Michael Caine Biography

This lack of money meant that young Maurice suffered vitamin deficiency in the womb and was born with rickets. When he was old enough to walk his ankles could not support his weight and he was forced to wear surgical boots. His ears protruded badly and for two years his mother would stick them back with plasters, his lugs eventually remaining so close to his head that for the rest of his life he'd be slightly deaf as some sounds would pass him by. He also suffered from an eye condition called Blepharitis which would make his eyelids swell up (onscreen this would prove a sexy advantage). And, understandably with all this going on, he soon developed a nervous facial tic, a mild form of Sydenham's chorea, formerly known as St Vitus' Dance.

After the birth, Maurice and Ellen moved from their one rented room to a 2-room flat at 14 Urlwin St, Camberwell. They were five flights up from the garden where the only toilet for 5 families stood. The rickets would make this hard for young Maurice but in time the exercise would help to strengthen his legs. The bedroom would house a double bed for the parents and a single for Maurice, the other room serving as kitchen, lounge, everything. Each Friday the boy would be scrubbed in a tin laundry tub, then given syrup of figs to keep him regular. The next morning he would have to race down the stairs to the loo, on one memorable occasion not making it in time. Asking where the sickly potion was made he was told California - a place he then, with some irony as it turned out, swore never to visit.

At 2 years old, Maurice would find his bed shoved off into a corner as a younger brother, Stanley Victor, duly arrived. At 4 he'd be introduced to cinema, viewing the Lone Ranger at the Saturday morning matinee. Later Caine would recall the near-riot in the queue, being hit by a flying orange, smothered by an overcoat tossed from the balcony and smacked round the head by an usherette when he put his feet up on the seats in front and caused his whole row to topple backwards. He loved it. This would also be the point when he received his first lessons in acting. When the rent collector came round his mother would hide behind the door and leave the child to explain that mummy was out. Talk about pressure - film sets would never be this tense.

By 4, Maurice was attending John Ruskin Infants' School in John Ruskin Street. He was a pretty boy with blonde curls, but this would lead to trouble as, when a teacher chose to nickname him Bubbles, the other kids decided to massacre this girl-headed ponce. Ellen would not tolerate this and, going down to the school during the next play break, she personally thrashed the bullies. Maurice Sr would kneel down before his son and teach him to fight, the result being that Bubbles was soon known as Snake Eyes.

Come 1939, it was wartime again. Maurice was provided with an ill-fitting gas mask in the shape of Mickey Mouse's head, handed some corned beef sandwiches by his mum and, for the first time in his life, dressed in a tie (this gave him a rash so bad he never wears ties unless it's absolutely imperative and they're not compulsory in any of his restaurants). Along with the rest of the kids he marched 2 miles to Waterloo station, stepping in some dog muck on the way and being banished to the end of the queue. He was in tears until a teacher persuaded him it was actually lucky - oddly, on one later occasion, it would be. Soon he and the others would be standing in the village hall in Wargrave, Berkshire (Wargrave - the name could hardly have inspired confidence in a successful evacuation), waiting to be picked and housed by the locals. Maurice and Stanley would be the last ones chosen, snapped up by a rich lady who arrived late. Sitting in a car for the very first time, they were whisked off to a huge house, where they were given their own rooms and servants to attend them. From the depths of south London poverty to absolute luxury, it seemed too good to be true. And it was. The very next day they were informed the house was too far from the school they were to attend and so they were moved to far less salubrious accommodation with far less benign custodians. At one stage Maurice was locked in a cupboard under the stairs for 24 hours. On hearing this, his mother took her boys back to the dangers of London, swearing never to leave them again.

1940 saw the Blitz begin in deadly earnest. First came the bombs on parachutes, then the terrifying doodlebugs and finally the murderous V-2 rocket. Maurice Sr was called back to the Royal Artillery, returned after the disaster of Dunkirk, then left again to join the 8th Army in North Africa. They would not see him for another 4 years. Ellen took the boys out into the country for brief periods, then finally they were settled in a disused farmhouse in Norfolk. Life here for Maurice Jr was fantastic. He'd work on the farm, eat organic foods and have plenty of fresh air and exercise. He formed a gang to fight the local kids, poached moorhen eggs, raided orchards, stole milk and sausage rolls from neighbours. Given an airgun by his dad, he began work for the Ministry of Agriculture, receiving a few pence for the rats and starlings he shot and quickly becoming relatively rich (that early poverty made Caine a hard worker and tough bargainer throughout his life) As the US entered the war bases sprang up all over Norfolk, air fights raged overhead and the reality of it all struck home as the kids gathered to peruse the body-strewn plane wrecks in the fields. Maurice would join the other children in a near-constant round of scrounging from the Americans. He later claimed to have found them to be generous and tolerant folk and, coupled with the image he'd gained of them from the movies, he grew to love them and yearned to visit their homeland.

Like his father, Maurice Jr was under-educated but very bright, and his intelligence was spotted by a local teacher, one Miss Linton. Keen to have at least one of her pupils win a scholarship to grammar school, she took the boy under her wing, encouraged his reading, gave him extra lessons, and he rewarded her by passing the entrance exam with flying colours. Meanwhile, Ellen scored a job at a big house called The Grange and she and the kids moved into the servants' quarters. It was another lesson in luxury for Maurice, what with the electric lights, the hot water, the shower, and the chance to taste the landowners' leftovers - caviar, pheasant, pate - a new world of flavour and one that he'd end up inhabiting for most of his life. The scholarship took Maurice to Hackney Down Grocers, a Jewish school that had been evacuated in toto to Norfolk. He was now surrounded by other boys called Maurice and Morris and slotted in well, at last learning the value of education.

By 1946 the family were back in London, a place of ruins and rubble, the stench of burning rubbish everywhere as teams cleared out the myriad bomb-sites. Coal had come off the rationing list and the smog was appalling - you could and would get lost just 200 yards from your own home. Maurice Sr was now back from El Alamein and the liberation of Rome and the Micklewhites found themselves rehoused by the council in Marshall Gardens at the Elephant and Castle, set up in a new-fangled pre-fab house made in Canada. For the first time, their home had electric light, a shower and an inside toilet. There was also a promise by the council that they'd be moved to a "proper" house asap, but the family would remain in the pre-fab for 18 years, until a move was financed by the new film star Michael Caine.

Maurice Jr began to escape from the smog and rationing by fleeing to the local cinema once again, devouring the mostly American adventures. He was just 12 but already set on joining his heroes on the Silver Screen, visiting the library to read books on acting and teaching himself to not blink for extended periods (the soot would give him eye infections, but he felt it was worth it). For his schooling he was sent to Wilson's Grammar School (closer than Grocers, as his scholarship demanded) but he didn't like it at all. He'd often be caned and sent to the back of the class where he found himself sitting beside a boy with a compulsive urge to masturbate continuously. Even his first tentative step into acting came to nothing as he pulled out of a school play when asked to kiss an ugly boy named Jenkins. Bunking off sport three times a week (oddly for an occasional action hero Caine was absolutely useless at sport) he spent his time in Peckham's Tower Cinema, trying to concentrate on the movies as groped women in the audience screamed out and slapped their assailants. Caine would later recall being groped by a fellow himself.

Aside from school, life for Maurice wasn't too bad. His dad was back at Billingsgate (he'd often bring back knock-off fish which he stored in the boys' cold bedroom), money was coming in and rationing gradually came to a close. Now 14, like most teenagers, Maurice Jr was looking for somewhere to belong and thought he might join the gangs of spivs at the Elephant - nasty little thugs sporting wide Trilbys with razor-blades sewn into the brims (he's still known to flinch when someone takes off their hat). Taking a paper round for extra cash, he bought the requisite haircut and suit, only to be rejected unceremoniously by the villains. He would not take that path again.

Instead he went to Clubland, on Walworth Road. This was a youth training establishment run by the Reverend Jimmy Butterworth and was absolutely vital as a creative springboard for the kids of south London, most of whom had next to no access to art and culture. Butterworth was a superb networker and fund-raiser, getting many of the day's stars to contribute, thus giving Clubland the very best facilities. But Maurice did not begin acting there by design, rather by accident. He actually turned up to play basketball and, as was usual in his sporting career, was useless. Afterwards, fancying the pants off one Amy Hood, he stood staring through a door window at her and the bevy of beauties attending the same class. Leaning too heavily on the door, it suddenly went in, much to the shy Maurice's chagrin. However, once inside he was invited by the teacher to stay and he did, thus attending his first drama lesson. He was killing two birds with one stone - surrounding himself with girls (he was still a reluctant virgin) and taking his first serious step towards Hollywood stardom.

Maurice's first role was as a robot with one line in the play RAR by Czech writer Karel Capek. From now on he would perform in all Clubland's productions. He was also taken under the wing of Alec Reed, a film buff who taught film history and technique and showed 16mm silent films on Sunday evenings. He'd make documentaries on club trips away and Maurice would act as his assistant on a jaunt to Guernsey, thereby landing his first ever screen credit. When his name appeared onscreen, though, the audience sniggered. He knew then that a new name would be required. He was also growing more confident in his own looks. For ages he'd worried that only dark and handsome men like Tyrone Power stood a chance, but the success of Spencer Tracy and Jean Gabin convinced him that you could be blonde, or even ugly.

