If you’re an actor and you don’t act for a long time you sort of think, I wonder if I can still do it.
It’s funny, people ask me, ‘What would you consider the most romantic track on your record Mr Caine?’ And I say ‘Swollen’ by Bent, and they say ‘I think he’s off his rocker!’
I was born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite. Imagine signing that autograph! You’d get a broken arm. So I changed my name to Michael Caine after Humphrey Bogart’s ‘The Caine Mutiny,’ which was playing in the theater across from the telephone booth where I learned that I’d gotten my first TV job.
Do you know that the harder thing to do and the right thing to do are usually the same thing? Nothing that has meaning is easy. “Easy” doesn’t enter into grown-up life.
I didn’t want to come in the movie every so often, every 20 minutes saying, ‘Dinner is served, would you like coffee?’
My view of actors is that basically they’re all harmless lunatics who’d be on the psychiatrist’s couch.
Use the difficulties – if you can’t avoid them.
Just because I have made a point of never losing my accent it doesn’t mean I’m an eel-and-pie yob.
My career is going better now than when I was younger. Now I get the part. Back then, I’d get the girl.
It’s much harder to act in a bad film than in a good one. A terrible script makes for very difficult acting. You can win an Academy Award for some of the easiest acting in your career, made possible by a brilliant script.
My mum never understood how much I earned. When I told her I earned a million pounds a film, she said, ‘How much is that?’
I spent my life in the library reading books.
If someone is very upper-class, you have a stereotype of him which is probably true. If someone has a working-class accent, you have no idea who you’re talking to.
I see myself as 38, but you don’t notice it.
It’s vital to have your own space so you aren’t constantly in each other’s pockets.
Don’t sit as if you have nothing to say. You should be bursting with things to say. You just choose at this particular place and time, not to say them.
When you’re a movie star and you’re young, you are always playing someone who’s a better fighter, a better lover, a better everything than you.
Youre only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!
In my opinion, everybody is getting older and older. We have a great deal of dementia because nobody grew old enough to get it.
The basic rule of human nature is that powerful people speak slowly and subservient people quickly – because if they don’t speak fast enough, nobody will listen to them.