Interview: Michael Caine

ALPHA men – and rich movie icons are surely a subsection – tend to have that bombastic self-confidence that borders on the overbearing. Michael Caine is no exception. But I'll say one thing for the Cockney geezer: you can have a good old political ding-dong, entirely without rancour. He almost seems to relish arguing the toss.

Right now he's banging on (alpha men have very loud voices) about the undemocratic way Gordon Brown was forced on the nation. "This was a man from another country in actual fact, with its own parliament, who had never been voted for by an Englishman!" he says indignantly. There is a stunned pause. Well, that's a bit racist, isn't it? "Is it?" he demands, unabashed.

Just before interviewing Caine, I was waiting in a caf when a Cockney businessman next to me – who no doubt wondered why I didn't return his smile – said into his mobile, 'I've got a Scot in the morning and a Scot in the afternoon, so that's not much fun is it?' I expect Caine to be uncomfortable with that story; instead he retorts: "No, it's not!"

Outside, I say. Jackets off. "No, listen, listen," he says animatedly. "Listen. The major part of the UK is England.

The person who was given to us – not elected, given – was a man who had never had an Englishman vote for him at any time. He was voted in by his own constituency." Well of course he was, same as English MPs are. If he didn't like a leader being elected unopposed, that's one thing. But Brown being Scottish was completely immaterial. Except to Caine, obviously, who thinks Scotland is some foreign territory because it's not Enger-land.

"That's not the point," argues Caine. "You have missed my point entirely." (That's another thing about alpha men; if they want to change their point, they insist that you've missed it.) "My point is that he was unelected, not that he was a Scot." No it wasn't. He emphasised Brown being "from another country". "Yeah, but Scotland wants its own independence and I'm with them." Who says? The Scots haven't even been asked. That's only his big pal Sir Sean Connery telling him that. (And maybe he should have checked with someone who actually lived in the country and paid taxes there.) "Yeah, well, he told me that and I voted for it with him. I'm with him."

He is a big man, Caine, a solid presence still at 77, with few of the visible frailties of age. Big voice. Warm laugh. Grey whiskers because he's going to play a grandpa in a film. Few signs of uncertainty either on the outer walls of the double Oscar winner who has made his mark in generations of films like Alfie and The Italian Job, The Quiet American and Educating Rita, right through to Miss Congeniality and the Batman movies. Certainly not about politics. He has always been vociferous, appearing at the last election on a platform for the Conservatives.

He moved to the United States in 1979 to avoid the top tax rate of 82 per cent imposed by Jim Callaghan's government. Eight years later, he was back but he has often spoken out about benefit scroungers and the need to protect the people who generate wealth. What makes it interesting is that Caine was once unemployed and on benefits regularly himself. Brought up in the Elephant and Castle, a tough, deprived area of south London, he has just produced a second autobiography called The Elephant to Hollywood. It's quite a journey. But did he, when he reached his destination, forget where he started out?

Elephant and Castle shaped everything about Caine, who was born Maurice Micklewhite. "I lived in a field of dreams to get rid of the reality of where I lived. I grew up in a war and life in the 1950s was as bad, with rationing and the misery of London, the clearing of bomb sites and smoke all the time and burning rubber." He escaped in two ways: the library because he adored books (he wants to write a novel soon), and the cinema.

His father was a gambler and he always says his first acting experience was opening the door and telling debt collectors that his mummy wasn't in. Is that a painful memory? "No because I was never hungry or lonely, dirty or unloved. My life was perfect as a little boy. I thought everything was great fun."

Many years later, he heard his wife Shakira, to whom he has been married for 37 years, giving a magazine interview about being Mrs Caine. Caine had first seen Shakira on a television coffee advert and was instantly infatuated, vowing he would travel to Brazil to find her. But that night he met someone who worked for the advertising agency who told him there was no need. Shakira lived down the Fulham Road. Anyway, while she was being interviewed, Caine was in the next room, half-listening for trick questions. "What first attracted you to Michael?" he heard the journalist ask. "I thought, ooh I'll listen to this! And she said, 'The way he treats his mother because it shows his attitude to women.'"

His most treasured memory of his mother is when he was six years old and his dad went off to war. "He never came back for five years but instead of bursting into tears and saying I'm left with these kids on my own, she turned to me and my brother Stanley and said, 'Your father's gone. Now you two have to look after me.' My mother was tough but she made little men of us." Didn't it scare the life out of him? "No, no. I thought it was a great idea. We loved our mum. I'll do that. Don't let anyone come near her or they'll have me to deal with."

