Let’s pause for a moment and enjoy that thought. Michael Caine, DJ. Imagine the intro! (“Hello, my name is Michael Caine…”) What would he play? A bit of Beatles, Stones and some Elvis perhaps? “No. I play chill-out music. That’s what I like.”
For some reason, the image of Michael Caine burning CDs with chill-out music for an evening entertaining his guests in the heart of the English countryside is extremely pleasing. And I would imagine that dinner with Sir Michael and Shakira, his wife of 34 years, is a darned good night out, too – carefully selected mood music, home-cooked food and, if you’re lucky, a wealth of stories about the Hollywood elite. Caine is a natural storyteller. His anecdotes are rolled out with the ease of a professional after-dinner speaker, and very funny they are, too.
Like the time Bette Davis, by then in her mid-sixties, turned up at a party in honour of Caine and his film, Alfie, which had just opened in America. It was 1966 and international stardom was about to be visited on the young Londoner, born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite. To meet one of his cinematic heroes was a huge thrill. “As she walked in she stood and stared at me,” he recalls. “When I went over she said, ‘I hope you don’t mind me staring at you, but you remind me of Leslie Howard.’ I said, ‘I’ve been told that before.’ And she said, ‘Leslie Howard screwed every woman in every picture he ever made.’ And I said, ‘Yes, I’d heard that.’ And she said, ‘But he never got me. I was determined he wouldn’t get me.’ I was like, ‘Well, that’s great. I’m very glad for you.’ Then she said: ‘But the thing is, I was looking at you and thinking, what difference would it have made?’”
The delivery is perfect: there’s a slight pause as he looks up from underneath his glasses, inviting the laughter that duly follows. He leans back and lets that famous smile light up his face.
Caine is looking rather good for a man well past retirement age. His hair is silver and cut short, and those unconventionally handsome features have aged well, with wrinkles and laughter lines around his mouth. He’s dressed in classic black leather zip-up jacket with black slacks and a dark blue shirt, open at the neck.
He’s on the third consecutive day of press interviews in a Los Angeles hotel, where he’s holed up doing his bit to promote The Prestige, an intriguing period thriller about two Victorian magicians who start feuding with disastrous consequences. Caine plays Cutter, the man who designs the illusions and attempts to keep the flashy showman (Hugh Jackman) and the purist (Christian Bale) apart as they become obsessed with wrecking each other’s careers.
“I read it and I thought it was brilliant,” says Caine. “It’s like one big magic trick, an illusion. I’ve never seen anything quite like this before. When you get to my age, you’ve done practically everything – spies, romances, comedy – and you look for something different. This is certainly different.
“I’m actually retired, but they won’t leave me alone,” he says with mock exasperation. “It’s like the Mafia: they make me an offer I can’t refuse.”
“They”, in this instance, are hip directors such as Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men) and Christopher Nolan (Batman Begins and now The Prestige), who see the 73-year-old actor as more than a national treasure. They see an actor who has plenty left in the tank. He has two Oscars (Hannah and Her Sisters and The Cider House Rules) and a place in the hearts of film fans and the younger generation of British actors who cite him as an inspiration. In the past, Caine was notoriously not as picky as he might have been. Along with the great movies which mark each of the past four decades – Zulu, Alfie and The Ipcress File in the Sixties; Get Carter and The Man Who Would Be King in the Seventies; Educating Rita and Hannah and Her Sisters in the Eighties; Little Voice and The Cider House Rules in the Nineties – there have been some bad films and some absolute stinkers.
But if his quality control sometimes lets him down, Caine has done fantastic work of late and shows no sign of tailing off – he will remake his own film Sleuth, playing the role taken by Laurence Olivier in the 1972 original, with a new screenplay by Harold Pinter and directed by Kenneth Branagh, and will then make the sequel to Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, directed by Nolan again.
These days, he insists, it has to be something worthwhile to get him out of bed. “With The Prestige it was Christopher Nolan – he’s bloody marvellous – and a fascinating script. I mean, I’m not working for the rent here or anything. I have to work with people I like and have something good to do, because suddenly it’s a cold Monday morning and you are getting up at 6am and you have six pages of dialogue and you ask yourself, ‘Why the hell am I doing this?’ If you haven’t got a good reason you are liable to feel stupid.”
The truth is, Caine enjoys it too much to let go. “I imagine it’s like being a junkie in as much as you do get the hit,” he says. He claims that he never believed that his career would last as long as it has. The fame came late – he was already 31 when Zulu made him a star in the UK – and once his youthful, blond good looks began to fade, he thought that the work would dry up too.
“I thank God every day that I’ve had this career. There’s a hump you have to get over as an actor. You start out as the good-looking guy, you get the girl and all of that, you are a movie star. Then there comes a time when you’re too old. You’re too old to get the girl at 55 when the leading lady is 22. So you have to start playing character parts. That’s the moment when you find out whether the film star is a real actor.
