Michael Caine

• 1. Introduction

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  Maurice Joseph Micklewhite was born on the 14th of March 1933 at St Olave's Hospital in Rotherhithe, a working-class district of London, the son of a fish market porter. By the time he died his stage name Michael Caine would appear in more than 130 films, and the collective box office gross of those films would surpass $7.8 billion. That name itself was chosen in a hurry from a telephone box in Leicester Square, borrowed from a marquee showing at the Odeon Cinema nearby. Had a tree not been blocking part of his view, he later joked, he might have spent eight decades being credited as Michael Mutiny. What drove a boy evacuated to Norfolk during the Blitz, who made his screen debut as an uncredited walk-on, to become one of only five male actors ever nominated for an Academy Award in five different decades? And what does it mean that his most famous catchphrase was invented not by him but by Peter Sellers?

• 2. War and Formation

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  In 1951, Caine was called up for national service and assigned to the Queen's Royal Regiment, then from 1952 he served with the Royal Fusiliers in Korea. He watched the Chinese military deploy human wave tactics and came away convinced that the Maoist government regarded its own citizens as expendable. He had arrived sympathetic to communist ideals; he left repelled by them. He also contracted malaria, which sent him home in 1953 before his service concluded.

  One encounter during that war stayed with him for the rest of his life. He believed, at a particular moment, that he was about to die. In his 2010 autobiography The Elephant to Hollywood, he wrote: "The rest of my life I have lived every bloody moment from the moment I wake up until the time I go to sleep." That intensity of presence would later become one of the things directors praised most about working with him.

  After his discharge, Caine's father was already ill. In a 2010 Classic FM interview, Caine said he had asked a doctor to administer a fatal overdose when his father was dying of liver cancer in 1955, and publicly endorsed voluntary euthanasia. Doctors had told his father he had only four days to live. The experience of watching a parent die slowly would leave its mark on a man who later said that living fully, moment to moment, was the lesson Korea had burned into him.

• 3. A Name from a Cinema Marquee

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  In July 1953, before he had settled on a permanent stage name, Caine was cast in a Horsham repertory company's production of Wuthering Heights under the name Michael Scott. He played the drunkard Hindley. He moved on to the Lowestoft Repertory Company in Suffolk, where he met his first wife, Patricia Haines, and appeared in nine plays at the Arcadia Theatre with Jackson Stanley's Standard Players. He later described those first nine years of his career as "really, really brutal" and "more like purgatory than paradise".

  When his work brought him to London in 1954, his agent delivered an abrupt problem: there was already a Michael Scott working as an actor in the city. The agent needed a new name immediately. Caine was calling from a telephone box in Leicester Square. He looked around, saw The Caine Mutiny on the Odeon Cinema marquee, and chose the surname on the spot. He later joked in interviews that, had he looked the other way, he would have ended up as "Michael One Hundred and One Dalmatians".

  In 1958, four years after adopting that name, he played a minor court orderly in a BBC Television adaptation of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial - appearing in the very story that had given him his identity. That same year he started hanging out with Terence Stamp and became Peter O'Toole's understudy in a West End production. When O'Toole left to make Lawrence of Arabia, Caine took over the role and went on a four-month tour.

• 4. The Cockney Who Played an Aristocrat

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  Director Cy Endfield had already given the Cockney private role in Zulu to James Booth - who, he told Caine, "looked more Cockney" - but he noticed something else in the 6 ft 2 in tall actor standing before him. Caine didn't look like a Cockney to Endfield; he looked like an officer. Caine believed Endfield offered him the aristocrat role precisely because, as an American, he lacked the ingrained British class prejudice that might have made such casting seem absurd. Location shooting in Natal, South Africa ran for 14 weeks in 1963.

  After the film wrapped, the distributor Joseph E. Levine told Caine bluntly that he "looked like a queer on screen" and released him from a seven-year contract, handing it instead to Caine's Zulu co-star James Booth. That rejection cleared the way for what came next. By working a Cockney accent in The Ipcress File (1965) and then as the womanising title character in Alfie (1966), Caine stood apart from an industry that still expected actors to use Received Pronunciation. In a 2016 interview he called Alfie his favourite film of his career, noting it "made me a star in America as well, and it was my first nomination for an Academy Award".

  John Huston, who directed Caine in The Man Who Would Be King (1975) alongside Sean Connery, said of him: "Michael is one of the most intelligent men among the artists I've known. I don't particularly care to throw the ball to an actor and let him improvise, but with Michael it's different. I just let him get on with it."

• 5. The House That Jaws Built

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  Through the late 1970s, Caine averaged two films a year and openly admitted that some of them he took strictly for the money. The Swarm (1978) was critically panned; Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (1979) fared no better. Then came Jaws: The Revenge (1987). Caine's commitment to filming in the Bahamas meant he was absent from the Academy Awards ceremony where he won Best Supporting Actor for Hannah and Her Sisters, leaving Dianne Wiest to collect the award on his behalf. His summary of the experience became one of the most quoted lines of his career: "I have never seen the film, but by all accounts it was terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific."

