Michael Caine interview
By Nigel Farndale
For which two films was Michael Caine awarded Oscars? You can imagine the pub quiz
teams going into a huddle: ‘Well, it can’t be Zulu or The Italian Job. Too obvious.’ And the
whispers coming from another table: ‘What about Get Carter, or one of those Harry Palmer
movies?’ And from a third table: ‘I bet it’s Educating Rita and that adaptation of a Graham
Greene novel. What was it called? The Quiet American.’
That last table would have been closest because our man was nominated for both of those, as
he was for Alfie and Sleuth. But the correct answer, and not a lot of people know this, is The
Cider House Rules and Hannah and Her Sisters. And the point is that Michael Caine, Sir
Michael Caine, has starred in a lot of great films.
Bafflingly though, given that he must have good instincts about these things, he has also
starred in some true stinkers and, as he has appeared in more than a hundred films, these
outnumber the classics. Indeed, if you drew up a list of all his films and stuck a pin in it at
random chances are you would hit a Jaws 4, an Ashanti or, God forbid, The Swarm.
When I meet him on an autumnal afternoon at a hotel across from his flat in Chelsea Harbour,
I put the stinker question to him. ‘Well you have to remember,’ he says in a voice that I don’t
need to describe, ‘that film actors like Robert Redford and Paul Newman were being paid as
American stars, whereas I was being paid as a British interloper.
‘They could afford to be more choosy because they were being paid about six times more
than I was being paid. I would have to do four or five pictures to earn the same as one of
theirs. You know, they would be getting five million to my 700,000.’ Still quite a lot of
money though.
‘Yes, but I came from a very poor background and by then, and I’m talking about the late
Seventies here, I had the idea that everyone should have a house, family and friends, so I had
about seven or eight [houses] on the go. Then I got clobbered by the super tax, which was 82
per cent. That was why I went to live in Hollywood.’
The title of his new autobiography is The Elephant to Hollywood, the elephant being The
Elephant and Castle in south London, which was pretty much a slum when Maurice
Micklewhite, as he then was, grew up there. If success is measured by how far you travel in a
lifetime, physically and metaphorically, then his journey from Maurice to Michael, from the
Elephant to Hollywood, makes him one of the most successful actors in history.
The son of a charlady and a Billingsgate porter (who died from liver cancer when Caine was
24), he wasn’t exactly born with a silver spoon in his mouth. What he was born with was
rickets. He was eventually cured of it, but still has weak ankles.
Luckily for him he was evacuated during the war, which meant he ate healthily for the first
time and built up his strength, ending up a strapping 6ft 2in. He left grammar school at 16,
did his national service – seeing action in Korea – then became an actor, working in rep for
nine years. During that time he got his girlfriend pregnant, married her and then divorced her.
He was 30 when his big break came with Zulu in 1964. After this he became a symbol of the
Swinging Sixties, ‘the king of cool’, and with his mates Terence Stamp and Sean Connery,
drank and womanised his way through the decade.
In 1973, he met and married the love of his life, Shakira (after seeing her in a Maxwell House
commercial on television). She made him clean up his act – he was drinking up to three
bottles of vodka a day – and now, at 77, he describes himself as a devoted husband, father
and grandfather who only drinks wine in moderation with meals.
No longer a tax exile, he divides his time between London and his country house in Surrey.
And if there was any bitterness or angst left in his life about his tough, working-class
upbringing, it evaporated in 2000 when he was knighted. As his friends joked at the time, the
Queen must have knocked the chip off his shoulder with her sword.
His problem, if it is a problem, is that he is now trapped behind a thin yet impenetrable fog of
anecdote. For him, every day is a groundhog day because people will ask him to tell his
amusing, self-deprecating stories, even if they have heard them before, and, being a friendly
sort, he will go into autopilot and oblige them.
I am no exception, but, in the hope that he will give me something fresh as well, I point out at
the start of the interview that I have not only read his new biography, but also, some time ago,
his old one, the one which, when it came out in 1992, was compared with The Moon’s a
Balloon by David Niven, arguably the greatest memoir ever written by an actor – and I
couldn’t help noticing how many of his ‘classic’ stories have been served up again.
‘Well, the trouble was,’ he says, ‘my publishers pointed out that most readers of this memoir
wouldn’t have read the last one because it was a long time ago, so I would need to explain the
background all over again. You know, explain about the Elephant and all that. Also when I
wrote that first one I thought my career was over, but as it turned out it only covered the first
half of my career and the second half has been just as successful.’