Reed aside, there were various different inspirations at this time. Just before he'd joined Clubland, Maurice had joined the crowds at the Elephant when David Lean's classic Great Expectations was shown at the Trocadero. As a surprise prize, the organisers asked if anyone in the crowd was celebrating their birthday, Maurice was and so was invited to have tea with Anthony Wager, the young star of the movie. Next he'd meet Bob Hope who'd been persuaded by Jimmy Butterworth to donate all proceeds from his stint at the Prince Of Wales theatre to Clubland. More importantly, there'd be Paul Challen, a local kid orphaned by a German bomb, who Maurice met while touring Clubland's plays around the area. Together he and Challen would build their dreams of professional acting and stardom, and they'd become friends for life. And there'd be Jimmy Buckley whom Maurice befriended because of his successful with the ladies, hoping to snap up his leftovers. It did no good, he remained burdened by virginity - but later he would use Buckley's personality as the basis for his breakthrough role, Alfie.

Eventually, at 16, he would at last get his end away. Attending a neighbour's birthday party, he'd be led into the garden by the boy's 45-year-old aunt and gratefully have his cherry popped. This did not, however, start him on the road to sexual success and the next year he went to the same boy's party in the hope of a second go. Unfortunately, the aunt was not there and, instead of being led beaming with anticipation into the garden Maurice found himself being dragged into the bedroom by one of the boy's uncles, having to fight his way to freedom.

1949 saw Maurice leave school at 16 with 3 or 4 passes in his final exams, more than had been expected. Keen as ever to get into movies, he became an office boy at Peak Films, a small company specialising in 8mm films of London's sights, for tourists. Here he'd occasionally be allowed to help on the shoots, learning something of lighting and electrics, information he'd use on Sundays when helping out at Jewish weddings. This was a fairly lucrative sideline until he blew out all the electrics at a big wedding and was sacked. He'd not do much better at his next proper job, as an odd-job lad at the mighty J. Arthur Rank Organisation, getting fired on his second day for smoking in the toilets.

At 18 it was time for National Service and Maurice joined the Queen's Royal Regiment at their barracks near Guildford. One room, 28 guys, 8 weeks of intensive training, including heartbreaking assault courses and tuition in the use and cleaning of 303 Enfield rifles and sten guns. Then they were posted to Iserlohn, a small town just south-east of Dortmund. Here the soldiers were paid 4 shillings a day, a pittance for their efforts, especially young Maurice's. Having got himself on the wrong side of the platoon sergeant he found himself with all the hard tasks - peeling spuds, washing pans, guard duty while the others were allowed into town, he even had to scrape the guard room floor clean with an old razor blade. It was grim stuff, but still a laugh as Maurice became close friends with many of his fellow south London recruits.

After almost 12 months, Maurice and his mates were offered a choice - an extra year of this or a stint of active service in Korea, the Brits having joined the Americans there in 1950. The sheer boredom of life at Iserlohn made their minds up, they were sent to London and the Royal Fusiliers and soon found themselves in Liverpool, boarding the Empire Halladale, a ship that had been sunk and salvaged twice in WW2 and was thus especially vile. Fortunately, the soldiers did not have to spend much time below deck, being ordered to sunbathe all the way to Korea in preparation for the conditions. Being so pale, poor Maurice managed only to turn an eye-catching shade of red.

After a 6 week trip featuring a fight with French Foreign Legionnaires in Colombo and a brush with the edge of a typhoon near Hong Kong that saw 680 out of 700 vomiting uncontrollably (Maurice was fine until he had to shovel up everyone else's sick), they landed at Kure on the southern tip of mainland Japan for 2 weeks' training before moving on to Pusan, South Korea. This was a hellish place of rats and mosquitos, with the human dung used as manure on the fields quickly turning to dust in the heat and blowing all over everyone. Maurice and his mates were very soon sent up to the front line, the 38th Parallel dividing north and south Korea where they found themselves stationed on a trench-fortified hill about a mile from the Chinese lines. The Chinese had joined their North Korean brothers in their assault on the south, so this unruly pack of south London kids were now the West's first line of defence against the encroaching Communist empire.

On his first night of guard duty, Maurice witnessed a Chinese attack on positions to his left. It was immediately apparent that they were not afraid to die and were thus unlikely to be defeated. He settled down to life in a 2-man bunker where rats ran over him in the night. The troops' R&R was taken in Seoul, then a shanty town of bamboo bars and whore houses, with a 100% rate of gonorrhoea and constant rucks between the different international forces. As the best-educated member of his platoon, "Mick" (as he was known) was treated as a sage, reading and writing letters for his comrades and, because of his refusal to visit prostitutes, becoming an accepted expert on venereal disease, patiently inspecting his friends' genitalia and delivering a diagnosis that, with a 100% rate of gonorrhoea, really required little expertise.

Maurice's second tour of duty coincided with a major Chinese offensive. At one point he and his buddy were firing a machine-gun into a solid wall of men. There must have been fatalities. Then, patrolling No Man's Land at night, his patrol were cut off from their own lines by Chinese soldiers and spent horrible, endless hours in the darkness waiting for the sound of their deadly enemies and the tell-tale scent of the garlic that all the opposing army habitually chewed (for years afterwards, even in Hollywood, the smell of garlic would give Michael Caine the fear).

After one boiling summer and one freezing winter of death, disgust and raging fear, he was demobbed and returned to the family prefab at the Elephant. It was now 1952. He got a job in a butter factory, tipping crates of butter into a vat. Mentioning his acting ambition to an older co-worker he was given a sterling piece of advice - read The Stage, a magazine that could be bought on Fridays at Solosy's bookshop on Charing Cross Road. This he did and, sitting in Leicester Square, noted that the only suitable vacancy was for an assistant stage manager who'd also play small roles for a company in Horsham, a small provincial town to the south of the capital. This could be it, his first professional job in theatre. The world had seen the last of Maurice Micklewhite, from now on he would be. . . um . . . er . . . something more acceptably middle-class and thespian, like Michael Scott. Sending off a photo under this new moniker, he waited.

Not for long. Quickly he was called to an interview with Alwyn D. Fox, the company's owner who decided the tall, fit and large Maurice would do for butch roles like policemen - important as every other man in the cast was gay and a tad too effete. He was in. He made the tea, ran errands for the leads, organised props for each new show, shifted the scenery. He was paid £2 10 shillings a week, exactly the amount due to his theatrical boarding house, where he was allowed a room and one meal a day. For extras, he'd scrounge leftover food and cigarettes at the theatre and richer members of the troupe would stand him drinks in the pub. It was tough, but he was deliriously happy to be on his way.

Eventually he was given his first onstage role, as a policeman taking a villain away at the play's end. His only line was to be "Come along with me, sir", but even then it all went wrong. Walking out with his flies undone he drew a huge laugh from the audience which upset him so badly he forgot his one line, bringing another roar of laughter. For three weeks he was in disgrace, then was brought back due to sheer necessity when Fox needed someone to play a suave seducer, plying an innocent girl with alcohol in order to get his wicked way. As said, the others guys were more butterfly than butch so Maurice was called up again, this time being encouraged and pulled through the scene by the infinitely superior June Wyndham Davies.

Now a professional actor earning £3 a week, Maurice spent the next few months earning increasingly better roles, being alternatively praised and reprimanded by Fox for his performances. He later recalled another scene that inadvertently sent the audience into hysterics, when he played Cathy's cruel brother Hindley in Wuthering Heights, the strapping Maurice being thrashed by a short and effeminately gay Heathcliff. And then it all went wrong, dangerously wrong. At a Saturday matinee he collapsed and was diagnosed with a severe and incurable form of malaria. In hospital he was switched between hot and cold baths and given strong pills that, though they soon began to work, would still not prevent him from dying before he was 50. It was all over. He returned to the Elephant weak, yellow and skinny, resigned to living on a tiny army pension and, of course, never realising his dream of cinematic stardom. He called Alwyn Fox and asked if he might return to the Horsham company where he might at least be happy. To his joy Fox agreed.

Luckily for Maurice, the large numbers of British troops that had succumbed to malaria had caused a huge amount of research into the disease. Suddenly he found himself called to a military hospital in Roehampton where he was surprised to see many from his platoon in Korea, all suffering from the same condition. Together they were to undergo an experiment where a new mix of two malaria medicines were to be used. The patients' blood would become heavy, they would not be able to move and, strapped to their beds for 10 days, they must not try. Maurice would at one point attempt to raise his head only to pass out immediately and wake with two glorious black eyes. But it was worth it, they were all cured and, with his life expectancy back to normal and his dreams restored, he called Alwyn Fox once more. Unfortunately, during his hospital stay the company had gone bust. He would never hear from Fox again. He would, though, hear of him. When rich and famous in Beverly Hills he'd receive a letter from a Hammersmith dole inspector saying that the social services were caring for a destitute old man named Alwyn Fox who claimed to have discovered Michael Caine. If this was true, the letter said, could Caine send some money to make his last days more comfortable. Caine would send a cheque for £5000, only to have it returned uncashed. Alwyn Fox, he learned, had shown Caine's letter and cheque to everyone in the hospital, gone to bed and died that very night.

Once more repairing to Charing Cross Road for a copy of The Stage, Maurice won himself an audition with a troupe at Lowestoft, a seaside town on the north Suffolk coast. On arrival the producer immediately accused him of being a liar, an inauspicious start to an interview. Apparently, on his CV Maurice had foolishly claimed he'd played George in the currently popular George And Margaret, a play he'd never even read. As it turned out, the characters in the play are waiting for the titular couple, who never actually arrive. Fortunately, the producer forgave Maurice his devious scam and hired him anyway, proceeding to give him invaluable advice on actors' motivation and technique.

