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Michael Caine
| Biography |
Over the years Michael Caine has often bitterly bemoaned the lack of respect he's received in his own country. Where the Americans have awarded him two Oscars and major star status, the British, he's complained, STILL don't seem to think he can act. Maybe he was away for too long, his tax exiles in Hollywood and the south of France keeping him from true Brit popular opinion. Because now the Brits LOVE Michael Caine. Having been bowled over by his exceptional performance in Little Voice (where he deliberately undermined himself as a low-life cockney loser - the Brits like to see the mighty brought low), they were happy to drag out and dust off his earlier work. The Italian Job ("You were only supposed to blow the bloody DOORS off") was now reappraised as classic comedy-action, Get Carter ("You're a big man but you're out of shape") was raised from gritty cultdom, The Man Who Would Be King was finally accepted as the epic adventure it always was. When you added on his toffee-nosed upstart in Zulu, the original Harry Palmer trilogy, his washed-up professor in Educating Rita, his hardcore duel with Laurence Olivier in Sleuth, his laudanum-addicted doctor in The Cider House Rules, his sketchy adulterer in Hannah and Her Sisters and, of course, Alfie, there was no way even the most iconoclastic Brit would argue that Michael Caine was not one of our nation's greatest screen actors.
And it all started so unpromisingly. When he was born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite in the charity wing of St Olaves Hospital, Rotherhithe, just after 10am on Tuesday, March 14th, 1933, he was something of a mess. His dad, also Maurice, had served seven years in India with the Royal Horse Artillery then returned to marry Ellen Maria Burchell a local charlady. At the time of the boy's birth, dad was unemployed but soon got a job as a porter at Billingsgate fish market, where the Micklewhites had laboured for 200 years. He would work from 4 till 12, earning decent money, but would then repair to the bookies, meaning the family was always broke.
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