On March 14, Sir Michael Caine turns 90. There are others with a plausible claim to be the greatest British movie star of all time (start with Charlie Chaplin and Cary Grant and go from there) but few today would disagree that our most beloved homegrown leading man is the actor born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite, in Rotherhithe, south London, in 1933. As the most prominent representative of British masculinity on the big screen, we could have done a lot worse. Stylish, witty, dashing, clever, generous, steadfast, and apparently entirely immune to the bullshit and flimflam that typically accompanies worldwide celebrity, Caine got to the top, and has stayed there for 60 years and counting, by dint of hard work, good humour, remarkable endurance, formidable strength of character and supreme, and often underrated, talent. He’s our Nicholson, our Newman, our Eastwood. He’s Our Man in Hollywood.
In 2014, when Sir Michael was a mere stripling of 81, my colleague Simon Emmett photographed him for the cover of Esquire, and later that day I sat down with him for lunch, above a pub in Chelsea, for the interview we republish here in celebration of his birthday. We had the place to ourselves, just me and the star of Zulu, The Ipcress File, Alfie, The Italian Job, Get Carter, 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, Children of Men, Inception, and so, so many — many — more. (My kids will not forgive me, and rightly so, if I neglect to mention here his indelible turn as Scrooge in The Muppet Christmas Carol; truly a gift that keeps on giving.)
Incredibly, Caine is still going. Last year he filmed The Great Escaper, with Glenda Jackson, about a war veteran who sneaks out of his care home to attend the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings. That will be out in cinemas later this year. Then it is rumoured he will reprise his role as a criminal mastermind in a third film in the successful Now You See Me franchise, about bank robber magicians. (Caine’s career in capsule form: a modestly budgeted, cosy British indie, followed by a wham-bam mainstream studio blockbuster.)
What a career. What a life! What a pleasure it was to spend a few hours in his company, talking about all that and more.
He arrives alone. No PR, no agent, no assistant, no security. No flunkies of any description. A cab drops him on the corner and he approaches on foot. An old man, but not shrunken, not diminished. Too tall, too straight-backed, too imposing. Still, his movements are careful, deliberate. His hair, once blond, thick and wavy, is white now, and thin on top. His skin is mottled, liver-spotted. He wears comfortable shoes.
It's easy to patronise the elderly. Most of us not yet old ourselves do it. One woman, watching him having his make-up applied, whispers to me that she wants to take him home, as if he were a puppy. He's not a puppy. Following him down a steep staircase later on, I'm briefly tempted to put my arm under his, to steady him, as if I were his carer. I'm not his carer.
But sit opposite him, look him in the eyes – blue, hooded – and see he's the same man he always was. His voice is commanding. His unmistakable, endlessly impersonated, utterly distinctive voice: it brings you up short, reminds you straight away exactly who he is and where he's been and what he's done. When he smiles, which he does often, his top lip slides up, almost surreptitiously. It's the smile of a tearaway, even after all these years: a delighted, getting-away-with-it smile. You've seen this smile many, many times, and the twinkle that comes with it. You've seen his face in repose, too. Seen how he can summon thin-lipped menace as easily as expansive bonhomie.
Today we get the bonhomie. The location for Esquire's Michael Caine cover shoot is a gastropub on a residential street in Chelsea, 10 minutes from his London flat. The decor in The Pig's Ear is retro-pop-culture: faded movie posters, period newspaper billboards. High on a wall, unnoticed by us until now, there's a picture of him in one of his most indelible roles: as the vengeful gangster in the brutal Jags'n'slags classic, Get Carter (1971). He's dapper, stony faced, aiming a shooter. Would he mind, later on, being photographed underneath the picture? Not at all. "I'd better smile, though, hadn't I? Let him do the frowning."