Hired as the juvenile lead, Maurice was bound by theatre tradition to get it on with his female counterpart. Problematically, she was engaged, and he fell instead for the company's leading lady, Patricia Haines, a tall, beautiful Sheffield girl only two years his senior but a world away in terms of experience and sophistication. This was not the done thing and Maurice seemed set to suffer the tortures of ongoing unrequited love. Then, after a period of mooning over her from afar, he was thunderstruck to find her coming on to him. She liked him as much as he liked her and they were married a few weeks later in the Lowestoft registery office, Maurice getting so drunk on barley wine at the consequent party he passed out, leaving his marriage unconsummated (until the next morning).

Buoyed by love and ambition, Maurice and Patricia now left the Lowestoft company to try their luck in London, living in a 2-room Brixton flat owned by Maurice's aunt. In seeking work Haines would be more successful, Maurice scoring only small TV parts with no dialogue. Eventually poverty demanded that he get "proper" work while she continued acting, the plan being to restart his career when they were more financially secure. Thus he washed up, toiled in a laundry and as a plumber's mate and took a night shift making fruit pies and doughnuts with a Jamaican crew from the recent wave of immigrants.

The couple would have a baby girl, named after Dominique Francon, the heroine of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, Maurice being taken by Rand's theories of individualism (she'd later write a piece titled The Virtue Of Selfishness). But the pressures of ongoing poverty and professional failure were too much for the ambitious young man, now 23. He left his wife and child, Patricia retruning to Sheffield where her parents would raise Dominique. Maurice returned to the family prefab, taking a tough job greasing steel rods for packing. And it got worse. Maurice Sr now died of liver cancer (Maurice carried him to the ambulance), leaving the family just 3 shillings and 8 pence, and Maurice then lost his job. Massive depression fell upon him, there looked to be no way out.

This is where mums can help. Ellen now cashed an insurance policy, worth £25 (about a week's wage), gave it to her son and told him to go away for a while. He took off for Paris, walking the streets, enjoying exotic novelty of it all. Running out of money, he slept in the railway stations and relied on the kindness of strangers, then took a job in a cafe on the Boulevard Clichy, living in a cheap hotel that also served as a brothel. He got to know the pimps and the whores, saw the rip-offs and the killings, left his problems behind.

Finally, he was ready to return and, when he did, he found a telegram waiting for him, from his agent. Having never even scored a speaking role on TV, he'd been offered a small part in a film called A Hill In Korea and, due to his military experience, a role as technical advisor too. Eight weeks in Portugal at £100 a week, what a result. He borrowed more money from his mother to settle his child support bill (thus avoiding jail) and took off to join other unknowns like Stanley Baker, Robert Shaw and Stephen Boyd on-set. Still far from cosmopolitan he'd at one point complain vociferously about the food, thereby getting into a scrap with Baker. As it turned out, he was fortunate that Baker was a forgiving sort.

With his newfound riches he moved to a bedsit in Earl's Court, but his success was shortlived. His agent dropped him and A Hill In Korea was first held back then released on the very day the Brits invaded Suez. It didn't do well. Few jobs were forthcoming, Maurice being forced to return to mum's yet again. In the hope of at least gaining some more experience, he began attending Joan Littlewood's left-wing Theatre Workshop in the East End, attempting to win a part in their Christmas production of Dickens' The Chimes. Littlewood urged him to immerse himself in his character, to use the Stanislavsky Method, but eventually gave up on him, dismissing him with a withering "Piss off to Shaftesbury Avenue. You will only ever be a star". Well, it would have withered most actors, but that's exactly what Maurice wanted to be.

Acting-wise, he was now on the lowest rung of the ladder. He'd spend his days sitting in dodgy casting agencies waiting for jobs with small studios, often appearing in the B-features of cheap operations like Merton Park Studios. He'd usually be chosen for his size, not his talent. Then, just as desperation was building, he got a break. Julian Amyes, director of A Hill In Korea, was putting together a production of Anouilh's The Lark and asked for Maurice to play Boudousse, the guard who takes Joan of Arc to see the Dauphin. It was a good speaking role, just what he needed, but to get it he needed to join Equity immediately and they already had a Michael Scott on their books. He needed a new name and had half an hour to choose one. Standing by a phone in Leicester Square, trying to come up with a moniker that would look good on the cinema signs there, he saw flashing before him a neon sign announcing Humphrey Bogart in The Caine Mutiny, a huge, multi-Oscar-nominated hit. The omens were good - Michael Caine it would be.

Following The Lark, he kept going, playing an Indian in the popular TV cop show Dixon Of Dock Green, then another role on the same show. He was a deaf and dumb gangster in another B-movie (he was supposed to be Irish but his accent was so bad they cut his dialogue altogether). Meanwhile, to make ends meet he returned to civilian jobs, working as a night porter in a Victoria hotel, another whorehouse where, having saved a prostitute from a beating he was set upon by the client's mates. All around him fellow actors gave into the despair of this grinding life and killed themselves. Caine himself was under intense pressure to keep up the maintenance payments for Dominique or face prison. He owed money to everyone, life was becoming dangerous. Hoping for a life-changing contract with British Associated Pictures he was told to give up, he had no future in films. He was already angry, now he was bloody furious. The same righteous working-class anger that propelled Joan Littlewood's theatre group to take creativity to the people was driving him remorselessly on to individual success.

Fortunately, he persisted and the work began to come his way. On TV, coincidentally, he won a part in The Caine Mutiny Court Martial and also the live TV play Requiem For A Heavyweight, a big hit that, after Jack Palance pulled out at the eleventh hour, was the breakthrough of Caine's lifelong buddy Sean Connery. Then he played another cop in Val Guest's nuclear sci-fi thriller The Day The Earth Caught Fire. Yet still Caine wanted more, feeling his peers were passing him by on the ladder to success. His drinking became heavy, he engaged in a disastrous love affair, his career was on the cusp of implosion.

He wanted movie roles but was forced to take work onstage. Taking off for Liverpool, he now appeared in One More River, produced by Sam Wanamaker's theatre company and starring Robert Shaw and Dudley Sutton. He then returned to London for pop-up parts in the TV series Mark Saber, No Hiding Place and, once again, Dixon Of Dock Green. Onstage, there'd be Edgar Wallace's The Frog. And then, in a most unexpected fashion, things began to turn around.

Though desperate to be a leading man, the offer of regular money caused Caine to understudy one of the leads in Lindsay Anderson's stage production of The Long And the Short And The Tall, a tale of Brit soldiers in the jungle during WW2. Appendix problems had seen the original star Albert Finney drop out, his place being taken by the then-unknown Peter O'Toole (Robert Shaw and Richard Harris were also involved). This was a good time for Caine, whose job it was to provide booze and organise parties for the more prominent hellraisers in the cast. But he never managed to make it onto the stage. Despite his world-class carousing, O'Toole would always make it on time, though usually only with minutes to spare. Caine was ever-prepared for his big moment, a moment that never came. Until, that is, O'Toole left the production to make his name in Lawrence Of Arabia. Now Caine would take the lead as Private Bamforth, touring England, Scotland and Ireland, with Frank Finlay as his co-star.

This 4-month tour did wonders for Caine's ravaged self-respect. It also introduced him to an important new friend as he took under his wing a young actor 8 years his junior named Terence Stamp. Together they and 10 others would share a house on Harley Street, living it large as the Sixties began to bite. Caine was up in court for non-payment of maintenance, but he was making connections, one being the playwright Harold Pinter who cast Caine, alongside his own wife Vivien Merchant in the one-act The Room at the Royal Court (it played on the same bill as Pinter's The Dumb Waiter).

Terence Stamp was now starting to do well. Together he and Caine moved into a one-bedroom flat in Ennismore Garden Mews, behind Knightsbridge tube station and, as 1961 arrived, so they made a pact to support each other's careers. Caine would start this almost immediately when, having appeared in the TV play Ring Of Truth, he took a small role in Why The Chicken to lend his experience to Stamp, here in one of his first starring roles (the play was directed by Lionel Bart, who'd earlier turned Caine down when he auditioned for the part of Bill Sykes in the original Oliver!).

As Stamp moved ever upwards, winning the lead in Peter Ustinov's Billy Budd (for which he'd be Oscar-nominated), Caine scored big critical points in the TV play The Compartment, the first drama by the famed comedy writer Johnny Speight. Here he'd play a Cockney stuck in a train compartment with a posh Frank Finlay, increasingly frustrated by Finlay's superior attitude and eventually driven to attempt homicide (the class struggle being a very contemporary theme). There'd be a series of TV jobs and a couple of plays, one written by Troy Kennedy Martin and the other, Somewhere For The Night, by Bill Naughton. Before the decade was out these two writers would have provided Caine with two of his biggest hits - The Italian Job and Alfie.

