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An interview with actor Michael Caine is presented. An unlikely icon of British cinema for 40 years, he has built a career on self-assured cockney charm, straightforward professionalism, and a dash of the dark side.

We should honor Michael Caine-but should we trust him? As a jobbing actor and international celebrity, Caine has been one of the most visible yet indefinable presences in English-language movies for nearly 40 years.

What's the mystery?, you may ask. Sir Maurice Micklewhite (born in Rotherhithe, London, in 1933) seems like an open book when he's being "Michael Caine"-not least because of the seasoned charm he has demonstrated as a talk-show raconteur and double Oscar recipient (for Hannah and Her Sisters [86] and The Cider House Rules [99]). In the face of such cheerful, worldly blokeishness, it becomes difficult to suspend disbelief time and time again when watching Caine onscreen.

Yet there is a slipperiness to the actor that keeps us guessing. It informs not only the way he has bobbed and weaved through good and bad films alike but many of his performances, too: Has he ever played a man who is both honest to himself and others? His genius for duplicity is epitomized in a shot in which his imperialist opportunist Peachy Carnehan glances furtively at Danny Dravot (Sean Connery) after they have loquaciously cajoled a tribal leader into handing over his army in The Man Who Would Be King (75). Director John Huslon (or his editor) almost cut from the shot too quickly, but Caine's sly look survived intact-as knowing and irreducible as Caine himself.

After playing against type as the posh British officer in Zulu (63) before the type actually existed, Caine settled into comfy iconhood, via Alfie (66), the Harry Palmer trilogy (65-67), and Gambit (66), as a cool, sexy transatlantic chancer. He played rogues, spies, soldiers, criminals, writers, and other liars, demonstrating a willingness to try anything but sometimes (in Kidnapped, 71, for example) also a disconcerting absence of intensity or interest.

Yet, like John Wayne and Robert Mitchum, monolithic stars who also made more bad films than good ones, Caine has punctuated the humdrum flow of his assignments and salary-earners with landmark films containing shocking moments of self-revelation. The most significant of them all is the existential British cult noir Get Carter (71), in which he played a doomed, delusional London gangster who returns to his Newcastle hometown to avenge his brother's killing and seduce a few women. He expunges a child pornography ring that has exploited his niece (perhaps his daughter) but can't escape retribution. Brutally matter-of-fact, Mike Hodges's dank pulp thriller elicited the most rigorous performance of the first hall of Caine's career. Its rediscovery in the Nineties made him the preeminent Lads' Culture hero, notwithstanding his portrayal of Carter's polar opposite-the gang boss, Mortwell, pimp of teen prostitutes-in Mona Lisa (86).

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There has been dross along the way and plenty of rowdy, talky fun, some of it deliciously wicked, some of it dabbed with compassion and regret: The Italian Job (69), California Suite (78), The Island (80), Dressed to Kill (80), Educating Rita (83), Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (88), A Shock to the System (90), Noises Off (92).

We may think we know Caine too well, but his mature characterizations in the last six years suggest otherwise. The question of whether he's a great actor becomes irrelevant in the face of his sardonic mangling of Roy Orbison's "It's Over" in Little Voice (98)-as passionately subversive a punk deconstruction of showbiz's empty glory as Sid Vicious's "My Way."

He was a grindingly baleful lecher and De Sacle's persecutor in Quilk (00) and, coming back to his roots, a joke-telling South London butcher whose hail-fellow demeanor contains an emotional aridity in Last Orders (01). Then Caine did his finest work, as he himself recognizes, as journalist Thomas Fowler in The Quiet American (02): a parched, watchful study in middle-aged romantic anguish contextualized by pre-war CIA skulduggery in Vietnam. Phillip Noyce's thriller, from Graham Greene, etched Fowler's tragedy in looming, intimate close-ups. More recently, Caine was the hunched, cowardly former Nazi executioner in The Statement (03), a career and a lifetime away from Alfie. He may yet become a great weaselly geezer-the signs were there in Secondhand Lions (03).