Fair enough. But another drawback to interviewing Michael Caine is that he is so, well,
Michael Caine-ish: the way he leans forward and jabs his finger to emphasise a point; the
cockney voice that rises to a shout at the end of each sentence; the oddly translucent cast of
his skin; the sleepy, heavy-lidded, pink-rimmed eyes that stare at you without blinking.
Sitting opposite him is like watching someone do an unsubtle impersonation of an unsubtle
impersonation of Michael Caine.
It was his friend Peter Sellers who set down the parody benchmark with his answering
machine message in the Seventies: ‘My name is Michael Caine and I just want to tell you that
Peter Sellers isn’t in. And not many people know that.’ But most impressionists have had a
go since. Paul Whitehouse’s ‘I am Michael Paine and I am a nosy neighbour’ stands out as a
fine example of the genre.
I ask about the impersonations, and he says everyone he meets quotes lines at him. And he
quotes them quoting him now, which makes for an unreal moment: ‘You’re only supposed to
blow the bloody doors off!’
And the anecdotes? Does he ever tire of telling them? ‘I enjoy making people laugh. The
trick is to tell them against yourself. If you praise yourself your stories aren’t funny.’
There was one in the latest memoir that made me laugh out loud, I say. It concerned the time
he was filming on location in Spain and was desperate to meet Brigitte Bardot who was
working on another film not far away. Suddenly there she was in front of him saying hello
and, in his surprise, he knocked the table over, spilling drinks everywhere. ‘Oh yeah,’ he says
with a chuckle. ‘I was a complete f---ing disaster.
'Actually – and I didn’t put this in the book because no one would have believed me – but I
went to bed early one night, because I was completely knackered and I had to be up at six the
next day, and I felt a hand on my shoulder and opened my eyes. It was Brigitte Bardot. She
had paid the bloody doorman to let her in, and she said: “We’re going out dancing, Michael,
you’ve got to come with us.” No one would believe me!’
So did he go? ‘Of course.’ And? ‘No, we never had a romance, Brigitte and I. But my film
career has meant I’ve done all sorts of things like that. I got to play football with Pelé, for
God’s sake. And I danced with Bob Fosse. You just meet these people.’
You sure do. There is an endearing account in his book of how he and John Lennon in their
first flush of fame became soul mates at Cannes, hiding from the press, getting drunk together.
What is it like, I ask, when two famous people meet like that? Do you compare notes?
‘You become instant friends because each knows who the other is, and you know they want
nothing from you. Also, all famous people talk to each other instantly. It’s a protocol. Mutual
recognition,’ Caine says.
‘With John and I it was a case of bonding because we were both working class and we shared
a sense of humour. We were pretending we weren’t who people thought we were.’
When I ask if he finds it hard to forge friendships with what Liz Hurley calls ‘civilians’, there
is a pause before he answers. ‘My closest friends are Roger Moore, who is an actor, Sean
Connery, who is an actor, Terry O’Neill, who is a photographer, Johnny Gold, who was the
boss of Tramp, and Leslie Bricusse, who is a composer. Come to think of it, I don’t meet
other people often enough to become friends with them. I don’t meet stockbrokers, or
carpenters, or coal miners, I spend all day with actors, composers and photographers.’
What about his relationships with the working-class people he grew up with? His mother, say?
Did he ever feel embarrassed by her lack of sophistication when he was hanging out with
Frank Sinatra, Laurence Olivier and the like?
‘Good God, no. I took her to Beverly Hills, Las Vegas.’ Might she have thought he was
embarrassed about her? ‘I asked her to come to the premiere of Zulu and she said no, I guess
because she thought as a cockney charlady she would embarrass me, so I took a young girl, I
forget who it was, and I saw my mother in the crowd, looking at us and I was so angry with
her. But the next time I had a premiere I took her with me and she came in a mink coat I
bought her. She loved that mink coat. She thought it was the best thing ever.’
Does he draw upon his everyday life when acting? ‘Oh yes, sense memory, all the time.
That’s Stanislavski. There is an incident in my life which I always think about to make
myself cry, and I’ve never even told my wife what it is. It is my one last secret. I can cry
instantly. A very sad incident which I have never told anyone.’ He grins when he sees me
raising my eyebrows quizzically. ‘And I’m not telling you either.’
He does seem to cry a lot in his everyday life, judging by his book, a typical occasion being
when Cary Grant gave him a consoling hug after he didn’t win an Oscar. ‘Oh bloody hell,
I’m terrible. I don’t do it often, but I do cry. I also laugh a lot, people tell me I’m funny and I
do like to laugh.’