With Stamp taking a part in Laurence Olivier's court-room drama Term Of Trial, things were really looking up. He and Caine moved to a 2-bedroom flat in Ebury Street and began to enjoy the fruits of Stamp's burgeoning stardom. Stamp would uncomplainingly keep the bills up to date while Caine would do his share by ensuring that none of the many women who processed through Stamp's bedroom ever met. Life was fun, but workwise he still wasn't progressing as he'd hoped. Then came another surprise success. Desperate for work, he took a low-paid role as a comedy Cockney in James Saunders' Next Time I'll Sing To You. He held out very little hope for the production but, opening at the Arts Theatre, it proved a critical success and was transferred to the Criterion in Piccadilly. At the age of 30, Caine was at last starring in the West End. Not only that, but he was making waves. Orson Welles came backstage to congratulate him and, better still, offered him the part of Esau in his upcoming Hollywood epic The Bible. Though Welles would be kicked off the project and replaced by John Huston who'd cast Richard Harris as Esau, as well as Peter O'Toole and Stephen Boyd, this was still good news. Caine was catching up with those peers he thought were disappearing out of sight.

More concrete was the help Caine now received from Stanley Baker who'd also attended Next Time I'll Sing To You. Having clearly forgiven Caine for the ruck he started on the set of A Hill In Korea, Baker told him that he was about to produce and star in a military epic, to be called Zulu, and asked him to come and meet director Cy Endfield the next day in the bar below the Prince Of Wales theatre on Charing Cross Road. Full of hope, Caine turned up only to hear that Endfield had already cast James Booth as Hook, the London layabout turned hero. Then, as he was leaving, Endfield suddenly had a flash of inspiration and shouted after him. Could he, Endfield wondered, play a toff? He could, he said, and so a reading and screen test were completed, with Baker as John Chard, head of the Rorke's Drift garrison, and Caine as the snooty innocent Gonville Bromhead. Caine did not think the test went well and repaired to a party to drown his sorrows over another lost opportunity. Also present was Endfield, who said nothing. He can't have seen the test, thought Caine, otherwise he'd break the bad news right away. But Endfield kept saying nothing, right up until the moment he left. He then informed Caine that it was the worst screen test he'd ever seen. Nevertheless, he and Baker believed there was something indefinable there, and Caine would start filming in South Africa in 3 weeks' time. It was all to much for Caine. As soon as Endfield left the room he threw up over his own shoes.

The shoot would prove eventful. First there were problems with Caine's horse-riding (another sport he was rubbish at) and a double had to be used. Then there were the end-of-day rushes that, so paranoid was Caine about the quality of his performance, caused him to throw up again. Worse still was a telegram Caine surreptitiously read from Paramount Studios in London, demanding that Baker sack whoever it was playing Bromhead. In order to appear as aristocratic as possible, Caine was basing his character on Prince Phillip and the studio did not see it. Baker, though, did. When Caine approached him in a panic he told him he was the boss, not the studio. He also informed him that he'd be sacked in a heartbeat if he ever read Baker's mail again. The problems Caine suffered from the Zulu actors and extras were insignificant by comparison, if still hurtful. Whenever he arrived on set they'd all stand, raise their spears and chant something indecipherable. When he finally discovered that it roughly translated as "lady's hair" he demanded that they cut it out. It was a bit too close to Bubbles for comfort.

Returning to London $4,000 the richer, Caine bought a pony for his daughter (how "working class made good" is that? Years of non-payment of maintenance, then a pony with the first decent wage he gets) and put his mother up in the Brixton flat he'd once shared with his wife. Back in Ebury Street with Terence Stamp there were even more girls than usual and Caine, an avid networker, would engineer a meeting for Stamp with one girl that he fancied more than the others. This was Julie Christie, Caine thus sparking perhaps the most famous romance of the Sixties.

With Stamp now filming The Collector, it looked like the roistering flat-mates now both had it made. To get Zulu, Caine had signed a 7-year contract with Embassy Pictures worth £1,500 a week. However, once they'd seen Zulu the company refused to take up their option (bizarrely, this was because they thought he looked gay - lady's hair, indeed), so once again he found himself on the look-out for work. On TV, he reunited with Robert Shaw for a production of Hamlet, actually filmed at Elsinore in Denmark, with Christopher Plummer in the title role (Horatio was Caine's only classical role ever, triv fans). He then auditioned to take over the lead in a new play where star John Neville was contracted to a limited run. He didn't get it. It was Alfie.

It didn't matter. After Zulu premiered in 1964, with "And introducing Michael Caine" on the credits, his was the name on everyone's lips. Jack Hawkins publicly prophesied stardom. Edna O'Brien named him as one of the 5 most attractive men in London. Better still, while eating in a restaurant with Terence Stamp, he was called over by Bond-producer Harry Saltzman. Had he read Len Deighton's gritty espionage thriller The Ipcress File, Saltzman asked. Would he like to star in it? Would he like a 7-year contract? The answers were yes, yes and yes. Within a 2-minute conversation, Michael Caine had at last made it. Soon he would amicably split from the hugely supportive Stamp and move into his own mews house in Albion Close, near Marble Arch.

Though he was only second choice for The Ipcress File (Christopher Plummer was first but chose to do The Sound Of Music), Caine made the role of Harry Palmer his own. Much work was done on making the character the Anti-Bond, unglamorous but still effective. He did his own shopping (but could use a shopping trolley as a weapon), he did his own cooking (but could crack two eggs with one hand - that's actually Len Deighton's hand onscreen) and he wore thick glasses. A scene was written to ensure no one saw him as a speccy nerd. A young girl asks him if he always wears spectacles, he says he only takes them off in bed, she takes them off. What more do you need to say?

For The Ipcress File Caine was on £10,000 a week for 15 weeks. He was rich. And, after all those years of grinding poverty, what did he first blow money on? Cleanliness and comfort. Nice clothes, nice bedclothes, fine soaps and toothpaste, a massive telly and monstrous American fridge. For the rest of his working life he would strive to maintain a high level of luxury in his surroundings, even endangering his credibility in dodgy movies to do so. Many stars enjoy the good life, some use it as an expression of power. But for Maurice Micklewhite it is an end in itself and, given his background, that's easy to understand.

It was now that a sad falling-out occurred with his friend Terence Stamp. Stamp had been in the States and returned to the UK with new girlfriend Jean Shrimpton in tow. According to Stamp's memoirs he'd thought Caine had bought the Albion Close property for both of them, and was peeved to find Caine had nabbed the big bedroom, leaving him with a tiny side-room. What kind of thanks was that for all the support? Caine's version was very different. Having nowhere to live, he later wrote, Stamp had asked to stop at Caine's while he found a flat and was duly put up. He then disappeared, leaving Shrimpton with Caine for 3 whole weeks. On his return he took his supermodel girlfriend and left. It was not a happy farewell.

Interestingly, while Stamp was staying at Caine's he got a call from director Lewis Gilbert offering him the lead in Alfie. Stamp, though, having taken the play to Broadway and met with mixed reactions, wanted nothing more to do with it. Many more top British actors would turn the part down, usually due to fear of the controversy the famous abortion scene might cause. Caine auditioned, more in hope than expectation as he'd failed to win the stage role. But whatever doubts Gilbert may have harboured disappeared when he saw a rough-cut of The Ipcress File. Caine was in.

As a project, Alfie had started life as a radio play, Alfie Elkins And His Little Life, with Bill Owen (later a wrinkly hit in Last Of The Summer Wine) in the title role. Now it would become a phenomenon. On the first day of filming, on Westminster Bridge, Caine stepped in a pile of dog-doings, just as he had done during his war-time evacuation. And, just as his kindly teacher had, Gilbert told him it was a lucky sign. His whole life was coming together, not least onscreen where the role of Alfie allowed all of his charisma and Cockney charm to pour forth. Often speaking direct to camera he'd seal a lifelong relationship with his audience.

But he didn't know that at first. The premiere was a major event, the Beatles and Stones were there, and Barbra Streisand. Caine sat next to Tippi Hedren who fainted during the abortion scene and had to be carried out. However , the first person to leave, an outspoken member of the public, told a nervously waiting Caine that "It was the biggest load of crap I've ever seen". Terrified that this sentiment might be echoed in the next morning's reviews, Caine proceeded to get utterly hammered. He needn't have worried, the roll had begun. Though just a small Brit movie, Alfie had tapped into the Swinging London thing and did so well in America during its limited run that it was given a general release. Universal Studios also snapped up The Ipcress File and put that on general release, too. Caine was viewed Stateside as the latest hot leading man, with a very satisfactory Cinderella story, and was duly Oscar-nominated. They loved the notion that Britain's working-class had come to dominate art and culture. Unfortunately, in his own class-obsessed country he was seen as Alfie, a relentless Lothario and Cockney chancer. For decades he would complain at how he was misrepresented in the press and thus disrespected by the public.

After playing against type as a 33-year-old virgin in Bryan Forbes' Victorian farce The Wrong Box (where he was joined by such greats as John Mills, Ralph Richardson and Cook & Moore), now his dream of trans-Atlantic success came true. Having been impressed by The Ipcress File, Shirley Maclaine wanted him as her leading man in Gambit, wherein he'd play a super-smart burglar plotting to relieve Herbert Lom of a valuable statue. So off to Hollywood he went and, as is usually the case, he spent weeks alone in a Beverly Hills hotel, waiting for something to happen. It was worth it, though. He met Jane Russell and was given advice by John Wayne (talk slow and don't wear suede shoes - when you're recognised in a public lavatory men will turn round and, well . . .). And eventually Maclaine came through, both sorting out the movie and arranging a welcome party for him that - with the likes of Gloria Swanson, Liza Minnelli and Frank Sinatra attending - made him a social success amongst the Hollywood elite.