“And fortunately for me, the film star was a real actor. I had a theatre background, you see, I did nine years of repertory – one week I’d be the lord of the manor, the next the dustman. It’s bloody marvellous training. And now I’m doing the same thing again, playing different characters all the time, and I’m having the time of my life.”
He was raised in Peckham, South London, and after leaving school at 16 found different jobs before doing his national service, which included a spell in Korea. When he returned to the UK in the mid-Fifties he got a job as an assistant stage manager and then as an actor.
By the early Sixties, with those nine years in rep under his belt, Caine was making appearances on television and occasionally film. Britain – or at least London – was changing fast, and this good-looking working-class boy with talent was in the right place at the right time.
“My ambition was always to be a movie actor because that was what I grew up with. I can remember going to see films like Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon. I loved anything with Bogart in it. I liked Spencer Tracy too, because all the actors seemed to have dark hair and he was the only one with blond hair. That gave me hope.”
Caine was acutely conscious of the divide between American and British cinema. “American films were always about the working class and British films were about the upper class. There was no one in British films from my class. They were caricatures.”
Ironically, it was playing an upper-class officer in Zulu, in 1964, that made him famous. And two years later, playing the working-class womaniser Alfie – using his own accent – turned him into a superstar.
“I remember Bob Hoskins telling me he became an actor because I had a Cockney accent and if I could do it, he could do it. It’s one of the reasons I kept my accent, because I can do any accent. I wanted every working-class kid to know that if I made a success of it he could too.”
Alfie came out in 1966 when the Beatles were at their peak, England had won the World Cup, and London was buzzing. Caine was right at the heart of it. “The Sixties was the best time. I was single, it was all free and new and everything was happening.” But Caine was never really tempted by drugs. Booze and birds, that was different, but as to the other stuff, no thanks. “Everyone was smoking pot, but I read somewhere that it affected your memory and I thought, ‘I won’t be able to remember my lines.’ So I never smoked pot. I was too scared.”
Caine’s celebrity sometimes worked against him. By the early Seventies he was about as famous as you could be, the number one man-about-town in London. He had been married once, briefly, in the mid-Fifties to the late actress Patricia Haines and they had a daughter, Dominique. One night, in 1972, he was watching television with his best mate when a commercial for Maxwell House coffee (“There’s an awful lot of coffee in Brazil!”) came on and he was transfixed by “the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen”. “I don’t know why I stayed in that night. At that time I was out at discos every night, pissed. Anyway, this advert came on and I said, ‘Look at that girl, she’s the one! I’m going to marry that one. Tomorrow we’re going to Brazil to find her.’”
Later, at Tramp, he met a friend in the advertising business who made a few calls. “He said, ‘She’s not Brazilian, she’s Kashmiri and she lives on the Fulham Road.’”
Caine called Shakira, he says, 14 days running, and every time she refused to go on a date. “She was living with four girls who were warning her, ‘Don’t go out with him, he’ll just love you and leave you.’ I said to myself, ‘If she says no again, forget it.’ She said yes that night.” They married two years later.
:image:
“Do you know who directed that commercial? Ridley Scott! Every time I see him he says, ‘You owe me!’ I’m married to one of the most incredible women I ever met, so I’m very lucky. Or very shrewd. I chose her, didn’t I? I mean, no one gave her to me.”
Meanwhile, he’s writing his thriller as the mood takes him. “There’s no rush. They say everyone has a book in them and I thought I’d see if I have two. It’s about the amalgamation of terrorist groups, which is going to happen, I think.” He dictates the book on to his computer with the latest software. “I love all those gadgets. I get them from magazines.”
Caine was thrilled when he received the CBE in 1993, and was awarded a knighthood in 2000. “I am very, very patriotic. Don’t get me started,” he warns. He frets that his beloved England is being overlooked as the other home nations enjoy devolution. His friend Sir Sean Connery has become a cheerleader for Scottish nationalism and Sir Michael is beginning to think he’s right. “I’m a very English man. And that doesn’t mean to say I don’t like foreigners and I hate all immigrants. I’m married to an immigrant. But I am not happy at the moment. Everybody seems to be represented but the English.
“There’s a possibility that a Scotsman is going to rule over me. A Scotsman who comes from a constituency where my member of parliament, who I elected, has no say whatsoever. And there is an answer, given to me by my friend Sean: give Scotland its independence. Gordon Brown can be the prime minister of Scotland.”
He sits back. He’s having a bit of a rant, but he never loses that sense of humour. “And I’m worried about the fact that they cheer for the other side in the football and I think to myself, ‘Have they really got my interests at heart?’” Another big grin.
You do wonder what it would be like if Sir Michael Caine of England and Sir Sean Connery of Scotland sat down for a bit of dinner, just like they used to in the old days. Two old mates sharing a bottle of wine and a few memories and a bit of a grump about politics would be a real treat. And Sir Michael would doubtless provide the music.
The Prestige is released on Friday