After his mother died, he discovered an incredible secret. He had a 54-year-old, disabled elder half-brother, David, whom his mother had secretly visited in a home every single Monday of her life, except when they were evacuated during the war. Caine's mother had given David a picture of Michael but she used to bring in a Bible and make staff swear they would never reveal his presence.

A journalist eventually stumbled on the truth while doing another story at the home. Caine visited David and arranged some luxuries for him but, sadly, his brother died not long after. How did the revelation affect Caine's feelings about his mother? "I was full of admiration for her. I always loved my mother. I inherited this care for other people from her because she cared for him for 54 years."

Why was Caine so sure his father didn't know about the boy? "Oooh," he says, as if the notion is unthinkable, "he'd have been gone. Oh yeah. Oh, he was tough my dad. He wouldn't have stood for that. No, he never knew." His father had died when Caine was only 23. He would have loved the success that came his son's way six years later but also, in many ways he was motivation for Caine. "When he died, they gave me what was in his pockets, something like one pound, 11 shillings and tuppence. That was my inheritance. This man, who had worked and slaved all his life, that's all he had. That's where I got my respect for money from and that's why I vowed never to gamble. I am not tight with money. I am very generous – until it comes to business when I'm quite shrewd." (For a while, he was successful in the restaurant business. He owned five at his peak but has now sold up.)

But his father, highly intelligent yet uneducated, also underlined the class system Caine was so determined to smash. Boys like him didn't become actors. When the lights dimmed in the cinema, even villains talked posh. "When I watched The Blue Lamp with Jack Warner, the villain, a Cockney lad, was played by Dirk Bogarde. He was a gay Scotsman." Has he got a thing about the Scots? "No, but I thought, I could play that better than that. We all used to sit in the cinema and roar with laughter, taking the piss." When Caine said he wanted to go on stage, people scoffed. "What are you going to do, sweep it up?"

Undaunted, he took a job as an assistant stage manager, doing one-line walk-on parts. He spent nine years in rep learning his craft before landing his break in the film Zulu. Ironically, he played an upper-class officer. His career had been interrupted by national service which took him to Korea, a hugely formative experience for him.

"The people who send soldiers to war are usually too old to go themselves – have you noticed that? Very often men who have never been. I think if you'd been to war you wouldn't send anyone to it. It's the most obscene thing you have ever come across in your life. To me, it was a disgusting thing to have to do and it formed my character. You get people who are 50 or 60 who have had serious illness and almost die and they say, 'I am so happy to be alive. I am going to live differently now.' I did that at 19. It changed me. I am the most positive man I know, almost to the point of being a moron."

He had to be. He was told often enough that he wasn't going to make it. Caine was the wrong class, wrong look – he was even accused of looking gay in a period when screen heroes were butch – so he must have had inner self-belief to continue. "Incredible self-belief," he agrees. After Zulu came The Ipcress File but it was playing the working-class Cockney in Alfie that shot him to stardom and his first Rolls-Royce. Does he still regard himself as a class warrior? "I am a veteran of it. It no longer matters." Things have changed? "Oh blimey, yeah. No one gives a toss any more about the upper classes. We're not impressed by them, We don't want to be them. I am a knight anyway so I don't care."

Part of the establishment? No, he says. But how does a boy from the Elephant and Castle feel when people call him Sir Michael? "They don't very often but I stop them if they do." Unless it's British Airways staff. "The fares are too dear." He laughs. "If you charge me that you've got to call me Sir."

"No," Caine is saying. The whole point is he remembers his roots perfectly. We're in one of those fields of dreams today, a long way from Elephant and Castle. A five-star hotel in Chelsea harbour, surrounded by design centres, posh boats and fancy apartments. (He points his own one out through the window, though his main house is in Surrey.) He has worked on major films in every decade of his 50-year career but he was once an unemployed actor on benefits. Isn't it all too easy to forget struggle, to complain, as he does today, that there are over a million adults in Britain who have never worked in their lives?

"We pay more in benefits to people who don't work than we collect in income tax from people who do. That is an economic disaster." He's correct if you're looking at this year's projected figure but it has happened before – the last time in 2000 – and in a recession, benefits costs rise as people lose their jobs. Hopefully temporarily. So who is he blaming? "I blame the benefit system. I mean, if I can get 100 quid a week for not working and 98 for working … they've got to change the system to what the benefit was like when I was young. I was on benefits a lot as a young actor."

