“I was once asked in an interview: ‘How would you sum up your life in one line?’” Michael Caine writes in his 1992 autobiography, What’s It All About
“I was once asked in an interview: ‘How would you sum up your life in one line?’” Michael Caine writes in his 1992 autobiography, What’s It All About?. “And I answered, ‘All my dreams came true.’”
Indeed, Caine’s life is a testament to the power of tough work and tireless enthusiasm. He rose from his destitute Cockney upbringing to become a two-time Oscar winner, successful restaurateur, enthusiastic gardener, cook, and star of classics like Zulu, Alfie, The Man Who Would Be King, Dressed to Kill, Husbands and Wives, and A Muppet’s Christmas Carol.
The expert storyteller has written four memoirs; the absolute must-read What’s It All About? and the subsequent The Elephant to Hollywood (2010), Blowing the Bloody Doors Off: And Other Lessons in Life (2018) and Don’t Look Back, You’ll Trip Over: My Guide to Life (2024).
A gleeful, globe-trotting name dropper, Caine dishes with gusto and kindness about dear friends and co-stars including Sean Connery, Sidney Poitier, John Huston, Roger Moore, Jane Fonda, Mia Farrow, Rita Hayworth, Laurence Olivier, Liza Minnelli, Noel Coward, Faye Dunaway, Candice Bergen, Sylvester Stallone, Lauren Bacall, Sue Mengers, Elizabeth Taylor, Tom Cruise, Sandra Bullock, Beyoncé, and Vin Diesel.
Even more entertaining is when Caine recounts his run-ins with the likes of Charles Manson, Gloria Steinem, Shelley Winters, Marlene Dietrich (who once demanded that he dress better: “You look like a bum!”), Brigette Bardot (who threw a loaf of bread at him) and Richard Burton (who growled, after Caine wished him a cheerful Christmas, “why don’t you go fuck yourself?”).
A consummate renaissance man, Caine is still curious and hopeful at the ripe age of 92. “I remember,” he writes in Blowing the Bloody Doors Off, “Roger Moore, years ago, saying to me, ‘Cheer up. You’d better have a good time because this is not a rehearsal, this is life—this is the show.’”
The Boy From the Elephant
“I started to act at the age of three,” Michael Caine writes in What’s It All About. His first director was his mother, Ellen, who hid in the family’s two-room flat as he delivered his lines. “Mummy out!” he would say, slamming the door in various bill collectors’ faces.
Nervous at first, the little boy began to enjoy this recurrent charade—until a stern Jehovah’s Witness told him he would never get to heaven if he lied. When he asked Ellen where heaven was, she replied, “All I know is that it’s not around here.”
Here was Elephant and Castle, a notorious slum in South London. Caine, born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite on March 14, 1933, was from pure Cockney stock. His brilliant but uneducated father, also called Maurice, came from a long line of Michlewhites who worked as porters at Billingsgate Fish Market. Ellen, “rosy, cheerful-very funny-and tough as nails,” worked as a charwoman.
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