Michael Caine is 90 this week, and he offers to accept questions by email, which he will then answer by email, as if we are communicating between galaxies. Normally this would bother me – gah, actors – but it is Michael Caine, so I can’t mind. Maurice Micklewhite’s invention Michael Caine – he named himself after The Caine Mutiny – is as luminous a piece of 20th-century British culture as Eleanor Rigby. There are some people you want to be happy. They deserve it.
He replies quickly: this is a functional man. What did I expect? He has been nominated for an Academy Award six times in four separate decades, and won twice, and he is still working. This is work.
‘I became an actor because I wanted to kiss a girl, and I got to kiss all of them’
‘There are no films I wish I hadn’t made,’ he says, and this is a singular attitude.
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