Michael Caine interview

AN ACTOR'S LIFE FOR ME

Listening to Michael Caine for forty-five minutes makes you realise that he is not only the consummate actor, but the perfect movie star as well. He doesn't really namedrop his way through the press conference - namedropping isn't the correct term because to Sir Michael tales of Marlon, Dusty and Jack seem to come so naturally - but it is clear that this is a guy who has seen it all. And what's more, professionally he is on the form of his life, with a string of fantastic roles in recent years as well as looking in his mid-fifties even though he has recently turned seventy.

A typical entertaining and rambling Caine anecdote concerns the recent Oscars. Was has disappointed at not winning for The Quiet American? "Not at all", he says, and we have little reason to disbelieve him. "I felt honoured to in such company". And with that we learn how on the Friday before the Oscars, Jack invited Nick, Danny, Adrien and Michael (it's strictly first-names terms) to his Mulholland Drive mansion so that the five would-be winners could work out what to say if they won: bearing in mind that the ceremony was due to occur less than 48 hours before the outbreak of war. The way Caine tells it they all got so addled on Jack's champagne that they had to ring each other the next day to find out what had been agreed.

Caine is in town to promote his new comedy The Actors, in which he stars as a down-on-his-luck and frankly not very good thesp who is saddled with the lead role in a Nazi version of Richard III. His co-star Dylan Moran is also in attendance but the assembled press pack largely have questions for only one of them.

And Caine has alarmingly honest answers for all of them. His style is a world apart from the largely pat and predictable responses given by typical Hollywood superstars, and it's evident that his humble working class beginnings have kept his feet firmly on the ground. While he admits to loving being a movie star, he knows exactly what a fickle world it is.

"I knew about fifty guys like my character O'Malley when I was starting out in rep", he admits, "They were all completely sad, complete losers and completely unaware of it. They always thought they were great but they were too stupid to know". But he harbours no ambitions of returning to the stage. "I'm a movie star, which is what I always wanted to be. I went into the theatre to learn how to act but I won't be returning to the stage".