When did youjirsl realize that you wanted to be an actor?

Quite early on. When I was six or seven, I was in a pantomime at school in the country, in Norfolk. Then I joined a drama class at a youth club in Camber-well [southeast London] when I was 14. It was a stigma because the older boys joined the gym. They couldn't get any boys to join the drama class because it was considered sissy. But I noticed that all the prettiest girls were in the drama class-and I wanted to kiss very pretty girls. So I had nefarious reasons for becoming an actor. Were you shaped by your combat experience in the Korean War?

I was 19 when I was in Korea. Being in a war will obviously shape anybody, because you come up against your greatest fear-sudden death-on a daily basis for a long time. You become someone else. I've always said it's like African tribal rituals, where they give you a spear when you're a young man and you go out and kill your lion to prove that you've gone from boyhood to manhood. That's what Korea was like for me.

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Do you think it gave an extra streak of courage?

It gave me a streak of not really caring about what other people think about what I do. Otherwise I'd never have become an actor in the first place.

Early on, you worked with Joan Littlewood's and Sam Wanamaker's theater companies. Were those formative experiences in terms of learning technique?

It was extraordinary because it was Stanislavsky and the Method, though I don't mean everybody mumbled and picked their noses. The most important thing I learned from Joan and Sam was that the rehearsal is the work and the performance is the relaxation. That's the supreme advice for a movie actor, But you don't get much rehearsal time in film schedules.

But you rehearse yourself at home. You're your own director most of the time.

It's difficult to assess your career as a film actor, because you've somehow remained elusive, despite the popular perception of you as a kind of Cockney everyman. Although, I suppose, that's a goal for an actor-not to be pinned down.

I think that's why I'm still here. I've never played myself or an ongoing character, except Harry Palmer a few times. I've always been as different as possible in everything that I've done. And my whole altitude toward acting is that you shouldn't see the acting. If you sit there and you say, "Oh, isn't that Michael Caine a wonderful actor," that's no good. The audience should just see the character. Is that something you learned by trial and error, or did you know it intuitively?

No, it's something I saw onscreen. I was a moviegoer, you see. The first actors I saw were movie actors, not stage actors. In most actor autobiographies, you read: "I went to the theater and the curtain went down and the lights came on and I was hooked." That wasn't for me. Instead, I had the Saturday morning pictures. The first thing I ever saw was The Lone Ranger. On the screen, you knew everybody and everything was real: the trees, the train, the horse, you know? So you knew the acting had to simulate real experience, too?

Yeah. And we'd take the piss out of the actors when they were stupid, even in comedies.

Tony Curtis once remarked that when he saw Cary Grant, he said, "I can do that." Did you have a role model like that?

Humphrey Bogart. He never, ever did any acting. He did behavior, which is what film acting is-it's behavior and reaction. The other thing that Joan and Sam instilled in me was: "Don't sit there waiting to say your line. You must listen to what the other person is saying and think about it." I was in a play once where my character has a row and sits in the corner and sulks. I didn't have any dialogue for about 10 minutes. And Joan said during the rehearsal, "What are you doing there?" I said, "Nothing." She said, "What do you mean nothing?" I said: "I haven't got any dialogue for ten minutes." She said, "Of course you've got . . . ." I said, "No, I haven't." She said, "Yes, you have. You've got the most wonderful things to say and, sitting there, you decide not to say them." And that's what acting is.

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Your breakthrough in movies was playing Lt. Bromhead in Zulu (63)-upper-class, brave, but out of his depth on the veldt. People might assume that as a workingclass Londoner, Alfie came mare naturally to you. Was that necessarily the case?

I would imagine so, yes. I didn't have to research Alfie, because my best friend, Jimmy, at that time was Alfie. He got all the girls; I didn't. So I jumped at the chance to play him.

