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Michael Caine in 1971, after making Get Carter |
His name is...
Michael Caine
Michael Caine worked his way to A-List status the hard way writes William Hall
I have to declare an interest straight away. As Michael Caine’s ‘official biographer’ (thank you for that, Fleet Street) with his authorised life story Raising Caine that I first wrote in 1981 and have since updated, I have been closer to the actor than many other scribes who set out to chart his career. Indeed in the introduction to his own biography Michael Caine: a Class Act, Christopher Bray is generous enough to state: “All future writers will be indebted for that book”. Nice, Christopher. Thanks for that.
But if indeed there have been by the actor’s own count “at least seven biographies of me”, then one wonders what more there is to say, or what slant to take, on a genuine rags-to-riches story virtually without parallel among our movie stars today.
There is no doubt that Caine at 73 has become something of a screen icon and even, as someone called him, a national treasure. And this for a body of work as remarkable for its quantity (more than 100 films) and diversity as for its varying quality. Not for nothing did his agent, the formidable Sue Mengers at ICM, advise him at one stage shortly after Beyond the Poseidon Adventure sank with all hands: “Michael, if you’re going to do garbage, at least get paid a lot of money!”
So what new do we find from Christopher Bray’s thoughtful, meticulously researched and somewhat academic analysis of the life and times of the actor born Maurice Micklewhite on March 14, 1933 in Rotherhithe – almost a Cockney, depending on whether the wind carried the sound of Bow Bells across the river?
We all know Caine’s story, or think we do. How he was brought up in the great Depression, his father a fish porter at Billingsgate, his mother scrubbing floors as a charlady to make ends meet. How he dreamed of stardom, and spent his early years doggedly playing minor roles on TV and in repertory. How his big break came with Zulu and a role, totally cast against type, as the upper-crust Old Etonian Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead in that courage-against-all-odds epic which still stands up today.
How he made the part of Harry Palmer – the “antidote to James Bond” – his own, and did the same as womanising Alfie, carrying the ‘Mr Sex in Specs’ image into the sixties gossip columns with his chum Terence Stamp before settling down to become a family man with his beauty queen wife Shakira.
Then moving on to break into the world of money and international stardom, reach the celebrity A-list, and finally being awarded the trophy of a knighthood for services rendered to the acting profession. On the way picking up two best supporting Oscars (for Hannah and Her Sisters and Cider House Rules) and turning in notable performances in films like Sleuth, Educating Rita and The Quiet American.
Hard to find anything new to say, you might think. But Bray goes about the task with zest, turning over stones to shine a spotlight on what lies beneath like a psychiatrist examining a particularly complex patient.
The lateral thinking is intriguing. Sample: when describing the Harry Palmer spy sagas (Ipcress File being the best) the author goes off at a tangent to quote legendary director Howard Hawks saying that what he most liked about Humphrey Bogart was his capacity for projecting insolence.
Why the Bogie-man? Says Bray: “Caine worshipped Bogart, and there is little doubt that he saw Harry Palmer as his chance of playing a Bogart-type role – the compromised hero forever being given the runaround by the powers that be.”
In my own opinion Caine was closer to Bogart in the bleak and uncompromising revenge thriller Get Carter, surely the most memorable role in his entire career – where, as Bray writes: “His every line in the movie is pregnant with threat, heavy with dread.” I can only concur with the author’s claim that this is the “best British gangster picture ever made”. That’s for sure.
Sometimes the shrink gets caught up in his own verbosity. As in: “Alfie is not a charming cynic but a victim of alienated ennui.”
While he suggests that in the hit comedy yarn The Italian Job the noisy Self Preservation Society are a disturbing sight in the robbery – “fascist storm-troopers who take as much pleasure in bloodshed as they do in bullion”, and goes on to declaim: “Essentially the movie is a fantasy about Britain’s not needing to sign up to the Common Market because we are so much better than the rest of its members…” Pardon me, that’s one I missed!
There are 22 pages acknowledging references, showing the degree of research from the author.
But at the end he reveals, somewhat sadly: “Caine himself would not speak to me, for which he can hardly be blamed. To have authorised one biography and authored one’s own memoir is enough self-admission for any man.”
Rest assured, people, one day someone will make a biopic of Michael Caine’s life. But not yet.
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