After returning to Europe to film Funeral In Berlin, wherein Harry Palmer arranged a covert defection from behind the Iron Curtain, Caine would make a concerted effort to score big in Hollywood - with not much initial success. First would come Otto Preminger's Hurry Sundown, an epic melodrama set on the farms of the southern States, where white people were generally loathsome and blacks entirely noble. Caine would be taking a major risk with a Louisiana accent (he actually asked advice from Scarlett O'Hara herself - Vivien Leigh - being told to keep saying "four-door Ford" for weeks) and it didn't quite come off. The sexy scenes didn't really work either, being silly or aggressive, as when Caine's wife Jane Fonda strokes his saxophone and when he brutally rapes her. All in all, it was a tempestuous experience, what with Preminger's legendary temper, people trying to blow up the swimming-pool because black people had been in it, and the KKK firing bullets into the actors' caravans at night. The reviews were equally violent, critic Wilfrid Sheed saying "To criticize it would be like tripping a dwarf". Still, it was vital experience for Caine, and how bad could working with Jane Fonda and Faye Dunaway be?

Having been told by Cary Grant that an actor wanting stardom needed to make at least 15 films in order to become as familiar to audiences as a brand of coffee, Caine went for it. He rushed from Hurry Sundown to Finland for Billion Dollar Brain, the muddled third part of the Harry Palmer series (an American megalomaniac tries to take over the planet) then, as a return favour to Shirley Maclaine, popped up in a cameo in Vittorio De Sica's Woman Times Seven, playing a private detective who silently (and briefly) follows Maclaine and Anita Ekberg all over Paris.

Making the most of the offers flying his way (Caine was for years worried that his career might quickly wane and thus made every effort to maximise his earnings), he signed a 2-film deal with 20th Century Fox. First would come Deadfall, again with Bryan Forbes, where he played a cat burglar who adds problems to a heist by falling for his partner's wife (the wife being Forbes' own missus, Nanette Newman, who Caine had earlier romanced in The Wrong Box). His second Fox movie, also released in 1968, would be John Fowles' The Magus, an elaborate philosophical mystery where he'd play a British teacher on a Greek island coming under the influence of local magician Anthony Quinn. Amazingly, inbetween these he managed to squeeze in Play Dirty, a kind of low-rent Dirty Dozen where a gang of ex-crims had to blow up a Nazi oil depot in North Africa. Filmed in Spain, this allowed Caine to go visit his old buddy Sean Connery, then in the country filming the Western Shalako. It also gave him a chance to make a play for Connery's co-star, Brigitte Bardot, which sadly came to naught, a disappointment more than made up for by his next project, Troy Kennedy Martin's The Italian Job. A meticulously planned bullion raid, a massive traffic jam in Turin, an extraordinary escape in Minis, a brilliant, vertiginous finale and dialogue that is loudly quoted even today whenever Caine is mentioned - it was a great movie and a huge hit all across Europe. Weirdly, though, it made little impact in America, possibly because the studio decided to advertise it with a poster of a gangster with a machine gun and a nude woman sitting in his lap.

Having now moved to a flat in Grosvenor Square, Caine was a rich man. His original 7-year contract with Harry Saltzman would have kept him in good money but Saltzman, who was making a fortune hiring him out to other companies, had the decency to renegociate the deal every year, rather sentimentally on Caine's birthday. And, on his 35th birthday, Harry tore the contract up - an exceptionally beneficent move in a famously money-grubbing industry. Caine was free to do what he wanted but chose to say farewell to Saltzman by taking a cameo in the producer's next epic The Battle Of Britain, which lined Caine up next to the biggest Brit stars of the day - old muckers like Robert Shaw and Christopher Plummer and also heavyweights like Olivier and Michael Redgrave. It was a financial failure but it would see Caine appearing on British TV every Bank Holiday afternoon for the next 30 years.

Next he'd spend 22 weeks in the Philippine jungle filming Robert Aldrich's Too Late The Hero, where a motley band of Allied soldiers took on the Japanese on a Pacific island. It was long but blessed with an admirably tense finale. Interestingly, co-star Cliff Robertson would be Oscar-nominated for Charly during filming but schedules did not allow him to attend the ceremony, where he actually won as Best Actor. So, with the shoot finished and the cast just landed at LAX, Robertson grabbed the wooden Oscar he'd had made in the Philippines and descended the steps towards the waiting posse of photographers, only to spy Gregory Peck, President of the Academy, striding across the tarmac and clearly about to present him with his real trophy. In a panic, Robertson tossed the wooden replica over his shoulder, freeing his hands to receive his prize. Meanwhile, just behind him, Caine was quietly trying to stem the blood fountaining from his forehead where the wooden statuette had struck him. For many years it seemed likely that this would be the only Oscar he'd ever get.

Life in Los Angeles was not quite what it had been. Now a fully-fledged member of the Hollywood party set, Caine was thoroughly disturbed to one night meet Charles Manson at a party. He'd feel a great deal worse when, a few months later, his new friends Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring were slaughtered by Manson's Family and another friend, Steve Brandt, took his own life from sheer fear after appearing on the Family's official death-list.

Caine now took off for Austria and another violent epic. This was The Last Valley, set in 1641 amidst the 30 Years War, with Caine as a scholar attempting to protect a perfect Swiss valley from mercenary hordes. Unusually for a film packed with torture, burnings, rapes, throat-slitting and all-round mayhem, it actually managed to be quite literate and philosophical.

As the Sixties petered out, London was changing. Many of the Beautiful People were ravaged by drugs, some were dead. Caine himself was on two bottles of vodka a day, plus 80 tabs. But he was also on half a million dollars a movie and, both wanting to rake in even bigger bucks and recognising that movies he'd made with talented folk had been ruined by studio interference, he now decided to step into production. In partnership with Michael Klinger, he was in possession of a hot screenplay, based on the novel Jack's Return Home. This would now be filmed as Get Carter, the grittiest of gangster movies, where Caine would play a professional thug returning to Newcastle to find out exactly how his brother died. The critics would slam it for its grim atmosphere and shocking violence (Straw Dogs was still a year away), and Caine would now slip into a run of duds, albeit occasionally interesting duds.

Having filmed a weak rehash of Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped, Caine decided to clean up his act and left the London party scene for a mill-house in Clewer, near Windsor. Returning to the fray, he took on X, Y & Zee, written by his former flatterer Edna O'Brien, playing a successful but unfaithful architect with a harridan wife, the still-mega Elizabeth Taylor who takes revenge by seducing his mistress. The sexuality was taboo-breaking, the language famously coarse, and the movie was, in hindsight, a tad ahead of its time. Caine, now on three bottles of vodka a day, later recalled the shoot as a hazy experience, marked by Taylor's ever-present jug of Bloody Mary and the presence of jealously watchful Richard Burton.

But now the excess would stop. During a very rare evening at home, Caine would be transfixed by a TV ad for Maxwell House coffee (directed by no less than Ridley Scott), more particularly by a dusky beauty dancing with maracas filled with coffee beans. Wholly bowled over, he decided to take off for Brazil to track her down, only to be told by an acquaintance that she was, in fact, Indian and lived about a mile from his house, in the Fulham Road. She was Shakira Baksh, a Kashmiri girl born in Guyana, who'd come to London as Miss Guyana in 1967 and come third in the Miss World pageant. Caine nervously called her, romanced her (not something he usually had to do) and eventually won her for keeps. It would be at her suggestion that the heavy drinking stopped, replaced by a keen interest in gardening.

Caine's next effort, which he again produced, was Pulp, directed by his Get Carter helmsman Mike Hodges. Written by Hodges as a homage to John Huston, this saw Caine as a pulp fiction writer in Malta who ghost-writes the memoirs of 30s gangster Mickey Rooney and thus gets involved with a series of gangsters and oddballs.

For all he's said about his overpowering financial motivations, Caine has taken on many, many challenges that could have seen him fatally humiliated. One such was Sleuth, basically a two character play that saw him pitted against no less than Laurence Olivier. Olivier would play a crime novelist who draws big-time hairdresser Caine into a brilliantly convoluted web of trickery and psychological suffering, the two men struggling to con and break each other. On set Caine would notice how the arch-manipulator Olivier (recovering from being kicked out of his beloved National Theatre) would consistently steal centre-stage, hogging the limelight and pushing Caine off into the sidelines. Mentioning it to director Joseph Mankiewicz, he was told it would be sorted out at the editing stage. And it was - both men were nominated as Best Actor at the Oscars, though both were beaten by Marlon Brando's Don Corleone.

With Shakira pregnant, Caine now did the decent thing and married her at the Chapel On The Green in Las Vegas, on January 8th, 1973. But any hopes that things would proceed smoothly were dashed when the newborn child's lungs collapsed (she was only saved by a fast-thinking night nurse) and she was placed in an incubator. Shakira, meanwhile, had taken ill and was in trouble herself. Caine would later remember one night when he sat beside his daughter, with one finger pushed through a hole in the machine keeping her alive, and held her tiny hand. An affecting portrait of colliding hopes and fears if ever there was one.

Thankfully both Shakira and baby Natasha recovered and Caine returned to work on The Black Windmill, an under-rated thriller directed by Don Siegel. Here he played another spy, but this time one under severe pressure to betray the service when his family is kidnapped by a loathsomely smug John Vernon. To spare Shakira and Natasha the rigours of the English winter, he'd then take on The Marseilles Contract (known in the US as The Destructors), to be filmed in the south of France (from here on Caine would base many of his film choices on the luxury and familiarity of the location), a strangely upbeat tale of drug smuggling, hit-men and officially sanctioned assassination.

