There’s quite a lot of bad stuff written about me. My wife even says a lot of bad stuff about me. But she is wonderful.
A lot of my best parts I’ve been the second choice for, so you never get too egotistical about anything.
Comedy is underrepresented in every actor’s life, because it’s so bloody difficult to write.
How can I change me to suit the script?
Maybe its time we stop trying to avoid the truth and let it have its day.
Movie actors earn their living and learn their craft through listening and reacting.
When you’re a young actor you ring your agent every evening. It’s not like when you’re in Hollywood where you do one picture a year. You just hope you get a day on television.
If you’re blond, as I am, and you have blond lashes, you have to wear mascara, otherwise you’re invisible on stage.
Not only is acting more than a part-time job, it’s more than a full-time job. It’s a full-time obsession.
I’ve been in every disco in the world. I saw a picture of my wife Shakira and I dancing in Studio 54; I didn’t even know someone had taken that picture.
Hey, I always say: if you want a quiet life, become a monk.
Funny things happen to you in movies for silly reasons.
People say to me, why did you do those films, and I say, for money. It wasn’t for diamond rings or kidney shaped swimming pools in Beverly Hills, it was in order to improve the lot of everyone around me.
They use those monitors now, and sometimes you’ll be doing a shot and then suddenly you see yourself on one of those monitors, and I always say turn the monitor round, I don’t want to see myself on the monitor. I never see myself ’til the movie’s finished.
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?’
Use the difficulties – if you can’t avoid them.