Michael Caine
Sir Michael Caine is a retired English actor. Known for his distinctive Cockney accent, he has appeared in more than 130 films over a career that spanned eight decades and is considered a British cultural icon. He has received numerous awards including two Academy Awards, a BAFTA Award, three Golden Globe Awards, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. As of 2017, the films in which Caine has appeared have grossed over $7.8 billion worldwide. Caine is one of only five male actors to be nominated for an Academy Award for acting in five different decades. In 2000, he received a BAFTA Fellowship and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.
Often playing a cockney, Caine made his breakthrough in the 1960s with starring roles in British films such as Zulu, The Ipcress File, The Italian Job, and Battle of Britain. During this time he established a distinctive visual style wearing thick horn-rimmed glasses combined with sharp suits and a laconic vocal delivery; he was recognised as a style icon of the 1960s. He solidified his stardom with roles in Get Carter, The Last Valley, The Man Who Would Be King, The Eagle Has Landed, and A Bridge Too Far.
Caine received two Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actor for his roles as Elliot in Woody Allen's dramedy Hannah and Her Sisters, and as Dr. Wilbur Larch in Lasse Hallström's drama The Cider House Rules. His other Oscar-nominated film roles were in Alfie, Sleuth, Educating Rita, and The Quiet American —all four of which were for the leading actor category. Other notable performances occurred in the films California Suite, Dressed to Kill, Mona Lisa, Little Voice, Quills, Children of Men, Harry Brown, and Youth.
Caine is also known for his performance as Ebenezer Scrooge in The Muppet Christmas Carol, and for his comedic roles in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Miss Congeniality, Austin Powers in Goldmember, and Secondhand Lions. Caine portrayed Alfred Pennyworth in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy. He has also had roles in five other Nolan films: The Prestige, Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk, and Tenet. He announced his retirement from acting in October 2023 and his final film was The Great Escaper, which came out in the same month.
Early life
Michael Caine was born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite at St Olave's Hospital in the Rotherhithe district of London on 14 March 1933, the son of cook and charwoman Ellen Frances Marie and a fish market porter also called Maurice Joseph Micklewhite. His father was from a Catholic Irish Traveller family background. Caine was raised in his mother's Protestant faith. He had a younger brother, Stanley, who also became an actor, and an older maternal half-brother named David Burchell. He grew up in London's Southwark district; during the Second World War, he was evacuated to North Runcton, Norfolk, where he made his acting debut at the village school and had a pet horse called Lottie.After the war, Caine's father was demobilised and the family were rehoused by the council in Marshall Gardens in London's Elephant and Castle area, where they lived in a prefabricated house made in Canada as much of London's housing stock had been destroyed during the Blitz in 1940 and 1941. Caine later wrote in his autobiography, "The prefabs, as they were known, were intended to be temporary homes while London was reconstructed, but we ended up living there for eighteen years—and for us, after a cramped flat with an outside toilet, it was luxury."
At the age of ten, Caine acted in a school play as the father of the ugly sisters in Cinderella. His trousers' zipper was undone, prompting the audience to laugh, which inspired him to pursue an acting career. In 1944, he passed his eleven-plus examination, winning a scholarship to Hackney Downs School. After a year there, he moved to Wilson's School in Camberwell, which he left at age 16 after gaining School Certificates in six subjects. He then worked briefly as a filing clerk and messenger for a film company in Victoria, London and film producer Jay Lewis on Wardour Street.
Military service
In 1951, Caine was called up to do his national service with the British Army. After basic training and 12 months in the Queen's Royal Regiment, from 1952 he served with the Royal Fusiliers, first at the British Army of the Rhine Headquarters in Iserlohn, West Germany, and then on active service in the Korean War. Having contracted malaria, he was sent home in 1953 and discharged from the service.Caine, seeing first-hand how the Chinese used human wave tactics, was left with the sense that the communist Maoist government did not care about its citizens. Having been previously sympathetic towards the ideals of communism, Caine was left repelled by it. He experienced a situation in which he thought he was going to die, the memory of which stayed with him and "formed his character". In his 2010 autobiography The Elephant to Hollywood, he wrote that "The rest of my life I have lived every bloody moment from the moment I wake up until the time I go to sleep."
