Michael Caine: no, Zulu doesn’t incite far-right extremism

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. John Gielgud would not have had the confidence to appear in Jaws: The Revenge and was not a big enough star for The Muppet Christmas Carol. ‘I got paid for all of them,’ he adds, and he bought his relations a house each. He didn’t even bother to read the script for The Swarm, a 1978 horror film in which bees gang up on him and Olivia de Havilland. His work ethic was Academy Award or a million dollars. He calls his career ‘a miracle without the slightest difficulty’. It’s not true, of course: he struggled for a decade in regional theatre. But confidence is his defining characteristic, and it gives him, among actors, a peculiar grace.

This confidence is due to his mother, Ellen, I think, a cook and charwoman who loved him. He owes the most to her, he says. When his father, also called Maurice, a fish porter at Billingsgate, left to serve in the second world war Caine was six years old.