Having witnessed the vileness of apartheid during the filming of Zulu, now Caine took his first opportunity to do something about it, joining Sidney Poitier in The Wilby Conspiracy, his first overt "message" movie. Here he'd play a British mining engineer who helps activist Poitier flee from Cape Town to Johannesburg, all the while being pursued by racist cops. Then would come Peeper (interestingly taken from a book called Deadfall) where he played a kind of Brit Philip Marlowe, trawling the seedy street of 1940s LA. Back in London, he'd be disturbed to discover that his reputation as a macho Cockney seducer had not been eradicated by his onscreen efforts to leave Alfie behind, as feminist Gloria Steinem would pen an unpleasant and thoroughly dubious article criticising him for marrying a "subservient" woman. As if striking against this ill-founded opinion, Caine would move on to Joseph Losey's The Romantic Englishwoman, an odd literary comedy-drama where he played a badly blocked writer who invites wife Glenda Jackson's lover, Helmut Berger, to stay in order to generate ideas for his next piece - until jealousy rears its ugly green head.

Caine had not enjoyed a major hit or a critical success for a dangerously long time. But the cavalry would now arrive in the shape of Caine's own idol John Huston, who cast him in his epic adaptation of Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King. Huston had in fact attempted to make the film 20 years earlier with Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart as the leads. Instead, Caine and Sean Connery would play the buddy soldiers who take off into the mountains to become kings of Kafiristan - high adventure that comes to a grisly end. As in most historical adventures, a beautiful princess was required and, with the original choice dropping out at the last, Huston persuaded Shakira to take over, which she did with great applomb. Her presence would help Caine through the dysentery and mild case of typhoid he'd pick up on-set - small prices to pay for a hit film featuring some of his best work to date.

Caine would move on to Harry And Walter Go To New York where he played a crooked Brit entrepreneur hiring vaudeville duo James Caan and Elliott Gould to commit crimes for him. It was a good-looking period piece, with marching suffragettes and great sets, but not even the presence of these fine actors, bolstered by Diane Keaton and Lesley Ann Warren, could hide the fact that the humour was limp. Indeed, Caan and Gould came over like Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman later would in the ill-fated Ishtar. Back in London, Caine would now open the first of his string of restaurants, in partnership with wild-boy host Peter Langan. With a chef from Alsace serving up huge portions of paysan nosh, the place would be an immediate success, despite (maybe partly because of) Langan's habit of getting incredibly pissed, insulting the guests and even crawling under tables and biting ladies' legs.

Film-wise Caine would now take work about 15 minutes from his home when he agreed to star in The Eagle Has Landed, a WW2 thriller where he played a Nazi spy ordered to assassinate Churchill. He'd follow this up with a cameo in Richard Attenborough's epic A Bridge Too Far, as a tank commander racing to rescue British paratroopers trapped on the bridge at Arnhem. Watch for the expression on Caine's face when the Germans ambush him. Dear Dickie didn't tell him it was going to happen.

Under James Callaghan's Labour government, Caine was now subject to a tax rate of 82%, a big deal for a working class lad dedicated to a life of luxury. So, with exquisitely bad timing (the tax-reducing Tories were about to take over for the next 18 years), he relocated to Los Angeles. Desperate for money to buy a decent property and maintain his flash lifestyle, he panicked and took The Silver Bears, a pretty lame affair that saw him as a con man taking advantage of a Mob money laundering scheme and a European prince's attempt to take over the world's silver market. Caine's new pad in Beverly Hills would then be secured by a real stinker, when friend Irwin Allen cast him as a scientist saving Houston from killer bees in the atrocious The Swarm.

Before leaving the UK, Caine would nab his first memorable role in a while in Neil Simon's multi-sectioned comedy California Suite. Again assaulting his public image, this time he'd play the meek, bisexual husband of Maggie Smith's tightly-wound Brit thespian, in Los Angeles for the Oscars (Smith would actually win an Oscar for her efforts). This brought him critical acclaim, but he'd soon be on the back foot again with Ashanti, a painfully slow adventure that saw him as a doctor in South Africa struggling to save his wife from slave traders. It was a troubled production from the start with the director, leading lady and art director all being replaced after the production had begun.

Having sold his Berkshire mill-house to Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, Caine was now back in the black. Settled in a ranch-style house, built by Woolworth's heiress Barbara Hutton for her son, set in 3 acres above Los Angeles and protected by a private security force (he was less than a hundred yards from the property where Sharon Tate was murdered), he was sitting pretty. At least he was for a day or so. One night, just after their official welcome party, Caine was awoken by Shakira smacking him in the mouth. Thinking it an accident he went back to sleep, only to be smacked again. And again. Furious, he turned to his wife and found her ashen and slipping into unconsciousness. It was peritonitis and she had it bad. But she was stabilised by paramedics and recovered in hospital. When visiting her, Caine would be able to spend some time with a patient two rooms down from his wife - John Wayne, then dying of cancer.

With Shakira a practised and sophisticated socialite, Caine now found himself amongst the Hollywood elite, hanging out with the likes of Kirk Douglas, Billy Wilder and Swifty Lazar. This would help in his constant search for work, more particularly in his search for GOOD work, as the flops were coming thick and fast. First there'd be Beyond The Poseidon Adventure, Irwin Allen's dodgy follow-up to his own classic disaster flick. Then there was The Island, a notoriously awful effort written by Peter "Jaws" Benchley. This would involve a tribe of savages, descended from 17th Century pirates, who prey on the boats passing their isolated island and, because all the males are sterile, seize Caine to act as a stud to their one remaining fertile female.

Caine has often stated his belief that in Hollywood you need to score at least one hit in every five films you make, or you're considered finished. He was now very close to the mark, only to be saved by Brian De Palma and the classic slasher flick Dressed To Kill. Playing a psychiatrist who also happens to be a split-personality transvestite and murderer, it was a huge risk - indeed, no American star would touch it in case it damaged their image. But Caine, STILL known in the UK as a macho Lothario, pulled it off with great style. And just in time.

Keen to try another of the horror films currently in vogue, Caine opted for The Hand, playing a cartoonist who loses, as you might surmise from the title, his hand - the hand then proceeding to crawl around the city taking violent revenge on all and sundry. It was actually a very witty movie and a well-made thriller, as you'd expect from an early work by Oliver Stone (his next efforts would be Salvador and Platoon). The same could not be said about Caine's follow-up, Escape To Victory. This saw him as captain of a team of WW2 POWs who play soccer against their German captors while setting up a tunnel-based flight to freedom. Despite the presence of Pele and a host of other football luminaries, it was poor both as a sports movie and a war-time drama - though there were inadvertent laughs to had from Sylvester Stallone's ludicrously overblown goalkeeping.

It was now that Caine got an offer that would have proved the best test of his acting since Sleuth. Orson Welles called, asking him to join him in an adaptation of The Dresser. Unfortunately, as Caine was bitterly aware, such a movie was already in production, starring his old rivals Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay. Instead, he took on Sidney Lumet's Deathtrap, a project fairly similar to Sleuth, where Caine played another blocked writer, whose wife is rich but sick and whose student, Christopher Reeve, has written a dead cert hit. Everyone's worth killing and the twisting double-crosses make it one of Caine's best ever. He also had a great time during filming, spending many nights at the flamboyant Studio 54, and taking the opportunity to introduce his friend Mia Farrow to Woody Allen.

Though not enjoying a consistent run of hits, Caine was still a major player on the Hollywood social scene and now decided to start up a version of his Langan's Brasserie in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, his visions of another successful eaterie were dashed when Peter Langan flew over and passed out drunk at the meeting with potential investors. He was then thrown out of the posh Ma Maison for calling Orson Welles an "arrogant fat arsehole" and urinating in the flowerpots outside. It was all over before it had begun, but Caine could console himself with the notion that he had become a kind of British Ambassador to Hollywood, playing host to Princess Margaret, Prince Andrew, Princess Michael of Kent and even swapping jokes with the Queen herself.

It was time for another hit and, turning down a chance to star alongside his Beyond The Poseidon Adventure co-star Sally Field (then hot after her Oscar for Norma Rae), he signed on for Educating Rita, a small Brit flick to be directed by Lewis "Alfie" Gilbert. Once more this would see Caine acting against type, as an overweight, bearded, alcoholic professor bringing the best out of working class scouse gal Julie Walters. Rather than viewing the piece as a reworking of Pygmalion, Caine instead saw it as a tale of unrequited love and consequently based his performance on that of Emil Jannings, the poor fool destroyed by Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel. And it worked - Caine would find himself Oscar nominated again, alongside the stars of the movie he just missed, The Dresser.

Next he took off for Mexico with Bob Hoskins and Richard Gere to star in The Honorary Consul, typical Graham Greene fare involving exhausted passions, shattered loyalties and activists kidnapping a drunken British dignitary. Directed by John Mackenzie, who'd just boosted Hoskins' career with The Long Good Friday, it was tough, dark stuff, much like his next offering, The Jigsaw Man, another spy thriller that saw him as a double agent given a new face in Moscow and sent back to Blighty. The movie would suffer under great financial pressure, but would allow him to reunite with his old adversary Laurence Olivier. Very different would be his next outing, the infamous Blame It On Rio. A remake of the French hit Un Moment d'Egarement, but lacking any of its charm, this saw Caine seduced by his best friend's teenie daughter then asked by the friend to find the guy he's sure has seduced her. With the film focusing heavily on the lithe young bodies of Michelle Johnson (the seductress) and a very young Demi Moore (playing Caine's daughter), the critics kicked up a major fuss, pounding the movie for its dubious sexual politics and wholesale vulgarity.

