The Essential Michael Caine

"If I can make it, there's hope for us all."

Michael Caine in Helsinki, 1967, filming Billion Dollar Brain. Finnish Heritage Agency, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.

TO OUTWARD appearances, when Michael Caine finally achieved movie stardom in 1965, it may have seemed like a fairy tale: the working class boy from the Elephant and Castle had achieved his dream. If it was, the fairies must have been wearing lead boots. Caine clearly enjoys the finer things in life, and doubtless appreciates them all the more for having taken so long to get them. His is a true rags-to-riches story, and from everything I have seen and read about him, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer chap. He appears in some of my favourite films, and it’s difficult to say whether I would love them as much had he not been in them. This week I thought I’d share some of them with you, and tell you why I think he’s so very good.

Maurice Joseph Micklewhite was born in Rotherhithe, South London in 1933. His mother was a charlady, his father a porter at Billingsgate fish market. His brother Stanley was born in 1936, and the family lived in a flat in Camberwell. As a child Maurice had to wear surgical boots as he suffered from rickets, a poverty disease that weakens the bones. He was evacuated during World War II and suffered extreme cruelty at his first foster home, but a second evacuation to Norfolk with his mother and brother was a much better experience. He claims that organic food and good nourishment cured him of his rickets, and he “shot up like a weed”. He must have done: by the age of twelve he was six feet tall.