  That same self-deprecating candor ran through his public persona. He appeared in seven films ranked in the BFI's 100 greatest British films of the 20th century, yet he never pretended his output was uniformly distinguished. When he played Chief Inspector Frederick Abberline in the two-part TV drama Jack the Ripper in 1988 - produced to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the killings - he brought the same commitment he applied to every role, regardless of whether critics agreed it deserved it.

  The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) drew a characteristically direct statement of intent. Having been chosen by Brian Henson, Caine declared: "I'm going to play this movie like I'm working with the Royal Shakespeare Company. I will never wink, I will never do anything Muppety. I am going to play Scrooge as if it is an utterly dramatic role and there are no puppets around me."

• 6. Not Many People Know That

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  Peter Sellers launched the catchphrase on BBC1's Parkinson show on the 28th of October 1972, describing Caine as the "biggest mine of useless information" and offering an impression that included a riff on the Guinness Book of Records: "Did you know that it takes a man in a tweed suit five-and-a-half seconds to fall from the top of Big Ben to the ground? Now there's not many people who know that!" Caine later discovered that Sellers had recorded an impression of him as his answering machine message in the 1970s, so that every caller heard Caine's voice saying, "My name is Michael Caine. I just want you to know that Peter Sellers is not in. Not many people know that."

  Caine himself used the phrase as a joke in Educating Rita in 1983. By 2007 it had migrated to satellite navigation systems, with his voice directing drivers while adding asides in the style of the catchphrase. In an interview with Michael Parkinson that year, Caine tried doing the impression himself and concluded: "I sound like a bloody moron."

  The impression industry grew large enough to spawn characters. Harry Enfield's Television Programme featured Paul Whitehouse playing "Michael Paine", a nosy neighbour who wore oversized thick-rimmed glasses in reference to the Harry Palmer role. Mike Myers wove the Palmer character into the DNA of Austin Powers and then, at Myers' request, Caine played Austin's father Nigel Powers in Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002). In the 2010 television series The Trip, Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan argued over competing Caine impressions for extended comic sequences. Coogan and Brydon later performed from a balcony at the Royal Albert Hall during a celebration of Caine's work, until the real Caine interrupted to inform them they were out of shape. "For me," he told them, "it's a full-time job."

• 7. The Nolan Years

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  Caine played Bruce Wayne's butler Alfred Pennyworth in Batman Begins in 2005, the opening film of Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy. He later called that trilogy "one of the greatest things I have done in my life." His collaboration with Nolan extended across six additional films: The Prestige (2006), Inception (2010), Interstellar (2014), Dunkirk (2017), Tenet (2020), and a spoken cameo role in Dunkirk as a Royal Air Force Spitfire pilot - a deliberate nod to his role as RAF fighter pilot Squadron Leader Canfield in Battle of Britain (1969), nearly fifty years earlier.

  Jude Law, who played opposite Caine in the 2007 remake of Sleuth - in which Caine took over the role Laurence Olivier had played in the 1972 version, while Law stepped into Caine's original part - described watching him work: "He's a master technician and sometimes he was doing stuff I didn't see, I couldn't register. I'd go back and watch it on the monitor, it was like 'Oh my God, the amount of variety he's put in there is breathtaking.'" Making Caine one of the few actors to have played a starring role in two versions of the same film.

  The career resurgence of his final decades also brought two Academy Awards. He won his first for Hannah and Her Sisters in 1986, and his second for The Cider House Rules in 1999. Roger Ebert, reviewing The Quiet American (2002), wrote of Caine's performance: "it's a performance that seems to descend perfectly formed. There is no artifice in it, no unneeded energy, no tricks, no effort."

• 8. Retirement and Exit

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  Caine officially confirmed his retirement from acting on the 13th of October 2023 in a BBC Today radio programme interview with Martha Kearney. His final film was The Great Escaper, a British-French feature in which he starred opposite Glenda Jackson, playing a World War II veteran who broke out of his nursing home to attend the 70th anniversary D-Day commemorations in France in June 2014. The film was released on the 6th of October 2023.

  He explained his reasoning with characteristic directness: "I keep saying I'm going to retire, well I am now, because I figured, I've had a picture which is - I played the lead and it's got incredible reviews. The only parts I'm liable to get now are old men, 90-year-old men, and I thought well I might as well leave with all this. I've got wonderful reviews. What am I going to do to beat this?"

  In July 2016, Caine had legally changed his name by deed poll to Michael Caine, to simplify airport security. He was knighted in 2000 as Sir Maurice Micklewhite, CBE. He chose to be knighted in his birth name as a tribute to his father, explaining: "I was named after my father and I was knighted in his name because I love my father." The novel that occupied him during the COVID-19 lockdowns, a thriller entitled Deadly Game, was published in November 2023 - the same month his retirement took effect.