Michael Caine - Blowing the Bloody Doors Off: And Other Lessons in Life

THE FIRST TIME I was in the United States, when I had just made Alfie, I was sitting on my own in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel and heard the sound of a helicopter landing in the gardens opposite. This, the porter told me, was strictly illegal. He and I stood at the door to see who was so flagrantly flouting the lawpresumably the President, of the United States or at least of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Across Sunset Boulevard, out of a swirling sun-flecked cloud of dust, six foot four and in full cowboy get-up, strode the unmistakable figure of John Wayne. As I stood there with my mouth open he caught my eye and altered his course to come over to me. Whats your name, kid? he asked.

Michael Caine, I managed to croak.

Thats right, he agreed, with a tilt of his head. You were in that movie Alfie.

Yes, I said. I wasnt really keeping up my end of the conversation.

Youre gonna be a star, kid, he drawled, draping his arm around my shoulders. But if you want to stay one, remember this: talk low, talk slow, and dont say too much.

Thank you, Mr. Wayne, I said.

Call me Duke. He gave me a chuck on the arm, turned around and swaggered off.

It was a mind-blowing Hollywood moment for an ambitious young actor on his first visit to the city of dreams. And it was great advice for anyone who was going to be acting in Westerns and delivering all his dialogue from a horse. Talk low and slow so you dont scare the horses, and say as little as possible before the horse runs away. But it was not such great advice for someone like me, an actor who was going to play all kinds of characters with tons of dialogue, and mostly, thankfully, with my feet planted firmly on the ground.

I am often asked what advice I have for actors starting out in this business. And for many years my answer was Never listen to old actors like me. That was because, until John Wayne offered me his words of wisdom, I always used to ask older actors what I should do, and the only thing they ever told me was to give up.

But as Ive got older, Ive been reflecting on my life, as older people often do. And Ive realised that, over my sixty years in the movie business and my eighty-five years of life, I have been given a lot of useful adviceby Marlene Dietrich, Tony Curtis and Laurence Olivier among many othersand I have learnt a lot of useful lessons, from my many glittering successes and my many disastrous failures. I started to think I could do a bit better than never listen to advice. In fact, my advice would be, dont listen to that advice.

This book is the result of that reflection. I wanted to look back on my life from the Elephant and Castle to Hollywood, and from man-about-town Alfie to Batmans butler Alfred, with all its successes and all its failures, all its fun and all its misery and struggle, its comedy, its drama, its romance and its tragedy, and find, among it all, the lessons Ive learnt and want to share, not just for aspiring movie actors but for everyone.

A few of my lessons are quite specific to movie acting. But I hope that most of them will speak, somehow, to most of you. You wont all have to audition for parts but in some ways life is always an audition: everyone has moments when they have to put themselves out there for what they want. You wont all have to learn lines but everyone sometimes has to make sure theyre properly prepared. We all have to deal with difficult people and we all have to learn how to balance our professional and personal lives.

What you need to be a star in the movies is not that different from what you need to be a star in any other universe (it just takes a little more luck).

And if you dont give a monkeys about this old mans so-called wisdom? Well, I hope youll still be entertained. Along the way I tell stories from my life, some old, some new, many star-studded and all entertaining, I hope, that help to tell the bigger story of how I got from where I started to where I ended up, and the mistakes I made, and the fun I had, and what I learnt along the way.

What worked for John Wayne was never going to work for me. So I dont assume that what worked for me will necessarily work for you. The world I came up in was very different from todays, and my battles as a young white working-class male movie actor in the 1950s and 1960s will not be the same as yours.

And I know that my life has been blessed with more than its fair share of good luck and good timing. As a young working-class lad in the 1960s I was in the right place at the right time. I know that. Thousands of actors out there were as good as and better than me, but didnt get the breaks. I know that too. And I know that while suddenly in the 1960s parts were being written and worlds were opening up for working-class lads like me, those breakthroughs were decades away for women and people of colour. It has taken me many decades to understand the battlesnot just for the roles but for dignity and basic decencythat women have been fighting in the movies and many other industries for years, and Im still learning.

I have been extraordinarily lucky in my personal life too, meeting my wife Shakira and having the most wonderful life with her for forty-seven years. I have been blessed with two incredible daughters, three precious grandchildren and a group of close, supportive friends.

No one can succeed in the movies or anywhere else without luck. But I havent just been lucky. Ive been unlucky plenty of times too. And Ive never rested on my laurels. Ive worked hard, learnt my craft, grabbed my opportunities and just kept on bloody going when others gave up.

Nobody has the one secret formula for success. No one can promise you riches and fameand actually I wouldnt recommend wishing for them. A lot of actors know as much about the business as I do, and more. But if you would like a look at how one very lucky man got there, overcoming the bad luck and wringing everything he could out of the good, making tons of mistakes but trying to learn from them, doing what he loved and having a lot of fun along the way, lets get going!