What about Bromhead?

Because I'd been a soldier, I knew how officers behave toward privates-I'd been on the receiving end of it all the time. And in a war situation, you get to know the officers very well. But I didn't know how they were with each other, which I needed to because of my relationship [with Stanley Baker, playing Lt. Chard] in Zulu. So I used to have lunch at the guards officers' mess in the Mall by Buckingham Palace every few weeks to just watch how they behaved with each other. [The photographer] Patrick Lichfield was a young lieutenant there at the time and we became friends. Alfie is a much more troubling film than it's given credit for.

Most people remember it as a very funny comedy about a guy who boffs a load of girls. But there are some very serious moments in it, especially the abortion sequence.

The scene where he sees the fetus on the kitchen table-though we just see your reaction-is very sobering.

I think all men like Alfie have sobering experiences, if they're lucky. Otherwise, they end up at 65 wearing Grecian 2000 hair [blackener] and trying to dance in discotheques with young dollies. And they always look rather sad to me.

Alfie's attitude toward women has a strong psychological basis. He complains to the Julia Foster character that she smells "mumsy" because she has been breastfeeding her baby, yet when he later admits he's thinking of marrying the Shelley Winters character, he remarks that she, too, is "quite mumsy. "He clearly has a conflicted mother fixation.

There very often is with those guys who spend their entire lives screwing different women all the time.

But is that something you would talk about with the director [Lewis Gilbert]?

No. That's just a given. You work those things out for yourself. It was in the script-Shelley's character was obviously a much older woman than Alfie.

Have you had directors, though, who have wanted to discuss your characters on that, kind of psychological level?

No, I've been very lucky. They certainly wouldn't now. I said to John Huston on The Man Who Would Be King, "You don't give me many directions, John." He said, "You're paid a great deal of money to do this. You don't need me to tell you how to do it." And that's basically how most directors look at it. They will guide you if you're going away from their view. But they consider you must have some lalent, otherwise they wouldn't have sent you the script in the first place. I've never turned up with a character that the director didn't want-ever.

But, are background aspects of a character's personality useful to you?

What you learn in Stanislavsky is sense memory. You steal as much from your own experience as you can. For instance, it's very easy for me to cry because I have a memory that I go back to instantly. It's the same one, which I never mention to anyone.

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You've wept or sobbed more than most leading men-in Alfie and The Quiet American, to name just two.

Yeah, I get those emotional parts. But basically a man doesn't ciy. You're taught that in Stanislavsky. A man would rather swallow his own Adam's apple than cry. And as a male actor, that's what you have to try to do. Unless you absolutely have to break down, the audience cries for you.

I'll give you another example. I was playing a drunk in rehearsal, and Sam said, "What are you doing, Michael?" I said, "I'm drunk in this scene." He said, "You're not drunk. You're an actor trying to walk crooked and speak slurred. But a drunk is a man who's trying to walk straight and speak properly." That's the difference.

Doing comedy in movies, you must never do anything funny. The more real you are, the funnier it is. Playing an outlandish character, you can obviously act your socks off and be over the top, as Steve Martin did in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, but it wouldn't have worked had I not played it absolutely straight, as though he was an ordinary human being not doing anything out of the ordinary. That's what was funny.

You once said to Bob Hoskins, "There have been three great British crime films. I was in one [Get Carter], you were in one [The Long Good Friday], and we were both in the other [Mona Lisa]. Get Carter was discovered retrospectively, but were you aware when you were doing it that something special was going on?

Yeah. I was interested in doing that picture because I came from that world-you know, the Elephant & Castle [district] in London; it was all gangsters. But every time I watched a British crime movie, gangsters were either stupid or funny. And I thought to myself, this is completely wrong. It was another one of those class things that got up my nose. Gangsters are neither stupid nor funny. That's why I co-produced Get Carter with Michael Klinger.

