
Caine says his optimistic outlook is rooted in his hardscrabble early years.
Born Maurice Micklewhite into a workingclass London family, he was a child during the London Blitz and later, 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.
DESPERATION
“I was nobody from nowhere who knew nothing about anything,” he said. His drive to succeed came from “desperation — the determination to become something other than a factory worker.
“My father was an example of what I was and how lucky I was to have been born all those years later,” he said. “My father was an extremely clever, intelligent man but completely uneducated and a complete waste of a brain — and that’s what was happening to me, and I could see that.”
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.
“But also, timing played a massive part in my career.”
Caine was starting out just as a new generation of writers was emerging — playwrights like John Osborne and Harold Pinter, telling stories about workingclass life.
“Suddenly every working-class 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. “And that’s the way the 60s started.”
The 60s 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.
When leading-man parts dried up, Caine retired — briefly. The last two decades have brought some of the most rewarding parts of his career, including his six films with Nolan, whom Caine calls “a brilliant director... the new David Lean.”
These days, Caine is contentedly unretired, balancing work and time with his family: Shakira, his wife of 45 years; his two daughters.
Of his recent films, he’s proudest of Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth, in which he played an aging orchestra conductor.
“I don’t play the leads in movies now — I’m too bloody old to be getting up every morning at half past six,” he said. —