Having agreed with his wife that if he didn't win a much-coveted Oscar for Educating Rita he never would, the summer of 1984 saw Caine return to his homeland (the tax man would allow him 90 days a year), where he bought a new country pile on the Thames in Oxfordshire. Onscreen, he would continue his poor run (poor films, not necessarily poor performances) with Water, a duff comedy written by Clement and La Frenais, where he played the governor of a Caribbean island thrown into chaos when a long-neglected oil well starts spurting Perrier. The movie would feature cameos by executive producer George Harrison and his rock star buddies Ringo Starr and Eric Clapton, but that hardly helped. Better would be Robert Ludlum's The Holcroft Covenant (James Caan had dropped out late) where Caine played an architect whose guilt-ridden ex-Nazi father leaves billions to Holocaust survivors, Caine having to ensure it goes to the intended beneficiaries, rather than the dark forces that aim to snaffle it.

And then, just a few months after deciding that elusive Oscar would never arrive, he got the call from his friends Woody Allen and Mia Farrow and joined the cast of Hannah And Her Sisters, the complex, funny and moving tale of a showbiz family and their varying relationships. Caine would play a romantic weakling bemused by his passion for his wife's sister, then getting completely carried away. During filming, he later recalled, he found himself in the odd position of making love to Mia Farrow in her own apartment, being filmed by her lover and watched by her ex-husband, Andre Previn, who'd dropped by to see the kids.

This was the role that cracked it, Caine taking the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, ahead of Platoon's Tom Berenger and Willem Dafoe. At a charity show in London, he joined Bob Hope onstage and recounted the tale of how he'd met and been inspired by Hope back at Clubland, Hope adding that if he'd known how rich Caine would become he'd have adopted him. Back on film he'd now enjoy his longest screen kiss ever (even longer than the famous one with Christopher Reeve in Deathtrap) with Michelle Pfeiffer, when he played an arrogant, philandering movie star in Alan Alda's easily watchable Sweet Liberty.

His next release would be another hit, Mona Lisa, which teamed him up again with Bob Hoskins (also in Sweet Liberty). By shocking coincidence, Hoskins' production offices were actually set up in a dilapidated London building that used to be St Olaves Hospital, the very place Caine was born. Another gritty urban thriller, Mona Lisa saw Hoskins released from jail and trying to regain ground in London's underworld, being hired as chauffeur to prostitute Cathy Tyson. Naturally, he falls for her, which brings him into direct conflict with Caine, his absolutely repulsive boss, a cold-hearted businessman unapologetically trading in human misery. It was another fine performance. Different would be Half Moon Street, directed by Bob Swaim (who'd just delivered the classic French thriller La Balance). Here Sigourney Weaver would play a brilliant woman working in a London Cold War think-tank. Badly underpaid she becomes a high-class escort (as you do), one of whose clients is Caine, a lonely government defence spokesman. As they fall for each other their complex relationship is interesting, but then it flips into a rather silly action piece as terrorist spy rings turn up to sabotage Caine's Middle Eastern peace initiative. The Whistle Blower would then bring Caine back to familiar espionage grounds as he played a former intelligence officer drawn back into the game when his son is killed and a Soviet conspiracy is suspected. Next would come Frederick Forsyth's The Fourth Protocol, which reunited him with director John Mackenzie and saw him battling those damn Russkies yet again. This time he was a maverick operative, sacked by his bosses but still investigating a case where Soviet beast Pierce Brosnan is smuggling nuclear components into Britain, hoping to blow up a US army base and thus destroy the Brits "special relationship" with America.

And then, according to detractors, came another biggie in the Caine cannon of appalling movies. Indeed, Jaws: The Revenge may have been his worst ever. Here Chief Brody's wife loses a son to a shark and comes to believe it's following her, eager to eat her because she knows people who've killed sharks in the past, or something. So she goes out to sea alone to sacrifice herself to the aquatic monster. Caine, a pilot who's fallen for her, flies out to save her and, well, let's just say it didn't top Steven Spielberg's original. As ever, Caine was thoroughly bare-faced about it all, despite the fact that filming schedules prevented him from picking up his Oscar for Hannah And Her Sisters (Sigourney Weaver received it in his place). "I have never seen the film," he said "but by all accounts it was terrible. However I HAVE seen the house that it built, and it is terrific".

Back in LA, he'd now reunite with Sally Field for Surrender, a kind of romantic comedy where they played embittered people trying not to fall in love with each other. Sadly pre-nup agreements, big casino wins and yet more terrorists would rob the movie of its initial charm. More of a blow to Caine would come from the British Inland Revenue. With taxes now down to 50% he'd moved back properly and had received a back-tax demand for over a million pounds. Being paid in dollars and with the dollar doing badly he was again under financial pressure, partly self-inflicted as he'd bought a flash flat needing renovation in the Chelsea Harbour district. With no films immediately available, he returned to TV work for the first time in a quarter of a century, with David Wickes' Jack The Ripper, a superior project that saw him as the Scotland Yard detective tracking down the fiend of Whitechapel. It would be a massive hit, forcing Caine back into the public eye.

Meanwhile, his cinematic output would take a brief upturn. After Without A Clue, a Victorian comedy where he was a hammy, libidinous actor hired to play Sherlock Holmes and act as a front for Ben Kingsley's master of detection Dr Watson, came Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Originally known as King Of The Mountain, Caine had been attached to this project for some years, at one point with Tom Cruise as his co-star, but finance had never been secured. Now it was and Caine took it on, playing a high-class con-man in the south of France, diddling rich old ladies out of their fortunes and engaging in a hilarious battle of wills with street-wise hustler Steve Martin.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels was a comedy classic, but it would see the cash-strapped Caine now enter perhaps the poorest run of his career to date (not in terms of his own performances which were uniformly professional and occasionally very strong). After failing to replicate the success of Jack the Ripper when reuniting with David Wickes for Jekyll And Hyde, he moved on to Shock To The System, a weak satire of corporate greed that saw him employing wicked tricks and even murder to improve his fortunes. Then came Mr Destiny, an It's A Wonderful Life re-run where he played a magical bar-man taking a despairing James Belushi back through his life, and the Michael Winner-directed farce Bullseye! where he teamed up with his close friend Roger Moore to play both shady scientists and a pair of con-men out to trick them. Slightly better would be Peter Bogdanovich's version of the Broadway hit Noises Off (featuring Deathtrap's Christopher Reeve) where he'd play the burnt-out director of a second-rate theatre troupe touring a sex farce. Inevitably, the backstage shenanigans are far more rude and convoluted than those onstage. As said, it was OK, but Caine would later enjoy far more success playing this kind of down-at-heel, desperate but still hopeful man.

While filming Noises Off Caine was to receive an almighty shock when a hack from the Sunday People informed him that he actually had a half-brother, David, nine years his senior. Born with epilepsy he was, as was the custom back then, treated as insane and spent 50 years in an asylum. He was now 67, wheelchair-bound and unable to speak. Caine's mother, who'd recently died, had never told her superstar son that, for 62 years (apart from the war years and occasional holidays) she'd visited him every Monday and, to protect Caine's career she'd sworn everyone to silence. Weirdly, David had been kept in an establishment called Cain Hill. Michael would visit him, but the poor man would die soon afterwards.

Getting back into production, Caine would now serve up Blue Ice, where he played a philandering ex-spy who decides to investigate when his friends start dying, stumbling into international arms deals and a very mysterious Sean Young. With Caine now nearing 60, he did not convince when rushing around with a machine-gun. Far more effective would be his performance as Scrooge, the only human in The Muppet Christmas Carol. Thus Miss Piggy was added to his ever-growing list of stunning former leading ladies.

Forming a partnership with Marco Pierre White at The Canteen in Chelsea Harbour, Caine would continue his career as a restaurateur (despite the fact that Peter Langan had died after horribly burning himself). Onscreen, he nabbed some extra kudos playing Stalin in When Lions Roared, negotiating with Bob Hoskins' Churchill and John Lithgow's FDR, and some extra cash when replacing Jeremy Irons in Steven Seagal's On Deadly Ground, playing a ruthless oil baron who just doesn't care about the environment and ends up in a fight to the death with Seagal and his Eskimo friends. If this wasn't dodgy enough, he was then persuaded to resurrect Harry Palmer for two specials for the US Showtime Network. Filmed back-to-back, these were Bullet To Beijing and Midnight In St Petersburg, which saw Palmer sacked by MI6 and working as a security guard and private dick in Moscow, getting involved with kidnappings, drugs, art thefts and nuclear arms plots. They were reasonably interesting pieces, though lacking that Sixties style, and they also gave Caine a chance to ham it up with another working class thespian Londoner - Michael Gambon.

Caine's next effort would see him approaching top form again. Blood And Wine saw him as a career criminal after one final final score, persuading wine distributor Jack Nicholson to rob one of his clients. Many have been dwarfed by Nicholson's charisma - not Caine. Chain-smoking, coughing up blood, breaking into sudden rages that saw him thrashing Nicholson with a golf club, he more than stood his ground. He'd also be outstanding as FW De Klerk in Joseph Sargent's Mandela And De Klerk, trying to maintain order and dismantle the apartheid system at the same time.

