Michael Caine

Over four decades -- from "Alfie" to "The Cider House Rules" -- he has played warm, cold and everything in between, and never feared losing the audience's sympathy.

By Charles Taylor

Oct 3, 2000 | "The thing about ... Michael Caine is ... that he only ... speaks t'ree words ... at a time." That was British actor Jim Dale mimicking Caine's distinctive stop-and-start cockney inflections. It's a compliment, really, an acknowledgment that Caine had joined the select body of movie stars whose speech and mannerisms are so familiar they can be parodied. It must have tickled the former Maurice Joseph Mickelwhite, who took his name from a marquee advertising "The Caine Mutiny," starring one of his all-time favorite actors, Humphrey Bogart, to have gained entrance to such a select club. (Just as it thrilled him, in John Huston's "The Man Who Would Be King," to be playing a role originally intended for Bogart.)

Michael Caine, who had an easy birth on March 14, 1933 ("the last easy thing I was to do for 30 years," he has said), seems as familiar as any actor to have emerged in the past 40 years. We all think we know him. The ska group Madness named a song after him and punctuated it with the actor's voice announcing simply, "I am Michael Caine." In the midst of Eddie Izzard's one-man show "Definite Article," the English comic suddenly veers into dialogue from Caine's 1969 caper flick, "The Italian Job," and the English audience erupts in laughter of recognition with each new line. Roy Budd's score for Caine's 1970 tough-as-nails "Get Carter" (recently voted by British critics as the greatest British gangster film of all time) has been flying out of specialty CD shops on a pricey British import that features bits of Caine's dialogue between the music tracks. (A remake starring Sylvester Stallone and featuring Caine in a supporting role is due out Friday.)

The iconic image of Michael Caine is probably best summed up by a 1965 David Bailey photograph recently reprinted in his book "Birth of the Cool." In it, Caine wears the black horn-rimmed glasses he donned to play secret agent Harry Palmer in three films that began with "The Ipcress File." An unlit Gauloise dangles from his mouth, and his black suit, tie and white button-down shirt are slim and immaculate. But there's something unstable about the photograph, an unnerving aliveness that, 35 years later, still makes its meaning impossible to pin down, cut loose from its era as much as Bailey's chic portraits of other icons of '60s Brit cool -- Jean Shrimpton, Mick Jagger, even the Kray Brothers -- are contained by their times. The portrait is bordered by the edges of the black frame, but Caine's eyes make you feel as if you're the one who has been nailed to the wall. Steady, cool to the point of frigidity, they look as if they're glowing from within their partially shadowed sockets; the long eyelashes that frame them might be tiny laser beams. Caine's impassive expression and ray-gun orbs don't offer the certainty of either kindness or cruelty but something far more unsettling: the sensation of being coolly appraised, of having each action or utterance totted up and held to your credit or debit.

Looking at that picture now, I can't help feeling that it holds the key to the range and contradictions of Michael Caine -- not just the key to how a great movie star became a great actor but the key to how such an essentially warm actor (and one moviegoers think of warmly) has been able to play cold. In "What's It All About?" his enormously entertaining autobiography, Caine rather startlingly reveals that something other than his love for Bogart led him to take his name from a movie marquee. "Cain was the brother of Abel," he writes, "who was cast out of Paradise, and I felt a great sympathy with him at the time." Caine means that as someone scraping professional bottom after a promising start, he knew what it felt like to be suddenly on your uppers.

But could that understanding be part of what has made him so memorable when he has played bastards? The young Maurice Mickelwhite dreamed of being a movie star. Yet Caine has escaped the perennial curse of movie stars: vanity. He has never shied away from a role because he was afraid of losing the audience's sympathy. That has been true from the beginning, when he gained his first huge success as unrepentant cad "Alfie," through to the preoperative transsexual killer in "Dressed to Kill," slimy underworld king Mortwell in "Mona Lisa," the put-out-to-pasture middle-aged businessman who resorts to murder in "A Shock to the System" and the sadistic, Torquemada-like psychiatrist in the upcoming "Quills."

There are certain actors (Christopher Walken, for instance, or Harvey Keitel) whom we expect to play villains. And after a while, they are robbed of the power to unsettle us. Go see Walken or Keitel now, even at their best, and you're more likely to chuckle in pleasure at the way their villainy fulfills our expectations. Caine's villains are so effective because, in his other roles as well as in his public persona, he seems the most levelheaded of actors.

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