Michael Caine

A 21-year-old actor called Michael Scott rang his agent from a telephone box in Leicester Square in 1954 and was told there was already a Michael Scott in London. Before he hung up, he needed a new surname. Across the square, the Odeon was showing 'The Caine Mutiny'.

He was born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite on 14 March 1933 at St Olave's Hospital in Rotherhithe. His father, also Maurice, portered fish at Billingsgate market; his mother, Ellen Frances Marie Burchell, worked as a cook and a charwoman. Wartime evacuation took him to North Runcton in Norfolk, where the village school gave him his first part.

Back in London, the family moved into a prefab in Elephant and Castle. A scholarship took him to Hackney Downs School, and he left education at sixteen. National service called him up in 1951: the Royal Fusiliers, first at Iserlohn in West Germany and then in Korea, from which he was sent home in 1953 with malaria.

Six years of repertory and tiny uncredited parts followed. Understudying Peter O'Toole in 'The Long and the Short and the Tall', he took the part over when O'Toole left, and 'Next Time I'll Sing to You' finally got him reviewed in 1963.

Zulu, Harry Palmer and Alfie

The role that changed everything came with the wrong accent. Cy Endfield had already cast the Cockney private in 'Zulu' (1964) and offered him Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead instead, an upper-class officer. They shot for fourteen weeks in Natal. Having grown up in Elephant and Castle, he learned to speak like an aristocrat and left ten years of walk-on parts behind him.

A year later came 'The Ipcress File' and with it Harry Palmer, the short-sighted, insubordinate spy taken from Len Deighton's novels, where the narrator has no name at all. Those heavy-framed glasses were his own idea. Palmer came back in four more films.

Alfie (1966) made him an international star. Lewis Gilbert cast him as Bill Naughton's womaniser, who recounts his conquests straight to camera and ends up with nobody. He has often called it his own favourite, and it brought his first Oscar nomination.

Two more parts from that stretch are still quoted in pubs. Charlie Croker, the thief in 'The Italian Job' (1969), shouts the line about the bloody doors that eventually titled one of his books. Jack Carter, the London enforcer in 'Get Carter' (1971), was filmed around Newcastle and Gateshead by Mike Hodges.

Two films of that decade put him among the heavyweights. Sleuth (1972) kept him on screen with Laurence Olivier throughout, and both men were nominated for the best actor Oscar. The Man Who Would Be King (1975) made him Peachy Carnehan beside Sean Connery, directed by John Huston.

The house that 'Jaws' paid for

His first marriage, to the actress Patricia Haines, was short and unhappy, and left him a daughter, Dominique, born in 1957. Caine saw the Guyanese model Shakira Baksh in a television coffee advert in 1971, got hold of her number and married her on 8 January 1973. Their daughter Natasha was born that July.

Work was almost never turned down: war pictures, killer-animal disasters and a good many films he will not defend. Of 'Jaws: The Revenge' (1987) he has written that he has never seen it, that by all accounts it is terrible, and that he has seen the house it built, which is terrific.

Beverly Hills took him in 1979, away from a British top rate of tax above 80%, and he did not settle in England again until the second half of the eighties.

Educating Rita (1983) got him back to the good parts. Frank Bryant is an alcoholic Open University tutor teaching a Liverpool hairdresser, Julie Walters in her first film, and he learns more from her than she does from him. Awards followed: the BAFTA, the Golden Globe and a third Oscar nomination.

Three years later came the prize itself. Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) cast him as Elliot, married to Hannah (Mia Farrow) and helplessly in love with her sister Lee (Barbara Hershey). That performance won him the supporting actor Oscar in March 1987, and he was not there to collect it. Filming on the fourth 'Jaws' had him in the Caribbean.

Mortwell, the pimp in Mona Lisa, came the same season, in Neil Jordan's film with Bob Hoskins in the lead. Then came a Riviera confidence trickster opposite Steve Martin in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988), played with evident enjoyment.

One oddity of those years still turns up on television: Escape to Victory (1981), Huston again, with Caine managing a team of Allied prisoners alongside Sylvester Stallone, Pelé and a bench of real professionals, several of them from Ipswich Town.

Scrooge and Doctor Larch

Two years after his mother died, in 1991, a reporter told him something he did not know. He had an elder brother. David Burchell, born in 1925, had severe epilepsy and had lived in Cane Hill hospital since the age of seventeen. Their mother visited every Monday and told her other sons she was seeing a cousin. His brother was moved to a private hospital at Caine's expense.

Ebenezer Scrooge came the same year, in The Muppet Christmas Carol, and he approached it as if he were at the Royal Shakespeare Company: no winking at the camera, nothing Muppety, the puppets treated as actors. Brian Henson directed, in the company's first film after the death of his father, Jim Henson.

