Michael Caine
Sir Michael Caine CBE (born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite; 14 March 1933) is a retired English actor.[2] Known for his distinctive Cockney accent,[3] he has appeared in more than 160 films over a career spanning eight decades and is considered a British film icon.[4][5] 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.[6] Caine is one of only five male actors to be nominated for an Academy Award for acting in five different decades.[nb 1] In 2000, he received a BAFTA Fellowship and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.
For other uses, see Michael Caine (disambiguation).
Michael Caine
Often playing a Cockney, Caine made his breakthrough in the 1960s with starring roles in British films such as Zulu (1964), The Ipcress File (1965), The Italian Job (1969), and Battle of Britain (1969). 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.[7][8][9] He solidified his stardom with roles in Get Carter (1971), The Last Valley (1971), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), The Eagle Has Landed (1976), and A Bridge Too Far (1977).
Caine received two Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actor for his roles as Elliot in Woody Allen's comedy Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), and as Dr. Wilbur Larch in Lasse Hallström's drama The Cider House Rules (1999). His other Oscar-nominated films include Alfie (1966), Sleuth (1972), Educating Rita (1983), and The Quiet American (2002). Other notable performances include in the films California Suite (1978), Dressed to Kill (1980), Mona Lisa (1986), Little Voice (1998), Quills (2000), Children of Men (2006), Harry Brown (2009), and Youth (2015).
Caine is also known for his performance as Ebenezer Scrooge in The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992), and for his comedic roles in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988), Miss Congeniality (2000), Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002), and Secondhand Lions (2003). Caine portrayed Alfred Pennyworth in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy (2005–2012). He has also had roles in five other Nolan films: The Prestige (2006), Inception (2010), Interstellar (2014), Dunkirk (2017), and Tenet (2020). He announced his retirement from acting in October 2023, with his final film being The Great Escaper, which came out in the same month.
Army service[edit]
In 1952, Caine was called up to do his national service. Between 1952 and 1954 he served in the British Army's Royal Fusiliers, first at the British Army of the Rhine Headquarters in Iserlohn, West Germany, and then on active service in the Korean War.
Caine, seeing first-hand how the Chinese used human wave tactics, was left with the sense that the communist government did not care about its citizens. Having been previously sympathetic towards the ideals of communism, Caine was left repelled by it.[25] 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."[26][27][28][29]
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."[30]
Acting career[edit]
1950–1963: Acting debut and early roles[edit]
Caine's uncredited film debut was a walk-on role in Morning Departure (1950). 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.[31] Adopting the stage name "Michael White", in July 1953 he was cast as the drunkard Hindley in the company's production of Wuthering Heights.[32][33] 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.[34] He has described the first nine years of his career as "really, really brutal"[35] as well as "more like purgatory than paradise".[18] 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 White performing as an actor in London and that he had to come up with a new name immediately.[32] 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".[32] 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". (Humphrey Bogart was his "screen idol" and he would later play the part originally intended for Bogart in John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King.)[15] 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".[36] In 1958, Caine played the minor role of a court orderly in a BBC Television adaptation of the story, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial.[37]
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.[32] 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.[32] 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 (1957), and the crime/thriller drama Mister Charlesworth (1958).
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 (both 1963). He also acted in radio plays, including Bill Naughton's Looking for Frankie on the BBC Home Service (1963). 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.[38] Scenes from the play's performance were featured in the April 1963 issue of Theatre World magazine.[39]
Caine has written three memoirs across several decades. He published the first, What's It All About?, in 1992, whose title is a reference to a song in his 1966 hit film Alfie. It was reviewed negatively in The New York Times, which called it an "archetypal show-business memoir" that was engaging but tainted by the book's "name-dropping, the sexual boasting, the sensitivity to slights".[151] His second memoir, The Elephant to Hollywood, was published in 2010. Janet Maslin of The New York Times reviewed it positively, calling Caine a "charming raconteur" and "wittily self-deprecating".[152] Caine's first novel, a thriller entitled Deadly Game, is set for publication in November 2023.[153]
Bibliography