There's a framed photo of George Best. They used to run into each other at Tramp, Johnny Gold's club. What was George like? "I didn't really know him personally. He didn't know himself. He was always bombed." Which brings him to his former business partner, Peter Langan, the bibulous restaurateur who burned himself to death while trying to murder his wife. Which brings him to Marco Pierre White and Gordon Ramsay, whom he employed at The Canteen, his place in Chelsea Harbour. He had to put three sets of doors on the kitchen to stop customers complaining about the swearing. "And people ask me why I got out of the restaurant business!"
So many stories, they come tumbling out of him, about topics glamorous and routine. About Billy Wilder and Frank Sinatra and his own homemade bruschetta, pronounced the correct way, with the emphasis on the hard "c". About Liz Taylor and The Rolling Stones and being evacuated to Norfolk during the war. About John Wayne and Joaquin Phoenix and his garden in Surrey. About the naked African girls in the opening sequence of Zulu (1964) and wearing drag for Dressed to Kill (1980) and house prices (too high) and the weather (too hot).
Sitting in a makeshift make-up chair, he explains that his forehead is red raw because he is filming Paolo Sorrentino's Youth, for which he has to wear a wig, which is glued on and painfully removed after each day's filming. Caine plays a conductor in the movie, the Italian maestro's follow up to his gorgeous 2013 Oscar winner The Great Beauty. He's been having lessons in how to hold the baton – "My shoulder's fucking killing me" – and demonstrates some moves. He's looking forward, with trepidation, to conducting the London Symphony Orchestra for a scene.
Youth is a typical Michael Caine film in that there is nothing typical about it. To the casual observer at least, a survey of his long career reveals no patterns at all. Here is an actor who has twice won Oscars — Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and The Cider House Rules (1999) — and been nominated a further three times for moving, nuanced portrayals of flawed, complex men. And who has also been chased by killer bees, in The Swarm (1978), an animatronic shark, in Jaws: The Revenge (1987), and his own right hand, in The Hand (1981).
Caine has been directed by Woody Allen and Dickie Attenborough, Oliver Stone and Ken Russell, John Huston and Joseph Losey, Nora Ephron and Christopher Nolan. And Steven Seagal.
He has starred alongside Shirley MacLaine and Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith and Omar Sharif, Trevor Howard and Jack Nicholson, Sidney Poitier and Dirk Bogarde, Noel Coward and Scarlett Johansson. And Kermit the Frog.
I tell him I haven't been able to establish how many films he's been in. He reckons around 175 if you include all the early, uncredited walk-on stuff, 90-ish if it's substantial roles. By my calculation, it's somewhere nearer 120, but by the time this is published that'll doubtless be hopelessly out of date: he'll have signed on for still more.
Young viewers today know him best as Alfred, Christian Bale's butler in the Batman movies. One day, perhaps, "Shall I prepare the Batmobile, Master Bruce?" might be a catchphrase to rival his best, "You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!" from The Italian Job (1969); "You're a big man, but you're in bad shape," from Get Carter; or "Not a lot of people know that," from Peter Sellers' chat show impersonation of him.
But the films he will be remembered for longest are the ones he made in the Sixties, when he was one of the faces of Swinging London and the new "classless society". Never a great beauty like his flatmate Terence Stamp or an Adonis like their friend Sean Connery, Caine was nevertheless handsome and dashing and he could summon great intensity and transmit powerful charisma without appearing to have to do much on screen. He just was.
It is now half a century since Zulu, his first substantial film role. The movie was conceived as a vehicle for its star-producer, Stanley Baker, but Caine – in what would become a pattern that persists to this day – stole every scene he was in as the effete Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead, the image of the brittle British establishment that Caine's persona was a reaction against.
The following year, 1965, Caine was Harry Palmer, the kitchen sink James Bond, in The Ipcress File. Lurking behind the heavy specs that would become a trademark, Caine's Palmer was emblematic of the working-class man who refused to know his place, the Angry Young Spy. By the time of Alfie, in 1966, Caine was a superstar.