Also, film had become pornographic in its violence. People would get kicked and smashed in the face 30 times and come to work the next day with a piece of Elastoplast over their eyebrow. But violence isn't like that. What we did in the film seemed very violent, but if you look closely at it, the violence is always one blow and it's over-and it's violence that comes out of complete silence. Gangsters never warn you, like they do in most movies. So we made the violence silent, minimal, and deadly, though no one at the time knew why they thought it was so realistic.

How did you and Laurence Olivier establish a rapport on your two-hander, Sleuth [72]?

Larry? It was like working with a bloody whirlwind. It all came out of the blue from him. He'd be going along all quietly and then he'd go into one of those theatrical things that he did. It's quite stunning to watch.

He had a famous conversation once, with Dustin Hoffman on Marathon Man [76]-you've probably heard the story. Hoffman was apparently working out on the set to get in character.

Oh, I know that one. Larry said, "Instead of running around the studio, why don't you try acting?"

Is that an idea you subscribe to?

Yeah. People say, "Do you take your roles home in the evenings and stay in accent?" And I say, "No. I talk in my own voice." The technicians laugh because I talk in my own voice right until action. I never do the accent in real life at all because it's nothing to do with me.

Have you ever taken any of your characters home?

No, I always leave them at the door. I like going home [laughs].

Have you ever been creeped out by men you've played?

The only time was recently on The Statement. I disliked playing Pierre Brassard so much that at the end of the film I couldn't remember what I'd done with him. And for the first time, I watched a movie I was in not knowing what was coining. I had blanked him out of my life. And he did come out as quite a horrendous little character.

Did you blank him, because you'd contemplated what he'd done?

Yeah. It was disgusting to me. And I had to be sympathetic in the film-no man's an enemy to himself.

Was it unsettling playing the psychopathic transvestite psychiatrist in Dressed to Kill?

It was quite freaky. I'd never dressed in women's clothes before. I suppose that doing it as a comic thing, like in a pantomime with funny clothes, would be different. But to do it seriously was a bit weird. I remember thinking, "I hope I don't enjoy this. I don't want to wander around the rest of my life dressing up in women's clothes" [laughs]. But I'd already played a lot of psychopaths. I started doing them very early on in English television-I was always playing bloody psychopaths.

They've left no taint?

You do find the dark spaces in yourself. But you also find them doing other kinds of characters. You don't think about what effect it has on you, but you can very often know too much about something. I know too much about a lot of things because of the research I've had to do in different subjects.

Does it, come more naturally to you to play garrulous men like Alfie and Peachy Carnehan or taciturn men like Jack Carter, Harry Palmer, and Thomas Fowler?

I like the silences. I don't mind playing someone like Alfie who never stops talking. But my favorite character of all that I've played, and my best performance in my own opinion-it's got nothing to do with anyone else-is Fowler. That's the one.

At the climax of the film, Phillip Noyce cuts between Pyle [Brendan Fraser] being stalked as he crosses the Dakow bridge and you watching from a distance at a table outside a cafe. We see Fowler's conflict in your eyes.

The eyes are the most important thing in movies. I felt that I disappeared in that movie and got right inside Fowler. He was partly Graham Greene, of course, and I knew Graham. It's very interesting, that bridge. Graham started thinking about writing The Quiet American on a train journey, when he learned that an American diplomat had been caught on that very bridge in Saigon with explosives, and had been sent home. It made Graham very suspicious of what was going on in Vietnam. You could feel the vibes everywhere. The cafe where I was sitting wasn't the real cafe, but it was opposite the hotel where the cafe was supposed to be. All the time we were filming, I was looking up at the window of the room where I knew Graham had written part of the book. He wrote the rest of it in a hotel in Hanoi. I went to his rooms in both places.

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Your scenes with Do Thi Hai Yen [who plays Fowler's Vietnamese mistress, Phuong] are very poignant.

