Michael Caine

Michael Caine: The Cockney Who Refused to Change His Voice

In 1954 a young repertory actor stood in a telephone box in Leicester Square, being told by his agent that the stage name he had chosen was already taken and that he needed a new one immediately. He looked up. The Odeon was showing *The Caine Mutiny*. He has pointed out since that had a tree been in the way he might have spent seventy years as Michael One Hundred and One Dalmatians. It was the last thing about his career left to chance.

Elephant and Castle, and Korea

Maurice Joseph Micklewhite was born on 14 March 1933 at St Olave's Hospital in Rotherhithe. His father was a fish market porter from an Irish Traveller Catholic background; his mother was a cook and charwoman. Evacuated a hundred miles to Norfolk during the war, he made his acting debut at a village school; on returning, the family was rehoused in a prefab in Marshall Gardens at the Elephant and Castle. "The prefabs," he later wrote, "were intended to be temporary homes... but we ended up living there for eighteen years."

He left Wilson's School at sixteen. Conscripted in 1951, he served with the Queen's Royal Regiment and then the Royal Fusiliers, saw combat in Korea and was discharged in 1953. The war reversed his politics and set the tempo of the rest of his life: "The rest of my life I have lived every bloody moment from the moment I wake up until the time I go to sleep."

Nine Years of Purgatory

He played Hindley in *Wuthering Heights* at Horsham, moved to Lowestoft Repertory at twenty-one, and spent the better part of a decade in the provinces. He has never romanticised it: the first nine years were "really, really brutal," and "more like purgatory than paradise." He had no formal training, a thick south London accent at a moment when Received Pronunciation was effectively compulsory, and no connections whatever.

The break came on stage — as Meff in James Saunders's Cockney comedy *Next Time I'll Sing To You*, in January 1963.

Zulu, Palmer, Alfie

Stanley Baker recommended him to Cy Endfield, who cast him in *Zulu* (1964) — not, as expected, as the Cockney private, but as the languid aristocratic officer, on the grounds that at six foot two he simply looked posher. He tested badly and got the part anyway. Producer Joseph E. Levine then released him from a seven-year contract, saying he "looked like a queer on screen."

*The Ipcress File* (1965) answered that. As Harry Palmer — horn-rims, insolence, a spy who cooked — Caine kept his own accent, a decision that reads now as a small act of class warfare. He has explained it plainly: "I kept my cockney accent in order to let other working class boys know that if I made it, they could do it too." *Alfie* (1966) made him a star in America and brought his first Academy Award nomination; he still names it his favourite. In Hollywood, John Wayne gave him the only technical advice he ever needed: "Speak slow and speak low."

*The Italian Job* (1969) supplied a line — "You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!" — that the British voted the second-funniest in cinema. *Get Carter* (1971) made him frightening. *Sleuth* (1972), opposite Olivier, brought a second Oscar nomination. And on *The Man Who Would Be King* (1975), John Huston offered the assessment that has followed him ever since: "Michael is one of the most intelligent men among the artists I've known... I just let him get on with it."

The Money Years

Then he made a great deal of rubbish, and never once pretended otherwise. Tax at 92 per cent under the Callaghan government drove him to Beverly Hills for eight years; he averaged two pictures a year and took parts, in his own words, strictly for the fee. *The Swarm*, *Beyond the Poseidon Adventure*, and *Jaws: The Revenge*, about which he delivered the business's most quoted line of self-assessment: "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."

Two Oscars and a Renaissance

*Educating Rita* (1983) won him a BAFTA and a Golden Globe. *Hannah and Her Sisters* (1986) won him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor — he was filming in the Bahamas and Dianne Wiest collected it for him. Peter Bradshaw later wrote that the performance, "so fervent, so agonisingly dedicated, actually gains in force and touching sincerity with the years." *Dirty Rotten Scoundrels*, *Mona Lisa* and a magnificently straight-faced Scrooge in *The Muppet Christmas Carol* followed — a role he approached, he said, "like I'm working with the Royal Shakespeare Company. I will never wink."

*Little Voice* (1998) brought another Golden Globe; *The Cider House Rules* (1999) a second Oscar. *The Quiet American* (2002) drew from Roger Ebert the finest single sentence written about him: "a performance that seems to descend perfectly formed. There is no artifice in it, no unneeded energy, no tricks, no effort."

Nolan, and the Long Coda

From 2005 Christopher Nolan used him as ballast in eight films — Alfred in the *Dark Knight* trilogy, which Caine calls "one of the greatest things I have done in my life," then *The Prestige*, *Inception*, *Interstellar*, *Dunkirk* and *Tenet*. When he remade *Sleuth* in 2007 he took Olivier's old part while Jude Law took his; Law came away describing "a master technician... sometimes he was doing stuff I didn't see... the amount of variety he's put in there is breathtaking."

He retired on 13 October 2023, on BBC radio, after *The Great Escaper*: "I've had a picture which is — I played the lead and it's got incredible reviews... I thought well I might as well leave with all this."

Why Michael Is Called a Genius

Huston's verdict — one of the most intelligent artists he had known — is the strongest claim on the record, and it was made by a man with no reason to flatter. Caine has two Academy Awards from six nominations, is one of very few actors nominated in five consecutive decades, holds a BAFTA Fellowship and a knighthood, and appears in seven of the BFI's hundred greatest British films.

The specific faculty is analytical rather than intuitive. Caine worked out what screen acting actually is, at a time when almost nobody was articulating it, and then taught it — in masterclasses and four volumes of memoir. His formulations are exact and unsentimental: acting is "listening and reacting," not performing; you never play a drunk, you play a man fighting drunkenness; an emotional scene is resistance first and collapse second. His motto — "use the difficulty" — turned a Cockney accent, no training and a working-class face into the assets that defined him. That is invention, not luck.

The counter-case he makes himself. A man who cheerfully admits taking films for the house they bought cannot be measured by the standard of uncompromising artistic vision, and the filmography contains a great deal that is simply bad. His intelligence is practical, not scholarly; he left school at sixteen and never claimed otherwise. And the persona — the voice, the glasses, the catchphrase Peter Sellers actually invented for him — grew so familiar that impersonation crowded out assessment for years. The honest verdict: a supreme technician of a difficult craft, who understood it better than most who theorised about it, and did not always spend the technique wisely.

Legacy

Knighted in 2000 as Sir Maurice Micklewhite, in his father's name, Caine spent sixty years demonstrating that a London accent was not a disqualification from anything. Films he appears in have grossed over $7.8 billion. Not a lot of people know that; he made sure they did.

Achievements

• Commander of the Order of the British Empire — 1992
• BAFTA Fellowship — 2000
• Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor — 2000
• BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role — 1983
• Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy — 1983
• Worked as film actor, writer and autobiographer