At 81, Sir Michael Caine tells me, he considers himself retired. He comes into town each Wednesday and Thursday with Shakira, his wife of 41 years, and they have meetings and see friends. The rest of the time they're near Leatherhead, in a converted barn, surrounded by countryside. He cooks, he gardens, he kicks a football about with the grandkids.
He only takes the occasional role, he says, when the material is too good to turn down. Trouble is, that is not a rare occurrence. As well as the Sorrentino film, he has finished work on Imagine, a family drama with Al Pacino; Eliza Graves, a psychological thriller; Interstellar, the latest Christopher Nolan sci-fi mind-bender; and Kingsman: The Secret Service, the new film from the people behind Kick-Ass, in which he plays a shadowy Whitehall mandarin opposite Colin Firth's spiffy spy.
Our interview takes place over lunch in an upstairs dining room. The pub is closed so we're the only people eating. We sit at a small table for two in a window, which opens onto a dazzling London summer day. I pour the water and we begin.
ESQUIRE: Are you going to eat something?
MICHAEL CAINE: I tell you what, I'll have a Caesar salad. I don't really need a big meal. Are you going to have two courses?
If you're having two courses, I'll have two courses.
I've suddenly realised I haven't got my watch. [Searches in pockets.] Oh, there it is.
Got it?
Yeah. Caesar salad would be nice. Be the easiest thing for them to do, you know, with just the two of us here. Or French onion soup, Caesar salad. Shall we have two courses?
Go on, let's have two courses.
I'll have French onion soup.
I'm going to have French onion soup, too, and then I might have steak tartare with chips. What do you reckon?
That's easy, too.
So, I thought we could start at the beginning.
That's the best place to start, I find.
It often is.
So clever of you.
I think these things through in advance, you know?
I can tell.
You were born and grew up in south London?
Yeah. My father was a Billingsgate Fish Market porter, and my mother was a charlady. She cleaned offices and people's houses, but she was also a cook. When we were evacuated during the war, we wound up in a rich man's house, called Mr English, in North Runcton, in Norfolk. She was the cook in that house. That's where I became interested in cooking. Later she cooked in Lyons' Corner Houses.
Stupid question, but what does a fish porter do?
He carried the fish from one place to another. There were no hydraulic trucks in those days. And fish porters were also responsible for icing the fish up, because there was no refrigeration.
What was he like, your dad?
Very tough. But very loving. My father was a great hero because he went away in the [Second World] War and fought the Germans. So to us little boys – I had a brother, three years younger than me, he's dead now, of cancer – he was an incredible man, and he was very inventive. He was a victim of the class system. He was so much more intelligent than his education. He was so bright it was unbelievable. I saw him build a radio once. He should have had more chances than he did.
In what ways are you similar to him?
I'm sort of funny, nice, wonderful, until you do something and then I'm completely unforgiving.
Would you be terrifying if I crossed you?
No. You would disappear. You would just disappear from my life so fast you wouldn't believe it. There's no coming back. You don't get two goes at having a go at me. And that is from my dad. He was like that. And I grew up like that, and so did my brother.
Was your mother tough, too?
She was an incredible woman. Although my brother and I were both 6ft 2in, she was a little fat woman, 5ft 1in. When my dad went away – he went away for five, six years during the war – I was six and my brother was three, and instead of her moaning and crying, she made men of both of us in one sentence. She turned and she looked at us, and said, "Your father has gone so now you two have to look after me." And we both said, "Right mum. Don't you worry. We'll look after you." And we became men at that one sentence. And that's how I've been all my life – I look after everybody.
Michael Caine with his mother, Ellen, and girlfriend, Edina Ronay, at the 1965 premiere of The Ipcress File.
Because that's what a man should be: someone who looks after people?
Yeah, that's exactly what a man should be. Always.
What else did you learn from your mother?
Well, we were poor, and from her I learned to tolerate poverty with a smile.
Was she funny?
Very funny. Funnier than my dad. I'm funny like my mother, I'm not funny like my dad. He was very sarcastic. He could be quite biting. I'm not like that. I bend over backwards not to hurt anyone's feelings.
