The tone that pervades "What's It All About?" is one of someone who has gotten used to luxury but doesn't take it for granted. The former Archibald Leach may have said, "Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant." But part of Caine still seems to be Mickelwhite. He is refreshingly free of guilt about being an actor who has worked for financial security. ("I have never seen ["Jaws: The Revenge"] but by all accounts it is terrible. However I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.") There's a famous story about his being treated as a cockney scruff by a Rolls Royce salesman, who saw Caine just a few hours later when the actor rode past the fellow's showroom in a Rolls he'd purchased from another dealer, giving a two-fingered salute. In an interview a few years ago, he told one of those stories that make you laugh even as your eyes are tearing up. When money was no longer a concern for Caine, he told his mother that he could now take care of her and asked what she had always wanted. "Would it be all right," Caine's mum responded, "if I were to order an extra quart of milk, because sometimes I run out by the end of the week?"

Caine possesses a smoothness, a star quality that transcends class, a believability that has made him convincing as everything from an international movie star ("Sweet Liberty") to a variety of lowlifes and losers ("Mona Lisa," "Little Voice") to a swank Riviera con man ("Dirty Rotten Scoundrels") to Manhattan businessmen ("Hannah and Her Sisters," "A Shock to the System") to an Oxford professor ("Educating Rita") to a small-town doctor ("The Cider House Rules"). But in the '60s, when his career took off, Caine was the movies' quintessential cockney.

You can talk all you want about the changes wrought on British culture by John Osborne and the Angry Young Man school of writing, or by the theatrical experiments of director Joan Littlewood (who told Caine, after his short stint in her company, "Piss off to Shaftesbury Avenue; you'll only ever be a star"), or by the writing of Allan Silitoe and Shelagh Delaney. Those artists reached primarily intellectual, educated audiences. It was the Beatles who, reaching everybody, sent the British class system topsy-turvy. Suddenly, people were affecting Liverpudlian and cockney accents instead of upper-crusty ones. Suddenly, being born in the East End was more desirable than being listed in "Burke's Peerage." The aristocracy was a closed club; the joys of the new "ruling class" were open to anyone who responded to the excitement that carried the day.

Caine's entry into acting had nothing to do with the British tradition of theatrical training. He started acting as a teenager in youth clubs, and after his National Service, moved on to stage managing and small roles at a little theater company, and from there into regional repertory, TV and small movie roles. By the time he became known in the '60s he had already been acting for some years. (He had also gone through his first marriage and had a daughter, Dominique.)

Despite his role as official cockney, producers almost didn't see it that way. Caine lost a part as a cockney in "Zulu," only to be cast in his first big movie role as aristocratic snob Lieutenant Bromhead. Speaking in an upper-class accent that contained a wafer's edge of parody, Caine modeled himself physically on Prince Philip, clasping his hands behind his back in the manner of "a powerful man and well guarded so he did not have to be ready to defend himself as the unguarded lower orders do. He never had to open doors or do other mundane things for himself." The response from a senior Paramount executive in London who saw the rushes was a telegram that read: "ACTOR PLAYING BROMHEAD SO BAD HE DOESN'T EVEN KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH HANDS ... SUGGEST YOU REPLACE HIM." Luckily, director Cy Endfield knew when to ignore studio executives. The movie was a big hit, and Caine got great reviews but not the contract he had hoped for. Famous producer Joseph Levine, president of Embassy Pictures (which made "Zulu"), told Caine the studio was not picking up his option because "you look like a queer on-screen." (This, incidentally, was 1964, the same year Rock Hudson was ending his seven-year run as the top box-office attraction.) But Caine's performance attracted the attention of producer Harry Saltzman, who cast him as spy Harry Palmer in the film of Len Deighton's bestseller, "The Ipcress File."

The movie marks the beginning of Caine the icon. Right down to his ordinary-bloke name, Harry Palmer was conceived as the antithesis of James Bond, the spy as civil servant (though not one of the tortured and rumpled denizens of John le Carri's gray world). The result is a movie that's static and unsatisfying, a pop entertainment without the kick of pop (which was the distinctive joy of the Bond films). But Caine's Palmer, competent, disrespectful to his superiors without being flagrantly insubordinate, was a coolly contained version of the working-class cheek that had won over British culture. Palmer's targets can never quite tell whether he's sincere or taking the piss.

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