Cockney actor Michael Caine was born on this day 14th March in 1933. He is one of only two actors nominated for an Academy Award for acting in every decade from the 1960s to 2000s, the other being Jack Nicholson. In 2000, Caine was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in recognition of his contribution to cinema.
Caine was born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite in St Olave's Hospital, Rotherhithe, Southwark in South East London, during the Second World War he was evacuated to North Runcton near King's Lynn in Norfolk. After the war, when his father was demobilised, the family was rehoused by the council in Marshall Gardens at the Elephant and Castle in a pre-fabricated house. In 1944, he passed his eleven plus exam, winning a scholarship to Hackney Downs Grocers' School. After a year there he moved to Wilson's Grammar School in Camberwell (now Wilson's School in Wallington, South London), which he left at sixteen after gaining a School Certificate in six subjects.
Caine's acting career began at the age of 20 in Horsham, Sussex when he responded to an advertisement in The Stage for an assistant stage manager who would also perform small walk-on parts for the Horsham-based Westminster Repertory Company who were performed at the Carfax Electric Theatre. In July 1953 he was cast as the drunkard Hindley in the Company's production of Wuthering Heights. He moved to the Lowestoft Repertory Company in Suffolk for a year when he was 22. It was here that he met his first wife. He has described the first nine years of his career as "really really brutal." When his career took him to London after his provincial apprenticeship, his agent informed him that there was already a Michael Scott treading the boards in London and that he had to come up with a new name immediately. Speaking to his agent from a telephone box in Leicester Square, London, he looked around for inspiration, noted that The Caine Mutiny was being shown at the Odeon Cinema, and decided to change his name to "Michael Caine". (Humphrey Bogart was his "screen idol" and he would later play a part originally intended for Bogart in John Huston's film "The Man Who Would Be King".
A big break came for Caine when he was cast as Meff in James Saunders' Cockney comedy Next Time I'll Sing To You, when this play was presented at the New Arts Theatre in London on 23 January 1963. When this play moved to the Criterion in Piccadilly with Michael Codron directing, he was visited backstage by Stanley Baker, his co-star in A Hill In Korea, who told him about the part of a Cockney corporal in his upcoming movie Zulu, a film Baker was producing and starring in. Baker told Caine to visit the director, Cy Endfield,
who informed him that he already had given the part to James Booth, a fellow Cockney who was Caine's friend, because he looked more Cockney than Caine did. After dozens of minor TV roles, Caine finally entered the public eye as the upper class British Army officer Gonville Bromhead in Zulu.
Subsequently, Caine's agent got him cast in the BBC production Hamlet at Elsinore (1964) as Horatio in support of Christopher Plummer's Hamlet. Horatio was the only classical role Caine, who had never received dramatic training, would ever play.
After working on The Italian Job with Noël Coward, and a solid role as RAF fighter pilot Squadron Leader Canfield in the all-star cast of Battle of Britain, both made in 1969, Caine played the lead in Get Carter (1971), a British gangster film. Caine was busy with successes including Sleuth (1972) opposite Laurence Olivier, and The Man Who Would Be King (1975) co-starring Sean Connery and directed by John Huston (which he has stated will be the film he wishes to be remembered for after his death). In 1976 he appeared in the screen adaptation by Tom Mankiewicz of the Jack Higgins novel The Eagle Has Landed as Oberst (Colonel) Kurt Steiner, the commander of a Luftwaffe paratroop brigade disguised as Polish paratroopers, whose mission was to kidnap or kill the then-British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, alongside co-stars Donald Sutherland, Robert Duvall, Jenny Agutter, and Donald Pleasence. Subsequently in 1978, he starred in The Silver Bears, an adaptation of Paul Erdman's 1974 novel of the same name. Caine also was part of an all-star cast in the film "A Bridge Too Far" (1977).
By the end of the decade, he had moved to the United States, but his choice of roles was often criticised — he admitted to and has since made many self-deprecating comments about taking parts, strictly for the money, in numerous films he knew to be bad, despite working with Hollywood's highly regarded directors such as Irwin Allen, Richard Fleischer, Michael Ritchie and Oliver Stone. Caine was averaging two films a year, but these included such failures as the BAFTA Award-nominated The Magus (1968), the Academy Award-nominated The Swarm (1978), Ashanti (1979) (which he claimed were the worst three films of all the other worst films he ever made), Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (1979), The Island (1980), The Hand (1981) and a reunion with his Sleuth co-star Laurence Olivier in The Jigsaw Man. Caine also took better roles, including a BAFTA-winning turn in Educating Rita (1983), and an Oscar-winning one in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and a Golden Globe-nominated one in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988).
The 1990s were a lean time for Caine, as he found good parts harder to come by, however His performance in 1998′s Little Voice was seen as something of a return to form, and won him a Golden Globe Award. Better parts followed, including The Cider House Rules (1999), for which he won his second Oscar.
In the 2000s, Caine appeared in Miss Congeniality, Last Orders, The Quiet American, for which he was Oscar-nominated, and others that helped rehabilitate his reputation. Several of Caine's classic films have been remade, including The Italian Job, Get Carter, Alfie and Sleuth. In the 2007 remake of Sleuth, Caine took over the role Laurence Olivier played in the 1972 version and Jude Law played Caine's original role. Caine also starred in Austin Powers in Goldmember as Austin's father and in 2003 he co-starred with Robert Duvall in Secondhand Lions. He also appeared in the films Children of Men, The Prestige and Flawless, as well as starring in the British drama Is Anybody There?, which explores the final days of life.
In 2005, he was cast as Bruce Wayne's butler Alfred Pennyworth in Batman Begins, Directed by Christopher Nolan, while in 2008 he reprised his role as Alfred in Nolan's critically acclaimed Batman sequel, The Dark Knight and is also in the forthcoming film The Dark Night Rises, alongside Christian Bale, Tom Hardy and Anne Hathaway.
Caine has been Oscar-nominated six times, winning his first Academy Award for the 1986 film Hannah and Her Sisters, and his second in 1999 for The Cider House Rules, in both cases as a supporting actor. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1992 Queen's Birthday Honours, and in the 2000 New Year Honours he was knighted as Sir Maurice Micklewhite CBE. On 5 January 2011, he was made a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France's culture minister, Frédéric Mitterrand. In 2008, he was awarded the prize for Outstanding Contribution to Showbusiness at the Variety Club Awards.
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