It was important to have a Vietnamese girl play Phuong. In the Michael Redgrave version [58], they had an Italian actress, Giorgia Moll, play her with funny eye makeup. There were Thomas Fowlers all over the place in Vietnam when I was there. I'd go out on the street and see these middle-aged European men with these beautiful young Vietnamese women. I would stop and speak to them and find out who they were.

When you were a very young man, did you ever suffer unrequited love? And if so, is it something you drew on when you made Hannah and Her Sisters and The Quiet American?

No, I've never had unrequited love. I've been married to the same woman for 31 years, but my attitude toward women when I was younger was there was no such thing as "no"-I didn't take no for an answer [laughs].

Like Alfie.

Yes. Alfie just smashed through all the tears and humiliation and kept going [laughs]. It was quite difficult to do the unrequited love in Hannah. I had to think of times when I thought love was going to be unrequited. I'd do a "semi" on a past experience-I had semi sense memory, and I'd take it further, as if the woman hadn't wanted me.

The way you sing "It's Over" in Little Voice sums up [theatrical agent] Ray Say's seediness and desperation, but a strange nobility, too.

There's sadness there-and pride. I'd never done any singing. But neither had Ray Say. Someone said to me, "Why didn't you sing it better?" I said, "Well, how well do you think Ray Say would sing a song like 'It's Over'"?-which was written by Roy Orbison, who had a very high voice, for himself. Most professional singers can't sing "It's Over." That song was deliberately chosen because it's unsingable.

Did you get it in one take?

Yeah. I said, "I don't know how many takes I can do on this, because I'm going to lose my voice," and I had dialogue scenes the next day. That frightened the daylights out of everybody, so I think they had three cameras running.

I feel there's been an extra emotional depth in your acting in the last five years. Do you agree?

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You get to a stage where you need the work less and less. It's harder to get up in the morning, because you're getting older and you're fussier and fussier about what you do. Anything I do is going to he a joy-supposedly. You can still make mistakes. But I don't do movies to pay the rent; I do them because I really want to. And also, of course, when you get older, you become a movie actor again instead of a movie star, and you get much more interesting roles.

You have been criticized for taking a lot of roles in bad films. . .

Everyone's got 20/20 vision in hindsight. Critics judge a film after it's made. But as an actor, you have to judge it before it's made. You're a young British actor in Hollywood and a producer like Irwin Allen asks you to be in his next film. He's just made The Towering Inferno with the two biggest stars in the world, Steve McQueen and Paul Newman. And then he asks you to be in The Swarm [78] with Henry Fonda, Dick Widmark, and Olivia de Havilland. And you say, "That's fantastic. He wants me." And it was all crap. But there you go. If you sit around for three years waiting for a great movie and a great director, when you suddenly get there on Monday morning, you'll cock up the first take.

In Last Orders, you played the butcher, Jack, who's dying. I was struck by that moment al the meat, counter when you turn away from the person you're joking with so he doesn't see you wince with pain.

It was also very powerful to me, because in that picture I died of cancer in St. Thomas' Hospital, which is where my father died of cancer. It was absolutely realistic.

Jack and Amy [his wife, played by Helen Mirren] have a retarded daughter who has been secretly institutionalized at his insistence. Since your own elder half-brother [an epileptic] lived in a home all his life, this must have resonated with you.

Yeah, but it wasn't a son-it was my brother, and I only knew him for a little while. But it did seem weird in that movie that we [Jack and Amy] had this hidden secret and I died of cancer. When I read the script, it was like going back on my life in a funny way. We filmed it very close to where I came from, though I was never a butcher [laughs]. It went back on the milieu of my life-put it I hat way. It was a sort of sentimental journey.

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Are you going to carry on working until you drop?

I think I'll carry on for another five years, until I'm 75. What happens in this business is that they don't fire you-the scripts just stop coming. But I'm all right because a script has just landed on my desk. We'll see whether it gets made or not.

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