He only went and blew the bloody doors off!

Michael Caine in The Great Escaper
Picture: wyrdlight

I have an 89-year-old uncle, Michael, who hasn’t been particularly well recently. He’s a big bloke, my Uncle Michael, born in Wimbledon in 1934, who went on to spend a large part of his career in the Royal Navy. By coincidence, another 6’2” Michael - Sir Michael Caine - is currently starring in a film, The Great Escaper, with the late Glenda Jackson, in which he plays a Royal Navy veteran who, at the age of 89, leaves his old people’s home to to travel to France to attend the 70th anniversary of D-Day.

Caine’s performance is said to be one of his best. It is now certainly his last. Having recently told The Telegraph “I am bloody 90 now, and I can’t walk properly and all that. I sort of am retired now,” Caine has now confirmed that he is.

“I keep saying I'm going to retire. Well I am now," Caine said today in a BBC Radio interview. “I’ve figured I’ve had a picture [The Great Escaper] where I’ve played the lead and had incredible reviews... What am I going to do that will beat this?. The only parts I’m liable to get now are 90-year-old men. Or maybe 85…,” he told the BBC’s Martha Kearney. “So I thought, I might as well leave with all this.”

In doing so Caine brings the curtain down on a seven-decade career that has seen him appear in, now, 176 films since his debut (a walk on part in the 1950 naval yarn Morning Departure) , encompassing everything from drama, comedy and action, to sci-fi, horror and fantasy. That alone is a testament to his legendary work ethic, one which, even after he’d become a proper Hollywood star, rarely saw him turn down roles, even if some included the atrocious Jaws: The Revenge and On Deadly Ground (the ridiculous Steven Segal eco-thriller in which Caine applied a questionable American accent). “I choose the great roles,” he has said, “and if none of these come, I choose the mediocre ones, and if they don't come, I choose the ones that pay the rent.”

Such blips aside - even De Niro has put in some stinkers - Caine’s body of work comprises some of my favourite films down the years (too many to list, but I’ll give you, in particular order, Alfie, The Italian Job, Zulu, A Bridge Too Far, Dirty Rotten Scandals and The Muppet Christmas Movie just for starters. Then there is Funeral In Berlin, his second outing as the anti-Bond, Harry Palmer, in which he delivers the following exchange:

    Waiter: “Bitte?”
    Palmer: “Nah, Löwenbräu”

Another that deserves attention is Get Carter, Mike Hodges’ grim-as-the-decade-it-was-made-in 1971 directorial debut in which Caine plays the eponymous gangster Jack Carter. It marked a somewhat darker shade of acting for Caine, given the more frivolous fare of some of his work in the previous decade. 45 years later Caine returned to crime with Christopher Nolan’s Batman reboot, Batman Begins, the first of a trilogy in which he played Bruce Wayne’s surrogate guardian Alfred (also spawning Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s attempts to out-Caine themselves during their impression contests in The Trip). 

Picture: Warner Bros

The Dark Knight films commenced an unlikely working relationship between Caine and Nolan, seeing the actor cast in The Prestige, Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk and Tenet (though not, contrary to expectation, Oppenheimer). Nolan does appear to rely on an ensemble, but the regularity with which he’s cast Caine - in the closing chapter of his film career - has had much to do with the actor’s personal philosophy to the craft. Nolan has regularly called out Caine’s professionalism and preparation on set as two of the many reasons for casting him, something Nolan would also see as rubbing off on the younger members of the cast.

Until today Caine had been talking about retirement for a number of years, first floating the idea in 2008. Two years ago it came again when he announced that his role in Lina Roessler’s comedy Best Sellers might be the last. If, as seems definite, The Great Escaper is the end, it will be poignant. “The character of Bernie is an old cockney soldier, which, funnily enough, I am,” he told Kearney. “He fought in the Second World War - I fought in the Korean War - so it’s an entirely different frame of mind, but the same really.”