Caine has said that he would like to see the return of national service in Britain, to help combat youth violence, stating: "I'm just saying, put them in the Army for six months. You're there to learn how to defend your country. You belong to the country. Then, when you come out, you have a sense of belonging, rather than a sense of violence."
Acting career
1950–1963: Acting debut and early roles
Caine's film debut was an uncredited walk-on role in Morning Departure. A few years later in Horsham, Sussex, he responded to an advertisement in The Stage for an assistant stage manager who would also perform bit parts for the Horsham-based Westminster Repertory Company, who were performing at the Carfax Electric Theatre. Adopting the stage name Michael Scott, in July 1953 he was cast as the drunkard Hindley in the company's production of Wuthering Heights. He moved to the Lowestoft Repertory Company in Suffolk for a year when he was 21. It was here that he met his first wife, Patricia Haines. He has described the first nine years of his career as "really, really brutal" as well as "more like purgatory than paradise". He appeared in nine plays during his time at the Lowestoft Rep at the Arcadia Theatre with Jackson Stanley's Standard Players.When his career took him to London in 1954 after his provincial apprenticeship, his agent informed him that there was already a Michael Scott performing as an actor in London and that he had to come up with a new name immediately. Speaking to his agent from a telephone booth in Leicester Square, London, he looked around for inspiration, noted that The Caine Mutiny was being shown at the Odeon Cinema, and decided to change his name to Michael Caine. He joked on television in 1987 that, had a tree partly blocking his view been a few feet to the left, he might have been called "Michael Mutiny". He also later joked in interviews that, had he looked the other way, he would have ended up as "Michael One Hundred and One Dalmatians". In 1958, Caine played the minor role of a court orderly in a BBC Television adaptation of the story, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial.
Caine moved in with another rising cockney actor, Terence Stamp, and began hanging out with him and Peter O'Toole in the London party scene after he had become O'Toole's understudy in Lindsay Anderson's West End staging of Willis Hall's The Long and the Short and the Tall in 1959. Caine took over the role when O'Toole left to make Lawrence of Arabia and went on to a four-month tour of the UK and Ireland. Caine's first film role was as one of the privates in George Baker's platoon in the 1956 film A Hill in Korea. The stars of the film were Baker, Harry Andrews, Stanley Baker and Michael Medwin, with Stephen Boyd and Ronald Lewis; Robert Shaw also had a small part. Caine also appeared regularly on television in small roles. His first credited role on the BBC was in 1956, where he played Boudousse in the Jean Anouilh play The Lark. Other parts included three roles in Dixon of Dock Green in 1957, 1958 and 1959, prisoner-of-war series Escape, and the crime/thriller drama Mister Charlesworth.
Caine continued to appear on television, in serials The Golden Girl and No Wreath for the General, but was then cast in the play The Compartment, written by Johnny Speight, a two-hander also starring Frank Finlay. This was followed by main roles in other plays including the character Tosh in Somewhere for the Night, a Sunday-Night Play written by Bill Naughton televised on Sunday 3 December 1961, another two-hander by Johnny Speight, The Playmates, and two editions of BBC plays strand First Night, Funny Noises with Their Mouths and The Way with Reggie. He also acted in radio plays, including Bill Naughton's Looking for Frankie on the BBC Home Service. A big break came for Caine when he was cast as Meff in James Saunders' Cockney comedy Next Time I'll Sing To You, when this play was presented at the New Arts Theatre in London on 23 January 1963. Scenes from the play's performance were featured in the April 1963 issue of Theatre World magazine.
