Caine - Whats It All About?

Contents

About the Book

Michael Caine is the best-loved film actor Britain has ever produced. Here, for the first time, he reveals the truth about his childhood, his family and his hard-fought journey from London to Hollywood, bringing to life the lean years and the triumphs with astonishing candour. And with typical charm and humour he talks about the movies, about his relationships on and off the screen with other actors and directors, and about the memorable screen presence which is his hallmark.

About the Author

Michael Caine has starred in over one hundred films, and is one of only two actors to have been nominated for an Academy Award for acting in every decade since the 1960s. He lives in London and Oxfordshire with his wife, Shakira. He has two daughters.

To Shakira, my wife,
and Dominique and Natasha, my daughters.
All my love forever.

Foreword

Well what do you think of it so far?

Its not too heavy for you, is it? They told me not to write a long book or it would be too weighty and too expensive, so Ive tried to keep the price and the bulk down. But theres still a lot I want to say.

There have been something like 5,000 miles of newsprint and at least seven biographies on me. God knows why. So why add to all this? To set the record straight on my own record player for a change. I have long since stopped reading what is written about me; for the most part it has been wrong or misleading. I am not saying that I am a better or nicer person than I have seen portrayed and, heaven knows, this book is not a work of history or scholarship. But what you will read here is the real me not for a change, but for the first time.

So what was it all about? Im going to tell you.

Part One

Mummys out!

I FIRST STARTED to act at the age of three. We were a very poor family and it was my mothers idea to have me help out with her many outstanding bills. She wrote the script and directed the action. The cue to begin my performance was a ring at the door bell. Grasping my small hand, my mother rushed down the three flights of stairs from our small flat and hid behind the front door as I opened it. The unsuspecting third member of the cast the rent collector was standing there as I delivered my first lines: Mummys out, I said, and slammed the door in his face.

I was a painfully shy little boy and terrified at first, but I became accustomed to the role and eventually got to play to a better class of creditor. One day I even played to the local vicar, who was collecting money to repair the church spire. As my mother was Church of England and my father was Roman Catholic, they had not been allowed to marry in either church so they had no reason to go there to thank anybody for anything. My mother was always a firm believer in God, but like me never went to church although she did have me christened into the Protestant faith. I asked my father one day why I was Protestant and not Catholic like him and his honest and practical reply was: The Protestant church was just around the corner and the Catholic one was a bus ride away and we didnt have the money for the fare. Of such earth shattering material is ones destiny formed.

I read somewhere in a book on psychiatry that the basis of all our lives is that we become what we are afraid of. For although my performances at the front door continued up to the start of World War Two, I have never got over my initial fear of performing in front of strangers. The rent collector may have become a familiar face but I have never forgotten the time when following the same old routine I opened the door and stood there stunned in front of a man I had never seen before with a thick bushy beard I had never seen a beard before either shoulder-length hair and terrible piercing eyes. I stood rooted to the spot. He actually reminded me of someone. In the unaccustomed pause, he declared he was a Jehovahs Witness and wanted to speak to my mother. Mummys out, I mumbled, transfixed by those staring eyes. Youll never go to heaven if you tell lies, he hissed. As I slammed the door, I realised now that I knew who he looked like: the picture of Jesus my mother had shown me. Wheres heaven, Mum? I asked as we clambered slowly back up the long flights of stairs. I dont know, son, she replied. All I know is that its not round here.

In 1985 I was asked by my friend Bob Hoskins to play a small guest part in his movie Mona Lisa. I sat in the car on the way to the production office not taking any particular notice of where we were going until we crossed the River Thames. The river divides London not just physically but socially: north of the river is the posh side, the south very definitely isnt. I know this because I come from the south. As the car weaved its way through the grey depressing streets that I had known as a boy, I wondered where the hell we were going. Bob had told me that the film had a very small budget I knew that from the amount that I was being paid but how small was it if they had to have an office in such a crummy area? We drove deeper into dark valleys of decaying Dickensian warehouses and finally arrived at a depressingly ugly Victorian building which now housed Bobs production office. As I was led through the long, dark, dank corridors I asked my guide what the place had been before it was converted. It was originally built as a hospital years ago, he replied. It was called Saint Olaves. I stopped dead in my tracks and looked round me. So this was it. I had heard that name all my life but had never known exactly where it was. I was standing in the hospital where I was born.

It turned out that after the hospital was closed down, St Olaves became a lunatic asylum for a while and then a couple of years ago was converted into offices. When I think about it, it seems a cruel joke on the progress of my life a natural progression from my birth place to lunatic asylum to movie production office. And I bet Im the only movie actor to have worked out of a production office in the building where he was born.

When I was a young man I used to read a lot of star biographies in movie fan magazines to see if there was anybody like me in them. (There never was.) According to the biographies, all actors had done menial jobs and had a rough life before they became successful. The girls usually claimed to have been waitresses or nurses and the men had dug ditches for a living. No matter what background they actually came from children of millionaires, relations of the studio boss, boy or girlfriend of the producer or agent the Hollywood machine would make these stars sound like one of the people.

But in my case its all true.

I was born in the Charity wing of St Olaves Hospital, Rotherhithe on Tuesday, 14 March 1933 at a few minutes after ten oclock in the morning. I weighed eight pounds two ounces and my mother later told me that the birth was easy the last easy thing I was going to do for the next thirty years.

I was born with a mild, non-contagious but incurable eye disease called Blefora which makes the eyelids swell. Like many things in my life this problem turned out to be actually in my favour, as by the time I was a young actor my heavy eyelids gave me a rather sleepy and, more importantly, sexy look. Apart from my eyes being a bit dodgy, Im told I also had ears that stuck out at almost right angles from my head. This time the deformity was curable with the aid of sticking plaster which my mother used to pin them back every time I went to sleep for the first two years of my life. The flattening of my ears was a two-edged sword because they are now so flat against my head that sounds often whiz past without hitting them at all which makes me slightly hard of hearing without being actually deaf.