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Sir Michael Caine is 90 years old, and if we’re taking the impression of him everyone does as a guide – you were only supposed to blow the bladdy doors off, yer a big man but yer aht uv shape, mar nyme is Marchel Caine – the still-working actor has been a national treasure for about half his life.
He’s probably the most film star-y film star Britain’s ever produced. Which is not to knock his acting; he’s brilliant. It’s just that his star persona is so big and so distinct that it bends all films around him. He is also, for good measure, probably the only film star-y film star Britain’s ever produced who knocked together trivia books during a career lull too. Not Many People Know That!: Michael Caine's Almanac of Amazing Information and its follow-up And Not Many People Know This Either! are classics of the Christmas present panic buy genre.
Those two things are the definitive Caine traits. He’s a very cool and excellent actor, and he’s made some very endearingly gawky choices.
Michael Caine was part of a generation of working class actors that made up the British New Wave, though he was out of step with what the movement wanted from its leading men: he didn't possess the brawniness of Albert Finney, for example, the glowering, thunderous presence of Richard Burton, or the brooding temperament of Terence Stamp. Meanwhile, the French New Wave which prefigured it tended to like its leading men to be more pouty and petulant types like Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Instead, Caine was somewhere in the middle of both waves: louche and wry, but muscular and brutish too, and able to knock up a decent omelette. Esquire asked Caine a few years ago whether he was an Angry Young Man. No, he said. “I was deliriously happy. I wasn't pissed off at anybody. It was all working out, you see?”
Since 1956 there have only been six calendar years in which he’s not appeared in a film. So how do you make sense of a career that runs to at least 130 movies? It often looks less like a filmography than a frantic scramble to make sure he didn’t end up anywhere like where he’d come from – a tiny house in wartime Southwark with no indoor toilet.
The run from Zulu, The Ipcress File and Alfie through to The Italian Job and Get Carter made a lot of sense. Caine did what the British film industry did well: stylish larks and hard-boiled thrillers. After Sleuth, Caine went on a run of comedy capers. I wouldn’t worry too much about seeing any of them.
Like a lot of British icons of the Sixties, Caine had a very odd Eighties. Twiggy went to Broadway. Sean Connery went back to Bond. All three surviving Beatles grew mullets.
On the one hand Caine made Educating Rita, Hannah and Her Sisters and Mona Lisa. On the other, he made a run of not-great Brit comedies and muddled potboilers. Jaws: The Revenge in 1987 was rubbish, but at least he got a decent gag out of it. (“I have never seen it but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.”) His true nadir was in 1994, opposite Steven Seagal in On Deadly Ground playing a very cockney Texan oil billionaire while wearing a wig that makes him look like Action Man.
And yet even that was side by side with his stellar performance in The Muppet Christmas Carol in 1992. Without his restraint and sincerity, you don't have the best Christmas film of them all. Two moments stand out: the bit in the churchyard where he turns to tell the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come defiantly that "a life can be made right"; and the bit where Beaker gives Scrooge his little scarf to say thanks for his charity donation, and Caine looks like he's about to burst into tears. Lovely, lovely, lovely.
Then, finally, Caine got back in a groove when Christopher Nolan turned up at his house with a script for Batman Begins. Over the last two decades Nolan’s done more than anyone to restore Caine to the critical standing he deserves, using him to add gravitas and easy charm whenever something complex needs explaining, allowing Caine in turn to do some of his best work in decades.
Caine played Bruce Wayne’s quasi-dad-slash-butler-slash-consigliere with a light touch and dry wit, a mixture of his cuddly Cider House Rules character Wilbur Larch and an SAS veteran who could still do you in. He became the emotional heart of the Dark Knight trilogy, and often the only thing that kept it from collapsing under its own self-seriousness.
It was during this period I met Caine very, very briefly, for a junket promoting his Hatton Garden robbery flick The King of Thieves. It also starred Ray Winstone and Tom Courtenay. As I waited outside the interview room in a luxe London hotel, they came by at irregular intervals. First Sir Tom wandered past, then Winstone bowled by wearing a short-sleeved white shirt and the most extraordinary purple suede Chelsea boots, dropping a quick, “Alright?” with a wink.
Finally: Caine, walking with a stick. It was the strangest experience. Meeting famous people is always slightly surreal, but watching Sir Michael Caine head down a fairly plush hotel corridor to do dozens of seven-minute interviews was properly mind-bending. He just pottered past with his comfy shoes on, chatting to someone about the traffic on the way in.
During the interview I was a sweaty mess. With Caine sandwiched between Courtenay and Ray, we played a game of 'What Does This Modern London Slang Mean' which lasted 90 seconds before Winstone took my bowl of questions off me and demanded I “ask some proper questions”. Still, I did get to hear Michael Caine say, “Tekkers?”.
Why, I wondered, was an 85-year-old Michael Caine still bothering to come along and do junkets for movies? The answer, I suspect, is quite simple. He just really, really likes making movies, and doesn’t want to do anything else.
“I’ve seen 70-year-olds who are already dead and 90-year-olds who can’t stop themselves living,” he wrote in his autobiography Blowing the Bloody Doors Off. “I stay young by refusing to be old.”
