Caine & ABLE
Sir Michael Caine is turning 90. MARION McMULLEN looks at how talent and tenacity took him from East End poverty to movie legend status
COCKNEY Maurice Micklewhite was born the son of a charlady and a Billingsgate Market fish porter.
He grew up in a two-room flat with an outside toilet and no hot water, in one of the grottiest areas of London, and left school when he was 15.
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.
Now he is better known across the world as film star and double Oscar winner Sir Michael Caine, renowned for movies like The Italian Job, Sleuth, Educating Rita, The Ipcress File, Get Carter and Hannah and her Sisters.
He once said: “I never give advice to younger actors because, when I was their age, I used to ask older actors for advice and the only advice I got was ‘Just give up’”.
Michael was born on March 14, 1933, and took his stage surname from an advertisement he saw on a marquee for the film The Caine Mutiny.
He was nothing like the posh-sounding leading men who dominated the industry at the time. He wore glasses, spoke with a Cockney accent and was working class.
His first theatre work saw him earning 50 shillings a week (£2.50) before he began landing work in television and then uncredited roles in films.
It has been said he appeared in more than 30 uncredited movie roles before he was “discovered” – and offered the role of an aristocratic officer in the 1963 film Zulu.
The 1960s proved an important turning point in his career. He went on to appear as secret agent Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File and the womanising chauffeur in Alfie. Alfie itself became one of the biggest movies of 1966 and proved hugely popular in America.
“I shared a flat with Terence Stamp. I understudied Peter O’Toole. I remember being in Liverpool and going to see a matinee with a young actor nobody had ever heard of called Albert Finney,” recalled Michael. “Oh, a tremendous wave. It was ridiculous. I knew a writer who wanted to write musicals called Lionel Bart, a painter called Francis Bacon.” Michael also shared a London flat with future celebrity hairstylist Vidal Sassoon.
“Be like a duck, my mother used to tell me. Remain calm on the surface and paddle like hell underneath”.
He also pointed out: “I’m the original bourgeois nightmare... a Cockney with intelligence and a million dollars.”
He spent five weeks in subzero Finland in 1967 playing Cockney spy Harry Palmer again in Billion Dollar Brain. He later came face to face with the “Brain” at Pinewood Studios where a £150,000 Honeywell computer took over the entire soundstage.
Michael fell in love when he first saw his future wife Shakira in an advert for Maxwell House coffee directed by Ridley Scott.
He thought she was “the most beautiful woman he had ever seen” and was prepared to fly off to meet her before learning she was actually living in London.
They eventually met and the couple married in 1973 in Las Vegas at the Candlelight Wedding Chapel. They recently marked their 50th wedding anniversary.
Michael once told the Radio
Times: “I fell in love with her in about eight minutes. It took her two hours to fall in love with me.”
He and Shakira auctioned off artwork, furniture, film posters and jewellery last year as they downsized into a new home.
A poster for Zulu went for £11,500 and a director’s chair from the 1971 crime film Get Carter, in which Sir Michael starred as gangster Jack Carter, sold for £5,000. The Oscar winner’s gold Rolex sold for £125,250.
He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in the 2000 Birthday Honours for his contributions to cinema and brought out his third book, Blowing the Bl**dy Doors Off: and Other Lessons in Life in 2018.
“I live for the day. I don’t live for tomorrow and I certainly don’t live for yesterday”, he says.
Michael finally got around to legally changing his name from Maurice Micklewhite to Michael Caine when he was 83. He said he became fed up of being delayed by airport security because the name on the passport did not match the person they knew standing before them.
Pay attention to the background in The Muppet Christmas Carol – in which Michael played miser Scrooge with Kermit the Frog as Bob Cratchit – and you might notice a store called Micklewhite’s in the background.
He said: “My most useful acting tip came from... John Wayne – talk low, talk slow and don’t say too much.”
I’m the original bourgeois nightmare... a Cockney with intelligence and a million dollars Michael Caine