I just watched you downstairs on the shoot. All those people were desperate to hear from you and you turned it on. You gave a performance. You charmed the room.
Yeah. You saw what I did. My mother could do that.
You were born in Rotherhithe and you lived in Camberwell and in Elephant and Castle. That's only a few miles from here but also a world away, certainly back then. Tell me about the first place you lived.
Two rooms on the fourth floor in Urlwin Street, in Camberwell. The toilet was in the garden, so you had to have a very good bladder or very strong legs. I used to pee in the kitchen sink when my mother wasn't looking. We lived there till I was evacuated, when I was six.
What was the situation when you came back?
We were in the country for six years, off and on. Every time we came back to London, Hitler produced a new bomb. Unbelievable, really, the extremes. Was my dad going to be killed? Were we going to get a telegram? For six years we were waiting for my dad to be killed. When he came back we were bombed out of Camberwell. So we were moved to a pre-fab. We had a refrigerator!
Plenty of people today won't know what a pre-fab is.
A pre-fabricated house. It's made of asbestos. They bring it and they put it up in, I think, four days. They pull them down in one. To us, it was like a mansion. For the first time in my life, I had electric light, indoor toilets and a bathroom. There's a block of flats there now, where I lived. Marshall Gardens, just off the London Road, at the Elephant and Castle.
What made a boy from that background believe he could make a living as an actor?
Cinema. I saw my first cinema at the "Threepenny Rush" on a Saturday morning. It was at Camberwell Green. It wasn't the big cinema, the Odeon, it was a crap cinema round the corner, the Grand. It was thruppence – three pence. And it was known as the "Threepenny Rush" because you all rush to get front-row seats. The first act I saw was The Lone Ranger. And then I became a cinematic fan. I used to go to the cinema four, five, six times a week if I could, if I had the funds.
Lots of little boys dream of being The Lone Ranger.
Yeah, but I didn't want to be The Lone Ranger. I wanted to be the actor who played him. That's a whole difference. And then I grew up with Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracy. I loved those guys. The only thing was, people of my class and region didn't become actors. If you did, you played a Cockney spiv. You're not going to get a romantic lead in a movie with [starchy star of Forties British movies] Anna Neagle, you know? Michael Wilding got all those.
Were there any examples of men from your background who'd become movie stars?
Charlie Chaplin. Cary Grant did it. James Mason, sort of. Not working class, though; very bourgeoise, James. But America was the thing. Like, for instance, with war films, America made pictures about privates: From Here to Eternity, The Naked and the Dead. The British made war pictures about officers. So I became very Americanised, and we thought a lot of British films were funny because everybody talked [wibbly posh accent] like that, you know, and we used to take the piss out of them. I think it was The Blue Lamp, Dirk Bogarde played a Cockney tough. This is a gay Dutchman, you know what I mean? We just laughed ourselves silly. And I thought, "Well, I could do that better than that." I may not be a better actor, but at least my accent would be right.
The irony is that your breakthrough role was in Zulu. You played a toff.
Lieutenant Bromhead. There again the class thing in England came into it because I was up for the Cockney corporal in that film. I'd opened in the West End in Next Time I'll Sing To You, my first play in the West End after about nine years in rep, and I was playing a Cockney, obviously, and so they asked me to come along the next day to talk about playing the Cockney corporal in Zulu. And I got there and they said, "Sorry, we already cast Jimmy Booth." They couldn't phone me to tell me because I didn't have a phone. And I was walking out and [Zulu's American director] Cy Endfield called me back and said, "Can you do a posh accent?" I said, "I've been in rep nine years, I can do any accent you want." And then he screen-tested me and I got the part. But from a class point of view, I know that no English director would have called me back to play that officer. Not one. Even if he was a communist it wouldn't have mattered, he still wouldn't have called me back to play that part. They just couldn't imagine it, a working-class actor playing an officer. But Cy Endfield did.