“I’d retired when was sent the script,” he went on to explain. “I’d turned it down three times. But I kept falling in love with him every time I read it, and so I did it. I just loved the character of Bernie. I thought he was incredible, and it’s so beautifully written.”

It did, though, present Caine with a full stop: “With Covid and all that, I hadn’t done a picture for three years, and I thought I was finished. And I suddenly did it - and had such a wonderful time.” It wasn’t without its challenges, given that age has been visibly catching up with the 90-year-old. “They gave me a very good walking stick, and I was able to do scenes that needed that,” he explained. Oliver Parker, the film’s director, said the production team got the best out of the actor: “We were careful to ensure that Michael wasn’t working too hard,” Parker said recently. “For him to have returned to acting after not having made a film in a while, and in the way he did, was quite a thing.”

“I’ve rarely seen him playing a character that has such frailty,” Parker said at a press conference for The Great Escaper. “He’s always been Michael Caine - carefree, confident and cool. Here he’s playing a man who is struggling to keep control. And for the audience to invest in that he really has to share his vulnerabilities, and I really was thrilled at Michael’s ability to do that.”

Caine himself has been philosophical about ageing. “The worst thing about it is that so much disappears from your life,” he recently told the Daily Telegraph. “You can’t run around, you can’t play football, and you gradually realise you’re approaching death. It could be just around the corner at 90.”

Caine may be retiring from acting, but he’s about to commence a new career as a fiction writer. Next month he will publish his debut novel, the thriller Deadly Game. “I’m quite happy,” he told the Telegraph. “I’m sitting here writing, doing my thing. I like it. I have two children, three grandchildren and a wife. Everyone’s going to join me eventually. No one’s going to say, ‘I’m so sorry you’re going to die - I wish you were like me and not going to die.’ Everybody’s going to die. At least I’ve lived to fucking 90; I didn’t die at 9, or 19 or 29. I’m 90, and I’ve had the best possible life I could have thought of. The best possible wife, and the best possible family. They may not be a family that other people would say is the best possible family - but the best possible family for me.”

If The Great Escaper is to represent the final reels of celluloid for the man born Maurice Micklewhite in Rotherhithe in March 1933, the son of a Billingsgate porter and a cook, it will mark the closing call of a remarkable acting career. 

It’s a career that sprang out of no particular artistic instinct at all, apart from some am-dram stuff as a south-east London teenager. After being demobbed from the army after active service in Korea, Caine became the assistant stage manager of a theatre. On becoming an actor, a billboard for The Caine Mutiny provided his stage name (he only legally became ‘Michael Caine’ in 2016), which was followed by television and regional theatre work. The 1960s saw Caine emerge as one of a group of British actors which came to symbolise the decade (a group which includes Terence Stamp - with whom Caine shared a flat - Sean Connery, David Hemmings and Peter O’Toole) and, indeed Britishness, coinciding with The Beatles, the Stones and the blood-rush of British pop culture that erupted in the decade.

Arguably some of Caine’s most memorable work occurred in the 60s, be it in Zulu, Alfie or the The Italian Job, a film that 54 years on is still being quoted, most recently by Sir Keir Starmer. Following the Labour Party’s surprise victory in the Rutherglen & Hamilton West by-election, the Labour leader told party workers: “They said that we couldn’t change the Labour party and we did it. They said that we couldn’t win in the south of England and the north of England, and we did it. They said: ‘You’ll never beat the SNP in Scotland,’ and Rutherglen, you did it. You blew the doors off!”

Picture: Paramount

It’s unlikely that Caine, a self-professed Tory voter (although he did support Tony Blair in 1997) would warm to the reference to his character Charlie Croker’s most memorable line in The Italian Job, but its testament to his place in cinematic history. He may never have been the greatest British actor, in the thespian sense of an Olivier, a Richardson, a Gielgud or a Guinness, but he was a great British movie star, in the galactic sense of a Connery or a Roger Moore, transcending ordinary. May I wish him a happy retirement.