1964–1975: Stardom and acclaim
When this play moved to the Criterion in Piccadilly with Michael Codron directing, he was visited backstage by Stanley Baker, one of the four stars in Caine's first film, A Hill in Korea, who told him about the part of a Cockney private in his upcoming film Zulu, a film Baker was producing and starring in. Baker told Caine to meet the director, Cy Endfield, who informed him that he had already given the part to James Booth, a fellow Cockney who was Caine's friend, because he "looked more Cockney" than Caine did. Endfield then told the tall Caine that he did not look like a Cockney but like an officer, and offered him a screen test for the role of a snobbish, upper class officer after Caine assured him that he could do a posh accent. Caine believes Endfield offered him, a Cockney, the role of an aristocrat because, being American, he did not have the endemic British class-prejudice. Though he tested poorly, Endfield gave him the part that would make him a film star.Location shooting for Zulu took place in Natal, South Africa, for 14 weeks in 1963. According to his 2010 autobiography The Elephant to Hollywood, Caine had been signed to a seven-year contract by Joseph E. Levine, whose Embassy Films was distributing Zulu. After the return of the cast to England and the completion of the film, Levine released him from the contract, telling him, "I know you're not, but you gotta face the fact that you look like a queer on screen." Levine gave his contract to his Zulu co-star James Booth. Subsequently, Caine's agent got him cast in the BBC production Hamlet at Elsinore as Horatio, in support of Christopher Plummer's Hamlet. Horatio was the only classical role which Caine, who had never received dramatic training, would ever play. Caine wrote, "... I decided that if my on-screen appearance was going to be an issue, then I would use it to bring out all Horatio's ambiguous sexuality."
Caine's roles as effete-seeming aristocrats were to contrast with his next projects, in which he was to become notable for using a regional accent, rather than the Received Pronunciation then considered proper for film actors. At that time his working-class Cockney speech stood out to American and British audiences alike, as did the Beatles' Liverpudlian accents. Zulu was followed by two of Caine's best-known roles: the rough-edged petty-crook-turned-spy Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File and the titular womanising young Cockney in Alfie. In a 2016 interview Caine cited Alfie as his favourite film of his career, saying, "it made me a star in America as well, and it was my first nomination for an Academy Award". He went on to play Harry Palmer in a further four films, Funeral in Berlin, Billion Dollar Brain, Bullet to Beijing and Midnight in Saint Petersburg. Caine made his first film in Hollywood in 1966, after an invitation from Shirley MacLaine to play opposite her in Gambit. During the first two weeks, whilst staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel, he met long-term friends John Wayne and agent "Swifty" Lazar. Wayne was a fan of Caine's performance in Alfie and suggested to Caine, "Speak slow and speak low". Caine was always grateful for that advice. Caine starred in the film The Magus which, although BAFTA-nominated for Best Cinematography, failed at the box office.
Caine starred in the 1969 comedy caper film The Italian Job as Charlie Croker, the leader of a Cockney criminal gang released from prison with the intention of doing a "big job" in Italy to steal gold bullion from an armoured security truck. One of the most celebrated roles of his career, in a 2002 poll his line "You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!" was voted the second-funniest line in film, and favourite one-liner in a 2003 poll of 1,000 film fans. Culminating in a cliffhanger, The Italian Job has one of the most discussed end scenes in film; what happened to the coachload of gold teetering over the edge of a cliff has been debated in the decades since the film was released.
After working on The Italian Job with Noël Coward, and a role as RAF fighter pilot squadron leader Canfield in the all-star cast of Battle of Britain, Caine played the lead in Get Carter, a British gangster film. Caine also starred in a comedy thriller, Pulp. Caine continued with successes including Sleuth opposite Laurence Olivier, and John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King co-starring Sean Connery, which received widespread acclaim. Martyn Palmer of The Times applauded the "lovely double act of Caine and Connery, clowning to their doom", while Huston paid tribute to Caine's improvisation as an actor: "Michael is one of the most intelligent men among the artists I've known. I don't particularly care to throw the ball to an actor and let him improvise, but with Michael it's different. I just let him get on with it." In 1974, Caine appeared in The Black Windmill, co-starring Donald Pleasence.