Michael Caine
Michael Caine plays an elderly magician with Alzheimers in his latest film, Is Anybody There?. As he tells Dave Calhoun, it's a far cry from his early days playing Jack the lad in Alfie and The Italian Job - but he wouldn't have it any other way.
When you've been in the game as long as Michael Caine, who first stood in front of a film camera 53 years ago, age catches up with you. You have a choice: you can deny it and play totally inappropriate roles, you can retire, or you can keep working and embrace your age with honesty, wit and grace. Wisely, Caine has lately taken the last of these options with films such as Last Orders, which explores the death of Caine's chirpy south London butcher, and Children of Men, the dystopian thriller in which he plays a dope-smoking, long-haired old hippie. He's also won over a whole new generation of filmgoers with his turns as the elderly butler Alfred in Christoper Nolan's Batman movies.
"Every youngster knows me," Caine tells me, looking bemused and delighted. He's got the anecdotes and patter of a London cabbie, whether talking about how in the early 1960s he and his old flatmate Terence Stamp bumped into Roger Moore - then a total stranger - on Piccadilly and Moore told him, after seeing him on TV the night before, that Caine was going to be a star. Or how he wishes he saw a little more of his two best friends, but "Roger Moore lives in Switzerland and Sean Connery lives in the Bahamas". He's still got that famous south London drawl after six decades of acting. "I've become more dignified over the years," he jokes. "I've gone from Alfie to Alfred. I have this new base of people who recognise me in the street. It's weird because they're little teenagers."
We're talking in Chelsea, in a hotel opposite his Chelsea Harbour flat, and I tell Caine that the guides who run the pleasure-boat tours down the Thames always delight in pointing out his apartment. "Do they? It's funny, yeah, I used to live on the Thames at Windsor and they did the same thing there too." He points out the window. "I live in that block over there and my daughter lives in the next one. The great thing about my block is there's just one flat on every floor, so you've got a 360 view, you can look all the way round." There's something immediately likeable about Caine: he's upfront, blunt, has no hang-ups, is happy with success and proud of it too.
It all happened very quickly for Caine. After getting his break in Zulu in 1964, at 31, stardom came swiftly. He played well-dressed hard men and flash boys with a rich seam of backstreet chat.
Almost 100 movies later, his latest is Is Anybody There?, a small British indie for which he can't have received much of a cheque. It can't be vanity either. This time, he's a doddery, bitter 85 year old whose time on earth is coming to a end. Clarence is a vulnerable former magician who moves into a home and strikes up a friendship with a boy - the son of his carers - whose obsession with death stems from the sight of body bags travelling down the stairlift. Clarence knows that he could very well be next.
How things change: Caine starts his career inhabiting youthful, idealised versions of himself and now he plays a frail widower on the verge of death. "When you're a movie star and you're young, you are always playing someone who's a better fighter, a better lover, a better everything than you," he says. "This one was extraordinary because I had to get rid of Michael Caine for a start. And once he was gone, I had to get rid of any ego about what I looked like."
The boy from Bermondsey - his dad was a porter at Billingsgate Fish Market - turned 76 last month and has no intention of retiring. "I don't think you retire from movies, movies retire you." Some actors might be put off by portraying someone senile and dying - and Caine says that his wife, Shakira, was upset when she saw him wasting away on screen - but he isn't one to worry about death. "Yeah, I should," he says. "But I always worry about it for other people. I never worry about it myself. I don't care."
Caine has always worked hard - sometimes, as he admits, for the money. He once quipped that he's never seen 1987's Jaws: The Revenge - "However, I have seen the house that it built, and it's terrific." He's made a lot of duff movies, but he's always willing to try something new, whether it's playing a transvestite murderer in Brian de Palma's Dressed to Kill (1980) or hanging with puppets in The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992).
As Caine says, he knows what he'd be doing if he hadn't got that early break. "I would still be the old character-actor in theatre. I'm 76, I wouldn't have had the money to retire, I would be working and having a couple of drinks in the evening just to forget, and life would have been very different. But I would have stayed an actor."
Is Anybody There? opens in cinemas on 4 Jun.