Little Voice (1998) handed him another part of the kind he does best. Ray Say is a third-rate agent who discovers that his girlfriend's daughter (Jane Horrocks, with Brenda Blethyn as the mother) can mimic the great singers exactly, and exploits her until she breaks. That part took the Golden Globe for comedy in January 1999.

Doctor Wilbur Larch followed a year later in The Cider House Rules, a man who runs a Maine orphanage, is addicted to ether and performs illegal abortions because somebody has to. Lasse Hallström directed, with Tobey Maguire and Charlize Theron, and it brought a second supporting Oscar. Three months later he was knighted as Sir Maurice Micklewhite.

Work carried on at the same rate: the doctor running the Charenton asylum opposite Geoffrey Rush in Quills, a pageant coach to Sandra Bullock in Miss Congeniality, Mike Myers' father in Austin Powers in Goldmember, and a bent businessman in Get Carter (2000), the remake of his own film.

One of those films nearly went unreleased: The Quiet American (2002). Caine is Thomas Fowler, the comfortable British correspondent in 1952 Saigon who works out too late what is happening around him. Miramax shelved it after 11 September 2001 as unpatriotic, and it took pressure from the actor and his director, Phillip Noyce, to get it out. It was his sixth and last Oscar nomination.

Eight films in a row with Nolan

When Christopher Nolan turned up at his house with the script of Batman Begins (2005), Caine asked whether he was wanted as the butler. Alfred Pennyworth, butler to Christian Bale, ran to three films and began the longest working relationship of his career.

Nolan cast him in all eight features he directed between 2005 and 2020, and never in the same sort of part: Cutter, the engineer of illusions in The Prestige (2006); Professor Miles, mentor and father-in-law to Leonardo DiCaprio, in Inception; the Professor Brand who recites Dylan Thomas in Interstellar, with Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway.

Alfred returns in The Dark Knight (2008), with Heath Ledger's Joker, and in The Dark Knight Rises. To Dunkirk (2017) he lends only an uncredited voice on the radio, and Tenet (2020) gives him a single scene. Neither Oppenheimer nor The Odyssey has him in it.

Three of his best late parts come from the same years. Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men (2006) has him as Jasper, a retired political cartoonist growing cannabis in the woods and caring for his catatonic wife, a character he has said he built out of John Lennon. Harry Brown (2009) turns him into a widowed former Royal Marine taking the law into his own hands.

Then Paolo Sorrentino's Youth (2015) made him Fred Ballinger, a retired composer in an Alpine hotel who refuses to conduct his best-known work for the Queen. It won him the European Film Award for best actor in Berlin in December 2015, and he said it was the first prize he had ever been given in Europe.

There is a neat symmetry in the filmography. Two of his older characters were handed on to Jude Law: Alfie in the 2004 remake and Milo Tindle in Kenneth Branagh's Sleuth (2007), in which Caine takes the part Olivier had played.

Retirement, with two asterisks

Commercial work filled the rest of the decade: the treacherous chief in Kingsman: The Secret Service, the pensioner robbing a bank with Morgan Freeman and Alan Arkin in Going in Style, the swindled billionaire of Now You See Me, and Brian Reader, oldest of the Hatton Garden burglars, in King of Thieves (2018).

His last film to date is Oliver Parker's The Great Escaper (2023), in which he plays Bernard Jordan, the 89-year-old veteran who walked out of his care home in 2014 to get to the D-Day commemorations in Normandy. Glenda Jackson, in her last film, died months before the release.

On 13 October 2023, on BBC Radio 4, he said he was stopping. Ninety years old, he put it plainly: the only parts coming his way were old men of ninety. Years earlier he had said that nobody retires in this business, the business retires you.

Writing has not stopped. There are four volumes of memoirs and a first novel, 'Deadly Game', published in November 2023: a thriller about an ex-soldier turned detective and a consignment of uranium on an east London tip.

The first asterisk on the retirement is his voice. ElevenLabs announced on 11 November 2025 that Caine had licensed it for its catalogue of recognisable voices. Seven months later a roughly thirteen-hour audiobook of 'The Odyssey' narrated by that replica appeared, weeks before Nolan's film reached cinemas.

The second is a part. Lionsgate announced in September 2025 a sequel to The Last Witch Hunter with Vin Diesel, and Caine coming back at ninety-two as the priest Dolan. That deal has not been fully confirmed and the film has no date. Diesel wheeled him down the red carpet at the Red Sea festival that December.

One piece of paperwork sums up the seventy years. In July 2016 he changed his name by deed poll to the one he had picked in that phone box in Leicester Square, because airport staff recognised his face at once and then could find nobody called Maurice Micklewhite in the passport.

The earliest credit MovieNCo has for Michael Caine is Alfie (1966); in all, 55 films over 57 years. They have worked as actor in 54 and producer in 2. Their title most voted by MovieNCo readers is The Dark Knight (2008), with 314 votes. Their busiest decade is the 2010s, with 19 titles. The person they have worked with most is Christopher Nolan, on 8 films, among them The Dark Knight and Inception.