Profile: Michael Caine - So what's he all about?

Published on Saturday 14 November 2009 19:08

MICHAEL Caine has a phrase that he used as a mantra with his children: "Use the difficulty". It neatly encapsulates his attitude to a life in which he spent the first 30 years overcoming war, his lowly station in life and a poor family; three anchors that continually conspired to drag the archetypal Cockney geezer back into the south London underclass from which he was busily escaping.

The recent filming of Harry Brown, a film about an ex-marine who is turned into a vigilante by the squalor and violence he sees around him, has brought memories of Caine's tough early years in his native Elephant and Castle flooding back. Filming in London's mean streets catapulted him back into a world of poverty and crime that he thought he'd left behind.

Caine was astounded to find that conditions on his old manor are worse than when he was a lad. He was held back by class and poverty, but he says a strong family and his grammar school scholarship gave him an escape route not open to today's kids in the Castle, youngsters whose lives are blighted by the savage violence that accompanies a flood of drugs onto the streets of south London.

It's been something of an epiphany for Caine. Born Maurice Micklewhite, his early years were particularly harsh, with his family moving to a south London terrace when he was six months old, living in a two-room top-floor flat and sharing the house and one outside toilet with three other families.

Evacuated to rural Berkshire in the war while his father fought in France, he was placed with a policeman and his wife, only to find that whenever the wife (or "the wicked witch" as he calls her) wanted to go shopping she would beat the young Caine and then lock him in a cupboard under the stairs. Word got back to his mother and within a fortnight Caine's charlady mother arrived on the doorstep to find a malnourished son forced to subsist on a tin of sardines a day; mother Micklewhite dispensed a beating of her own that day, this time to the copper's wife with the free and easy fists.

Caine spent the rest of the war in Norfolk with his mother, returning to London to find their house flattened in the Blitz, and moved to Elephant and Castle with his father, just back from the war. If Caine stresses how having a strong family and a father whom he saw as a war hero was the making of him, that's only partly true: his father, a porter at Billingsgate Fish Market, was a heavy drinker and inveterate gambler who frittered away money and died with 36p to his name.

If the Micklewhites had little money, Caine wasn't indulged emotionally either. Growing up as a sensitive, intelligent boy who dreamed of becoming Humphrey Bogart or Spencer Tracy, when he confessed that he wanted to be an actor, his father presumed he was gay. Instead he left school at 16 and became a porter at Smithfield Meat Market, joining a gang to avoid the constant threat of attack by the razor gangs, but leading a bizarre double life as a bookworm who avoided conflict by spending endless hours reading in the library.

It was National Service, he says, which was the making of him. Forced "kicking and screaming" to fight in Korea, complete with its trenches and First World War conditions, he found himself. Out in the paddy fields he killed men and was almost killed.

At one stage, surrounded and faced with certain death, he and his squad decided to take as many as possible with them, only to survive. "I faced a moment when I knew I was going to die and I didn't run, I wasn't a coward and it affected me deeply," he said. "I've been at peace with myself for my whole life."

Determined to make the most of life when he left the army, Caine moved to central London in the mid-1960s, a time of endless possibilities, and became an actor "because that's where the girls were". In the Swinging 60s, few swung more enthusiastically than Caine. A dedicated skirt-chaser, he spent the rest of his time living with three unknowns – Terence Stamp, Bond composer John Barry and Vidal Sassoon – and hanging out with Francis Bacon, Lionel Bart, Peter Sellers and the fast set.

By the time Caine got his break in 1964 as the upper-class twit Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead in Zulu, he was already 30 and had spent nine years walking the boards doing repertory theatre. It's an apprenticeship to which he ascribes his success: "I was already well formed and extremely tough."

Caine, one of the first actors to speak in a Cockney accent rather than BBC English, became a sensation. Lead roles as spook Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File and the eponymous ladykiller in Alfie built his reputation, while his roles in Get Carter, The Italian Job, The Man Who Would Be King and Educating Rita cemented his position as a stellar talent and national treasure.

With more than 100 films under his belt, including a run of turkeys ("I've never seen Jaws: The Revenge, but by all accounts it was terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific"), he often complained that his working-class roots meant he didn't get due recognition, yet he and Jack Nicholson remain the only actors to have been nominated for an Oscar in every decade since the 1960s. Oscars as best supporting actor for Hannah And Her Sisters and The Cider House Rules remain his proudest achievements.

His success has allowed him to indulge himself in every way, from buying a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow with the cheque from Alfie (he couldn't drive) to living large in Florida, buying five houses and indulging his taste in fine wines.

He lost the roving eye when he pursued, caught and married the Guyanese star of the Maxwell House adverts, Shakira Baksch, who became his second wife, but has retained his famous wit and remains a legendary raconteur ("He'll talk your arse off telling you all these stories you've been dying to hear all your life," said Ewan McGregor).

Now living permanently in Britain, he remains entertainingly forthright on an eclectic range of subjects, from politics ("the government has taken tax up to 50 per cent, and if it goes to 51, I will be back in America") to music (he is a huge fan of chill-out music and released a CD of his favourite tracks, called Cained, in 2007).

Knighted in the New Years Honours list in 2000, he remains a vital, vibrant man of the people, a status that will only be enhanced by his down-to-earth starring role as English Everyman Harry Brown, facing up to the bewildering realities of an England changed beyond all recognition.

You've been Googled

• Speaking to his agent from a telephone box in Leicester Square, Caine took his stage name from a poster for the Bogart film The Caine Mutiny showing at the Odeon.

• Caine claims that The Swarm and Ashanti, both produced in 1978-79, were the worst two films he ever appeared in, but most fans judge his appearance as the villain in the Steven Seagal flop On Deadly Ground (1994) as the true low point.

• Caine never said "Not a lot of people know that." The phrase came from Peter Sellers, left, who talked on the Parkinson show about Caine's constant quoting from the Guinness Book of Records . He did, however, use a similar phrase in Educating Rita.

• After his mother died, Caine and his younger brother Stanley learned they had an elder half-brother called David. He suffered from severe epilepsy and had been confined to a mental hospital for his entire life. David died in 1992.

• Caine is a Chelsea fan and a keen supporter of the National Playing Fields Association.