Did he ever feel like an impostor? I only ask because at the start of his career he seemed to be
so lacking in confidence, throwing up all the time.
‘I was always p---ed off because of the way some people treated me, because of my workingclass background, I mean. Being patronised. But the whole point of the Sixties was that you
had to take people as they were. If you came in with us you left your class, and colour, and
religion behind, that was what the Sixties was all about.’
He certainly broke the mould. Indeed after Zulu, well, he tells it better: ‘They took my
contract away after that because I looked like a homosexual on screen. But [the film producer]
Harry Saltzman saw Zulu and for some reason in that officer he saw Harry Palmer. I was
sitting in a restaurant and Harry saw me and he sent the waiter over and…’
There was a certain femininity to Harry Palmer, the opposite of the manly James Bond.
‘Yeah, he was supposed to look like an ordinary man wearing glasses, pushing a supermarket
trolley. In Hollywood they watched me in The Ipcress File and asked again if I was gay. No
Hollywood hero would wear glasses and cook a meal for a woman.’
But he was far from homosexual. Indeed his sex life before he met Shakira was Olympian.
‘Well I was a sort of Alfie. We all were. We were young, rich, not bad looking and famous,
who was going to turn us down? I became a cook because I was single at the time and I
discovered that the secret to getting a woman into bed was to cook her a great meal. And
make her laugh.’
Can he remember how many women he slept with? ‘Oh no. No. But I was 38 when I met
Shakira so by then I wanted to settle down and become a family man. I was never a
philanderer, playing around, getting involved in scandals. Nothing. We became a team, with
her the quieter and better looking half.’
But when he was still single, it is telling how often he seemed to fall in love with women,
rather than simply lusting after them. ‘Well I had to fall in love with them because I was a
romantic. I’m not a man who could go to a prostitute. I’ve never been with one because the
main thing about sex for me was romance.’
Returning to the topic of what always makes him cry, I ask about the time he was evacuated
as a child. He was sent to Norfolk where the family who took him in beat him and locked him
in the cupboard under the stairs.
‘But you have to remember, we were running away from death. We were going to get
bombed if we stayed in London. The parents thought just get them out of London, we can
sort out any other problems later. Actually my mother came down and sorted it out in two
weeks. Took us back.’
Has he ever seen a therapist? ‘Naa, I’m of the Groucho Marx School that anyone who sees a
psychiatrist needs his head examined.’ But did it leave any scars? ‘Well I’m a patron of the
NSPCC, so that’s one thing it left me with. Child abuse is the worst form of cowardice you
can think of, to do something bad to a defenceless child.’
I notice as he says this that a film of water appears on his eyes. ‘I’m quite a rabid rightwinger about paedophilia,’ he continues, ‘if you want to bring back hanging for them then
I’m your man. I’ll pull the lever. Don’t get me started on that. I hate it. Hate it. I can’t see a
movie where a child gets kidnapped, so, yeah, that must be the psychological detritus I’m left
with.’ Blimey.
Another episode I want to discuss is his time in Korea. He was a machine-gunner and when
the enemy charged it was kill or be killed. There was one time when they were surrounded by
Chinese soldiers while out on patrol. The smell of garlic warned them that the Chinese were
approaching and as they hid, waiting to be discovered, he felt angry rather than afraid.
‘I remember it so clearly. I got so p---ed off and angry with the world. I was 19 and I had all
these things to do, and out of the anger came what formed me for the rest of my life: that you
can do what you like to me but I will take as many of you with me as possible. It made me
realise that I really had to start living my life to the full. Savour every moment.’
Back then, living life to the full meant hedonism and hard drinking. But now ‘I take care of
myself because I have three grandchildren. I think to myself I gotta live, I gotta live because I
want to see how their story goes. I’m besotted with them. I had two daughters but no son and
now my eldest grandson is my son. He’s blond with blue eyes and we have this incredible
bond. In my next film, a Jules Verne story, I play a grandfather. A first for me.’
He’s also still doing the Batman franchise (as the butler) and he still comes up with a gem
such as Harry Brown (2009). ‘That's the thing, you see, you never know which is going to be
a classic and which a stinker, not while you’re making it anyway.’
It’s time to go. He walks across to the window, holds back the curtain and says: ‘You can see
my apartment from here. See that red plant on the balcony?’ He jabs the finger. ‘That one.’
It’s as if he is playing Michael Paine, the nosy neighbour, someone else’s version of himself.
At 77, he still looks like Michael Caine has always looked, still sounds like Michael Caine
has always sounded, yet he remains an impersonation of an impersonation.