Caine's father worked in Billingsgate fish market. What if people like his dad had said: "I'm not working my socks off in a cold, smelly place to support you with your fancy notions of stardom. Get a regular job, same as the rest of us." What then? "I was only allowed 12 weeks on benefit and then I had to take the first job that was offered. I worked in factories. I worked my arse off in jobs I didn't want to do. Rotten jobs to earn more money because there was no more benefit."

Well let me play Devil's Advocate. "Go on then," he says. "Yeah, go on then." He seems animated by challenge but a deep breath is needed before asking the next one. Caine had an early, disastrous marriage to actress Patricia Haines and they had a daughter, Nikki, who is a big part of his life still. But back then, as a struggling actor, he found himself in court because he hadn't paid maintenance. What is the difference between someone else having to support his child because he hasn't paid maintenance, and him having to support someone else who is unemployed now? "But I didn't have any money," he protests. I know. Neither do the unemployed.

To be fair, as soon as he got money he went round to give some for Nikki. But is he guilty of inconsistency? For example, he became a tax exile. Yes, he agrees. Well, in America, his wife Shakira became dangerously ill with a burst appendix. They rushed to hospital and Caine was asked for $5,000 up front – which, given this is an emergency, he obviously doesn't have on him. Tough. "No money – no operation," says the cashier. Caine writes: "Not for the first time, it made me grateful for the NHS." But if people like him don't pay their taxes, there is no NHS. How can he praise it but refuse to fund it?

"I paid for the NHS for years and never used it," he says. That's the way tax works, though, isn't it? "Actually," he concedes, "I don't mind paying tax for things I don't use as long as it helps other people. I would refuse to live in a country that didn't demand tax from me to take care of the disabled and everybody."

The trouble with a lot of journalists, he says, me included, is that we don't "get" this. (In his affable way, he thinks he's smarter than the rest of us, though just as affably, I'm not sure why. He often sounds quite half-baked when talking politics, to the extent that he appeared on a platform for the Tories at the election praising "the government" –which was actually Labour.)

But he thinks it's the rest of us who only half-think things through. "You can't destroy the cake maker if you want to share the cake. It's as simple as that. We all want to share the cake with people who don't have any. It's just the system that's wrong. My attitude to people on benefits who are sick or unable to work is, you should be on benefits. I'll pay money happily for you. But if I am 77 years old and going out to work at 6am to make a movie, I don't expect to have my taxes put up so that two and a half million people can have an extra half-hour in bed."

He agrees that he changes his political position all the time according to what he feels. "I have never belonged to any political party. If I don't belong to you, then you don't rule me. If you don't behave the way I want, then I vote for your opposition. For instance, I voted for Maggie Thatcher, then Tony Blair, and now Cameron." He's an Obama supporter and if he was going to join a party that represented him, it would be America's Democratic Party.

But he's stuck here now. His daughter Natasha, from his marriage to Shakira, has three children: a two-year-old boy and one-year-old twins. Caine is besotted with his grandchildren and says family is everything to him. Shakira is not just the love of his life. She is his life. What was he responding to when he fell for her in that coffee advert all those years ago? "I don't know. I recognised something in her. And when I got to know her, everything I thought was there, was."

After his first marriage ended, he used to get nightmares. "I woke up in the middle of the night screaming because I'd got married. I hated the idea. But when I met Shakira, that went straight out the window."

He was 39 and his life had become a bit empty. He was drinking two bottles of vodka a day to deal with the stress of carrying big-budget movies. Shakira made him see he didn't need it. "We have been happy together because we are completely intertwined partners. She is not the little wife of the film star. We are complete partners. She is very gentle but very strong. You meet people sometimes, especially women, who have no malicious bones in their body. There is nothing malicious, harmful, evil or negative about Shakira."

He doesn't share Oscars with Shakira but he shares his knighthood because that's for a life, not a performance. "She's her Ladyship and I love that." More than he loves being his Lordship. "Not politically, but socially, I am a communist. I don't care who you are, you will get treated exactly the same, with respect and dignity, from the queen to the woman cleaning the corridor. When I go on a movie set, I say to everybody, right down to the teaboy, call me Michael. Everybody. No 'Mr Caine', No 'Sir Michael'."

He laughs. "But that's where my communism ends very, very sharply." n

The Elephant to Hollywood, published by Hodder and Stoughton, 20

• This article was first published in the Scotland on Sunday on October 12, 2010