By Peter Craven
The actor comes over as a charming and grounded man.
MEMOIR
Don’t Look Back, You’ll Trip Over
Michael Caine
Hodder & Stoughton, $70
Michael Caine, who was Oscar-nominated for Alfie in 1966, is now 90, and he says he’s made his last film and published his first thriller. In this deeply charming book he talks to journalist Matthew d’Ancona about his long and extraordinary career.
He filmed those anti-glamorous spy stories The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin, became a star in Zulu and did that wonderful Kipling film The Man Who Would Be King with Sean Connery, whose director John Huston said the pair had the skill and the precision of a great vaudeville duo.
Caine says in My Guide to Life (as he calls it), “In a weird way the Second World War was the best thing that ever happened to me – certainly in terms of my health because it got me away from all the pollution and industrial filth around Bermondsey. I basically lived on a farm for six years … I’m sure that all that good country air and food accounts for the fact that I ended up being six foot two.”
Caine worked out early that he wanted to be an actor, and he understudied Peter O’Toole in the play The Long and the Short and the Tall. When O’Toole wanted to know who was in the house, “I said, ‘Er, Peter, don’t ask me about who’s in – but I’ll bring two of them round at the end …’ At the end of the show, I took them back to meet Peter. It was Katharine Hepburn and Tennessee Williams.”
Caine became friends with playwrights John Osborne and Harold Pinter. You can hear the born anecdotist on every page of this book, but the stories burn brighter for the fact that he is deadly serious.
Michael Caine in the 1964 film Zulu.
The story of how he was cast in Zulu is riveting – and telling. He only got the role of the tall, posh officer because of the American director Cy Endfield, who was “looking for an actor to play a cockney corporal”. “But Cy went on, ‘You know, you don’t look like a corporal. You look like an officer … Can you do a posh accent?’ he asked. I said, ‘I’ve been in rep for nine years, I can do any accent you want!’ And that was how I got cast in Zulu and how my movie career began.”
That comment with accents is fascinating because we think of Caine as an actor who kept his Cockney accent.
Caine in the 1966 hit Alfie.Credit: Getty Images
His 1964 Horatio to Christopher Plummer’s Hamlet (and Robert Shaw’s Claudius) is impeccable, and so is the officer in Zulu. I was simply deluded into imagining he could do nothing but Cockney because that is the accent he sustains through Hannah and Her Sisters and The Quiet American, a performance Graham Greene admired.
It was a deliberate choice to make Cockney his calling card. Caine got on very well with Laurence Olivier when they made Sleuth, and here he is on how he prepared for making Educating Rita with Julie Walters. “I had to put on 30lbs because Frank is meant to be this burnt-out old professor who’s just let himself go. I remember watching Emil Jannings as the teacher in that Marlene Dietrich classic, The Blue Angel (1930), looking for tips – you can always get inspiration from great movies of the past.”
This book is a beauty because it gives you the mesmeric charm together with the plain man’s earnestness. We’re not surprised to hear that Caine keeps a copy of Kipling’s If – framed on his wall. “‘If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two imposters just the same.’”
He’ll tell you a story against himself about how he was prosing on about some Hollywood woman and how Cary Grant wouldn’t know about all that, and Grant says, “I used to be married to her.”
Caine’s candid answers are all very down to earth. “I remember being very flattered later on when John [Huston] said I was ‘an honest man’. That was one of the greatest compliments anyone has ever paid me. But The Man Who Would Be King was the kind of film where, by the end, you thought, if this turns out to be my last movie for whatever reason, we’ve really done it as well as we possibly could. It’s a great feeling, in any career or activity, very rare indeed.”
There is plenty more, including the celebration of his wife, Shakira, his veneration for his grandchildren and his fear of a world governed by messages and likes.
There is a detailed account of his relationship with Christopher Nolan that will enthral admirers.
Don’t Look Back, You’ll Trip Over includes accounts of the restaurants he’s owned and provides you with recipes, which have the weird effect of highlighting the sense of how likeable and utterly grounded this man who has kept his Cockney accent like a badge of honour actually is.
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