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Caine's easy charm still making its mark
The Sunday Age
Sunday May 31, 2009
Playing a bitter old man was a challenge for an actor so content with life, writes Melissa Kent. THE cockney accent is still there, but its owner is almost unrecognisable. Michael Caine's latest film, Is Anybody There?, shows the screen star as a doddery, watery-eyed pensioner raging in futile despair against the injustice of old age.It's a confronting image for Caine fans, but the engaging voice on the end of the phone line quickly dispels any notion that art is imitating life."What I did was make Clarence 10 years older than me, so that way it was happening to someone else," he chuckles. "Nothing to do with me. It's a good trick, you know."Clarence is a crotchety old magician who has been packed off to an aged-care home by social services. There he forms an unlikely friendship with Edward (Bill Milner), an odd, lonely 11-year-old obsessed with death and the afterlife.It's a gentle, funny, occasionally melancholy film about two misfits who help each other confront the trials of their world - in Clarence's case, the onset of dementia.For Caine, the poignant role was one of his best. "Clarence is the third character I have played to the best of my ability that is the farthest from me as a person, along with Educating Rita and The Quiet American," he says. "There's nothing of me in those three characters. That's what I look for in a role, and they're very difficult. I failed most of the time, but occasionally I didn't."Now 76, Caine does not care to dwell on ageing, instead searching for scripts that will deliver challenging roles. Still, his optimism took a knock when his close friend, Dougie Hayward, a famed Saville Row tailor and the inspiration for Alfie, died of dementia-related illness during filming."It was a bit of a shock, but at least when I came to do those scenes, I knew how it worked because I'd been with him, you know," he says.Caine is ensconced in the study of his Surrey home, a 200-year-old restored barn, which he shares with his wife of 36 years, Shakira, a former Miss Guyana. He is charming and warm, full of funny anecdotes and observations delivered in that famous mellowed cockney accent.A star of more than 100 films, including The Italian Job and the recent Batman blockbusters, Caine has been nominated for six Academy Awards and won two - in 1986 for Hannah and Her Sisters and 1999 for The Cider House Rules. In 2000, he received a knighthood for his contribution to acting. "But I never impose it on other people, it's just for me. It was an extraordinary honour, because it's part of the culture I live in, and the fact that I'm working class. But you don't have to call me Sir."Although he says class "no longer has any meaning" in modern day Britain, you get the distinct impression it remains integral to his character. Retaining his cockney accent was "my own bit of class warfare", he says with a mischievous chuckle."I thought if I could become a success as an actor keeping my accent, it would encourage other working class people to come into showbusiness and try their luck."Caine was born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite jnr in 1933 in Rotherhithe, a working-class suburb of south London, to a charlady and a Billingsgate fish market porter."Yes, I had humble beginnings - in other words, crap," he says with a good-natured chuckle. "I remember when I first started doing interviews, they'd ask me what drama school I went to. And I couldn't get across to them that I came from a strata of society where no one knew that any such thing as a drama school existed."His initial attraction to acting came not from a deep-seated desire to be the next Olivier - whom he would later star alongside in Sleuth - but from more adolescent passions."I was chasing girls," he laughs. "I was mad about girls but I was very awkward, you know ... But I thought, well, I'm going to take the chance because there were a couple of girls in there that I fancied, so I joined the amateur dramatics society and that's how I became an actor."Army service followed, including service in Berlin and the Korean War, an experience which, combined with his upbringing, Caine describes as "making me who I am".He adopted his professional name in the 1950s, plucking the name Caine from The Caine Mutiny, which was showing in Leicester Square at the time.After a stint in repertory theatre he landed his first film role in the forgettable A Hill in Korea, in 1956. In 1964, he shot to fame as the upper-class officer Gonville Bromhead in Zulu. This was followed a year later by The Ipcress File and the career-defining Alfie in 1966.The skirt-chasing geezer earned him his first Academy Award nomination and remains his favourite film role. "Alfie did so many things for me," he says. "It set me up as a movie star, rather than a lead actor in a British film."Much has been made of Caine's comments in the press last month that he plans to retire if no more good scripts come his way. Thankfully, that's yet to happen - but if and when it does, he is ready."If someone shows me a script that's worth getting up for at 6.30 in the morning and learning a load of lines then I'll do it," he says. "If that script doesn't come along, then I'm gone. There'll be no fanfare, no publicity, no announcement. I'll just fade away."
© 2009 The Sunday Age