There were few surprises when Caine played Captain Nemo in 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, attempting to create a new underwater world. There were fewer still in Shadow Run where he played a cold-hearted crim plotting to steal £11 million in cash from a security van (the movie's title refers to areas where security van drivers cannot receive a signal on their phones). But then came a real shock. Muppets aside, Caine had not been in a truly popular movie for a decade. In that time all his best performances had been in films that no one saw. So Little Voice seemed to the general public like a true rebirth of a long-dead talent. And it was an undeniably brilliant effort. Little Voice would see Jane Horrocks as a painfully shy girl with an extraordinary talent for mimicking the likes of Shirley Bassey and Marilyn Monroe. Caine would be Ray Say, a former London club promoter now reduced to managing strippers. When he hears Horrocks sing (while he's cavorting hilariously with her mum Brenda Blethyn) he begins to plot a money-spinning career for her, and of course himself. He's desperate, devious and thoughtless, but also charming, funny and very human. And when it all goes catastrophically wrong, when he's onstage himself singing a tearful, angry farewell to the world of showbiz, he delivers one of the classic moments in British cinema history. Caine had done this before, on many occasions, but no one thought him capable any longer. It was an unqualified triumph.

And it would keep getting better. After Curtain Call, where he and Maggie Smith near-reprised their California Suite roles as a bickering couple of thespian ghosts haunting James Spader's townhouse, would come John Irving's The Cider House Rules. Here he played Dr Wilbur Larch, a fine man who runs a Maine orphanage, delivers children and is a pillar of the community - though he might not be if everyone knew he performs illegal abortions and is addicted to laudanum. The movie basically concerns the coming-of-age of Tobey Maguire, Larch's favourite orphan who he's trained to follow in his footsteps, but it dies somewhat when Maguire flies the roost, such is the strength of Caine's performance. The Academy recognised this, too, awarding him his second Oscar.

Caine's next film was a real oddity - a movie you will most likely never be able to see. Directed by Randy Quaid's wife Evi, this was The Debtors, wherein various people with various addictions meet at the gaming tables of Las Vegas - Caine playing a sex-crazed dentist. Problem was the project was bankrolled by Charles Simonyi, chief software architect at Microsoft, and he didn't like the film's tone or content, claiming it wasn't what he agreed to invest in. Attempting to win reimbursement from the Quaids he scored an injunction preventing release, which prompted an angry Evi Quaid to show her work at the Toronto Film Festival and set up a web-site featuring nude pictures of herself and claims that she was being forced to prostitute her talent. Come the new millennium and Randy and Evi Quaid would file for bankrupcy (imagine that, after all the films he's been in). And, despite the presence of Caine, Quaid and Catherine McCormack, Simonyi will probably never allow The Debtors to be released.

Caine moved on to another film featuring an obsessive sex-addict. This was Quills, with Geoffrey Rush playing an incarcerated Marquis de Sade, using laundry girl Kate Winslet to smuggle his depraved (and often spot on) philosophies out into the world. Caine would play his jailer, a prudish puritan who's nonetheless fascinated by Sade's crazed liberalism. As it turns out, like most puritans, he's a sadist who's taken a very young wife to allow him to live out his many sexual fantasies.

Next would come Shiner, a murky, occasionally violent Brit thriller, based loosely on King Lear, where Caine played an aging boxing promoter who gets a shot at the big time when his own son is involved in a world title eliminator. It was watchable, mostly due to Caine's performance (and it was an object lesson in how to waste a talent like Frances Barber), but it was messy and underwritten. So, too, was Get Carter, an utterly pointless remake that saw Caine co-starring with Sylvester Stallone for the first time in 19 years. Here Stallone would take the title role, trawling through the Seattle underworld in search of his brother's killers, kicking underworld ass in a thoroughly unimaginative way. Caine would pop up briefly as the genial but duplicitous businessman, Cliff Brumby, in the original played by Bryan Mosley.

After all this violence, Caine now returned to comedy with Miss Congeniality, where Sandra Bullock played an FBI agent going undercover at the Miss USA beauty pageant. As the camp beauty consultant who supervises her makeover, Caine would naturally get all the best lines. This would also happen in his next outing, Quicksand, where bank executive Michael Keaton is sent to Monaco to find out if dodgy money is being laundered through film productions, one of them being the titular Quicksand with Caine as its hammy, washed-up star. Soon they're both on the run, with the Russian mafia in hot pursuit. The movie would see Caine working with director John Mackenzie yet again. His main reason for taking the movie, though, would probably have been the location.

Now Caine would return to the East End with Last Orders where he played one of four lifelong friends, the others being his old Sixties peers Tom Courtenay, and David Hemmings and, once again, Bob Hoskins. With Caine's Jack Dodds now dead, the others meet with his son Ray Winstone and travel off to fulfil Caine's last wish - to have his ashes scattered over the sea at Margate. In flashback, we see the friendships evolve and the problems brought to Jack's marriage to Helen Mirren by a severely handicapped daughter that Jack could never accept. The secrets revealed, the remorse buried, the relationships maintained all made it the most human of stories. All the more so for Caine, perhaps, as Mirren lonely visits to see their daughter must surely have reminded him of his own mother's trips to see his lost brother David.

Very, very different would be Caine's next project, when he took the rise out of himself and his past by playing Austin Powers' father in Goldmember. Mike Myers would use clips from Hurry Sundown to show us the young Caine and, as Austin's thick glasses were based on those worn by Harry Palmer, Caine himself would wear the originals. The hilarity, though, would not last long, as Caine would now return to Graham Greene with The Quiet American. Here he'd play a weary and jaded foreign correspondent in wartorn 1950s Saigon, coasting in his job, often high on opium and enjoying a relationship with a local girl 40 years his junior who he pays for her time. Then he's forced out of his lethargy by the arrival of young turk Brendan Fraser who brings chaos to both Caine and country. It was another brilliant effort and earned him his 6th Oscar nomination.

Caine had spent much of his early career keeping a straight face. Now he was emotionally opening up to great effect, especially excelling as hammy fools and bitter, complicated men. He'd play both simultaneously in his next picture, The Actors where he was a poverty-stricken luvvie who recruits Dylan Moran from his dodgy troupe to help dupe an underworld boss out of some dough. It was another good performance in a half-baked movie that also featured the classy Michael Gambon and Miranda Richardson, Caine's co-stars in Bullet To Beijing and Get Carter respectively.

Now would come another (minor) Hollywood hit in Secondhand Lions, where Haley Joel Osment is dumped by his sketchy mum on two aged uncles, Caine and Robert Duvall. A feel-good movie for the older generation, this saw the two old buffers telling a succession of tall tales (shown in B-movie-style flashback) and play the eccentric card to maximum effect, the audience being asked what good the truth is if it doesn't bring happiness. Caine would be even better in The Statement where he played an old Frenchman who, with the help of a secret Catholic society, has managed to cover up his involvement with the Vichy government in WW2. Now, though, he's rumbled both by Israeli radicals and magistrate Tilda Swinton and goes on the run, seeking shelter with former wife Charlotte Rampling and anyone else he can. In many ways Caine's character is vile - obsequious, threatening, fearful, he's almost Gollum-like. But he's also old and tired and scared and just wants to spend his time in quiet contemplation. He's a Nazi murderer but Caine has you wondering whether they ought to just let him be.

2004 would be a quiet year for Caine releases. Indeed, there was just a short role in Around The Bend where he played a dying man who asks that his family take a trip together, scattering his ashes from LA to New Mexico. This turns out to be a gift to long-lost son Christopher Walken, who Caine abandoned as a boy, allowing him to bond with his own family. 2005 would see him being far more prolific. First would come Batman Begins, an earthy return to the Dark Knight's roots, with Christian Bale taking on the bad guys and digging into the warped psychology of the Caped Crusader. Caine would appear as Alfred, Bale's butler, who would remind the young man of his crime-fighting destiny and help him achieve it. Next would come the big budget screen adaptation of TV series Bewitched, where Nicole Kidman would be witch Samantha, trying to win the heart of Will Ferrell without using magic. Caine would play her wise father, explaining to her that a witch is a witch is a witch. He learned this from her mother, played by Shirley Maclaine, the woman who brought Caine to Hollywood nearly 40 years earlier. Next would come The Weather Man, a comedy where Nic Cage is on the verge of national TV fame but suffering a difficult private life, with divorce, troublesome kids and his father, Caine, very ill. Life, like the weather, can be so unpredictable.

Receiving a CBE in 1992, Caine was knighted by the Queen on November 16th, 2000 - accepting the honour as Maurice Micklewhite Jr, in memory of his father. As a multiple award winner (two Oscars, three Golden Globes, plus four more Oscar nominations, eight more for Golden Globes and three Emmy nominations) he must surely now accept that he is respected as an actor worldwide. Yet he continues to prove himself. As he said himself: "I'll always be there because I'm a skilled professional. Whether or not I've any talent is beside the point". He does have talent, of course, though it's often been buried in bad movies. But even for those Caine has a reasonable excuse. "As far as discrimination is concerned," he's said "I have a definite standard by which I choose films: I choose the best one available at the time I need one. Of course this has often led me down dubious artistic paths, but even they are not without their advantages. It is much more difficult to act well in a bad film with a bad director than in any other type of movie and it gives you great experience in taking care of yourself. It also means that when a good script does turn up you're ready for it." Let's hope the good scripts keep coming his way.

Dominic Wills