CELEBRATING MICHAEL CAINE'S 90TH
HOLLYWOOD, California---I can’t let the week pass without paying tribute to our great national treasure - Sir Michael Caine who celebrated his 90th birthday a few days ago. If there’s a British equivalent to the American Dream, Caine is living it.
To mark this milestone, I’ve been reflecting on some of our many encounters over the years. I’ve interviewed him more than a dozen times in Hollywood, London and even the Bahamas (on location with Jaws 4). Usually I found him to be amiable and ebullient as he contemplated his lot. Sometimes wryly, other times with outrageous humour. But never with nonchalance. He’s never taken his success for granted. In customary top form he’s laid back, relaxed, loquacious. (“Loquacious? What does that mean?” “Talkative, in an illustrative way.” “Oh.…well why didn’t you just say verbose.”)
With more than 160 films to his credit, he’s an international icon, appearing in such acclaimed films as Zulu, The Ipcress File, Alfie, The Italian Job, Get Carter, Sleuth, The Man Who Would Be King, Dressed to Kill, Educating Rita, Hannah and Her Sisters, Mona Lisa, The Cider House Rules, The Quiet American, The Dark Knight Trilogy and Inception. He’s proud that some of his movies have been remade (Alfie, The Italian Job and Get Carter) and finds it an enormous compliment “that anyone would want to remake any of my work”.
In the twilight of his acting days he continues to work, pushing himself further to tackle ever more challenging roles. Later this year we’ll see The Great Escaper based on the true story of a World War II veteran who escaped from his nursing home in 2014 to attend the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy. It reteams Caine with Glenda Jackson as his wife with whom he previously starred in the 1975 comedy The Romantic Englishwoman. And he may next reprise his role as a criminal mastermind in a third film in the popular franchise, Now You See Me, about a gang of bank robbers.
He is a consummate professional, as passionately in love with movies as he was as a child. One of Britain’s most versatile actors, his pendulum has swung in every direction – comedy, drama, literature, and he’s worked in every genre imaginable from spy thrillers to gangster movies. The cinematic landscape is rich with his diverse characterisations scattered across seven decades. And that, he believes, is the reason for his success. “I’m not fashionable,” he told me a while back. “I remember once many years ago a reporter asked me, ‘what is your main talent as an actor?’ and for some reason or another I said ‘survival’. I said ’I think I’ll still be here because for one thing I’ve never been in fashion so I can’t go out of fashion and for another I’m never the same, so you can’t get tired of me’. You see people come and they disappear, it’s because they were fashionable. The one thing you must never be is fashionable because you’ll then become unfashionable.”
He’s won six Oscar nominations and two Academy Awards, a BAFTA, three Golden Globes, a Screen Actors Guild Award and numerous other honours. An accomplished writer, among other books he’s written two autobiographies which became international bestsellers.
Michael Caine is a man with four great loves in his life: his family, work, cooking and gardening. In that order.
In January, he celebrated his 50th wedding anniversary with Shakira, the woman who changed the cocky playboy into a devoted husband, and he’s still besotted with her. A former Miss Guyana, who placed third in a Miss World contest, she and Caine met when he saw her in a coffee commercial and begged an agent friend to put him in touch. He was instantly smitten. That was 1972. They’ve been inseparable ever since.
“We share,” Michael has confided to me. “We’re so embroiled with each other. We have complete trust in each other. And we’re also great friends. You often see couples who’ve been married for a long time and they don’t speak. We’ve been married for 50 years and when we’re together it’s very difficult to get a word in edgewise. We’re just woven into each other like a multi-coloured blanket. That’s what our marriage is. It’s quite incredible. I thank my lucky stars every day for this woman.”
He doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Most of the time people think they’re going to meet a pussy cat. What they encounter, if Caine isn’t thrilled with them, is a tiger. He can be extremely abrasive on occasion, seldom shies away from speaking his mind. Admits he’s arrogant to the extent he listens to nobody’s advice. Yet he is a caring and kind man, though he leaves it for others to say. Tough as nails but soft as a jelly bean in the right hands. Especially Shakira’s.
A country boy at heart, he lives in a 200-year old manor in Surrey on 10 acres with three lakes and a waterfall and used to drive a 15-year old Mercedes that was built especially for him. (The first car he ever owned was a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow Coupe that sold at auction this week for £120,000 the day after his birthday. He paid £10,500 for it in 1968.) His estate is surrounded by a security lighting system that senses movement which automatically turns the lights on. Also living on his land are an assortment of animals including a deer and a cunning fox. Michael chuckled as he told me how the fox had got wise to the way the security system worked and had a fine old time roaming around, deliberately turning on the lights so that he could find his way to search for grub. It was great entertainment for the Caines who’d turn off all the indoor lights and settle down to watch the fox.
One might expect a certain complacency to have set in by now. After all – the career, the many successful restaurants he used to own, the country manor, the idyllic marriage and his daughters and grandchildren with whom he’s unashamedly besotted. And he’s worked his butt off to get it all. But Caine isn’t like that. “I think life has got to develop as you get older and I don’t want to be wandering along doing the same old thing. I want more out of life.”
Forging new territory is something that men tend to do earlier in life rather than later. But then Caine has never been what you would call a conformist. And so he’s gone after it. And got it all. From his passions - writing, gardening, cooking - to his charity work with children. Caine, like the batteries, just keeps going and going.
So there’s always another mountain to climb. Doesn’t have to be a big one. A little tor would probably suffice. But he needs the challenge of accomplishing different things. At an age where most men have retired, his days are spent in pursuit of further development, albeit at a much slower pace these days. “I’ve always got to have one impossible dream on the back burner,” he admits ruefully.
His enthusiasm for life is infectious. But it’s his confidence that jumps out at you. He wears it like a reliable deodorant that never stops working. His belief that anything is possible is his birthright. He has always refused to recognise parameters, whether real or imagined, established by the English class system. And in breaking beyond them and inspiring others to do the same, he has become a role model, especially to the working classes.
Caine could have gone to RADA to learn how to talk posh like his friend Roger Moore but he deliberately chose to keep his cockney accent in defiance of class stereotype. Courageous, I mused. “Bloody minded, I call it!” Caine retorted. "People always told me 'you can't be an actor, you don't talk posh', and I said 'I'll show you how to be an actor without talking posh’, and I did it." His voice isn’t nearly as cockney as it used to be. He learned to modify the accent when he made Alfie for Paramount and had to re-record the dialogue track 120 times before it was deemed understandable to American audiences.
Caine is always vastly amusing, unless he’s in a surly mood which is fairly rare these days. Street smart and largely self taught, he covers an astute wisdom with spontaneous wit and acerbic observations.
His massive self-confidence can be almost overpowering at times and is often construed as arrogance. At times, he’s been considered pompous and outspoken (“I’ve learned to tone it down”), but it’s the conviction of his knowledge of self and craft that really grabs you - “I’m always supremely confident as a movie actor and my own view of myself is that I’m a highly skilled movie actor.” He makes his work seem so easy that one is lured into believing he somehow makes it just happen. But he’s a strategic actor; he’s learned hard and learned well. The ultimate craftsman, when you listen to the way he talks about acting and the film profession it’s something of a surprise that he’s not also a director, “but I’m basically lazy.” The unmistakable and oft-mimicked voice is peppered with occasional American consonants - “I always wanted to direct but I’m too lazy; directing takes up a whole year.”
Henry Fonda, his co-star in their ill-fated movie Swarm, once told me, “he’s one of the most astute actors I’ve ever known, with an intimate awareness of the film profession.”
Not for nothing has Caine earned the deep respect of his peers. He has lectured about film acting and written about it. He has never compared himself to other actors - “I’m the United Kingdom of Michael Caine”, he told me during an interview for The Times a few years ago. An island unto himself.
His critics are irked that he get so much pleasure out of whatever he does. Life is supposed to be more of a struggle, they reckon. Nobody deserves THAT much enjoyment out of life. But Caine has had his share of hardship and paid his dues. Several years in repertory companies gave him a solid foundation (he understudied and later replaced Peter O’Toole in a London stage production) before the turning point arrived, at the age of 30, as the aristocratic officer in Zulu. After that, starring roles in The Ipcress File and Alfie cemented his ranking as a movie star.
He grew up in the East End, the son of a Billingsgate fish porter father and charlady mother. Evacuated during the war, he spent a brief period with a family who exercised “a mild form of child abuse”, by locking him in a cupboard. His mother found out after a fortnight and took him away, “but it was long enough to leave a mark which formed part of my psyche for the rest of my life”.
During the ‘80s, Caine, the quintessential Englishman, left Britain and moved to America. It was his protest at having to pay Britain’s exorbitant taxes of 82%. But even with his shift to Hollywood, his home was still an Englishman’s castle. He lived the luxury lifestyle and relaxed in his indoor jacuzzi, cigar in mouth. But he flew the Union Jack at the top of his Beverly Hills estate and watched films that showed the English countryside. That’s when Shakira knew it was time to leave. After 8 years, he moved back to Britain, “homesick as bloody hell”.
He’s in pretty good shape, though recovering from a spine injury and occasionally reliant on a walker, much of it the legacy from his Hollywood years when he learned how to eat healthily. He long ago discarded bangers and mash in favour of more healthful foods and vegetables that he grows in the garden of his 200-year old Surrey home and then loves to cook.
Along with his passion for cooking (and he’s a good cook) is his involvement with the NSPCC. “I’ve always done that; I’m one of the patrons at the NSPCC which harks back to when I was younger. So my charity goes towards children. If I was ever to do another charity, I would do it for the homeless. That’s the other thing that bugs me, the homeless. But for me, it’s mainly the children. I care very much about them.”
He admits he’s easily moved. “I can seem quite cold and I can hold it in but it stores itself, it works later. I’m very, very easily moved. I’m not repressed at all. It comes out but not... I don’t pee in the street and I don’t cry in the street. I pee at home and I cry at home because these are very private things that you do and they’re not for other people to see. That’s why the English have a reputation for being cold because they keep their emotions to themselves.”
Paradoxically, in most of his roles, even the vicious Jack Carter in Get Carter, there’s always a touch of humour lurking behind the eyes. “I love comedy,” he enthuses. “I love to make people laugh.” Michael Caine looks pensive for a moment. “I think if I hadn’t been an actor, or an architect which I really wanted to be, I’d have been a standup comic.”
And not a lot of people know that!
Till next time, Shavua tov.