One of the world's best loved actors, Michael Caine has won the respect of critics and audiences alike for his performances in some of the most fondly remembered - and a few of the most pilloried - films of the last 40 years. On the release of his latest movie, Little Voice, the London-born talked to Barry Norman.

Barry Norman on: Little Voice | Jane Horrocks | choice of films | his voice and accent | breaking into acting

Barry Norman: What we've just seen there, that's all your yesterdays flashing before your eyes. Painful experience or not?

MC: It's worse if they do a tribute. When they start with the first movie, like Zulu, and they wind up with Educating Rita, because your whole face collapses, and your stomach comes out gradually. It's a terrifying experience, but everybody thinks it's a compliment.

BN: Talking about Zulu. Thirty years ago, I was quite matey with a young actor called Terence Stamp who'd just made a big hit in Billy Budd and we'd meet and have lunch occasionally. And he was always saying, "Look you've got to come and interview my flatmate." And I said "Why?" And he said, "Well, he's an actor and he's going to be a big star." I said, "What's his name?" And he said, "Maurice Micklewhite." And I said, "Terry, do me a favour, no one called Maurice Micklewhite is ever going to be a star." And he said, "No he doesn't call himself that, he calls himself Michael Caine." I said, "That sounds even worse to me." So, I never did do this interview. The next time I heard of the erstwhile Maurice Micklewhite, Zulu had just come out, he's a bloody great star, and I can't get close to him. Everybody else was doing the interviews.

MC: Yeah, I changed my name. I got my name from The Caine Mutiny. I called myself Michael Scott. When I was in rep I got my first job. 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. And I rang my agent from Leicester Square, in a phone box, and I said, "Have I got a job?" And she said, "Yes, I've got you a week on Dixon of Dock Green. The problem is, you've got to join Equity" - this is my first television - "and there's another Michael Scott. So," she said, "You can call yourself Michael, but we've got to have another name." I said, "Well, I'll tell you tomorrow." And she said, "No, I need it now. I've got to sign the contract and send it in." So I just looked through the trees, at the Odeon Leicester Square, it just said Caine Mutiny. So, I just said: "Caine." If I'd gone to the Leicester Square theatre, I'd have been called Michael A Hundred and One Dalmatians!

BN: I think you chose wisely there Michael...

MC: Yeah, good choice, huh?

BN: The thing is though, today you wouldn't have had to change your original name. I mean, a name like Arnold Schwarzenegger is a hell of a lot sillier than Maurice Micklewhite and he's a star.

MC: Yeah, well you can do that now. My one was Swoosie Kurtz. And I worked with Swoosie Kurtz. You know, they sound like names where someone's put a shotgun to your head and say think of a name and you go, em, Swoosie Kurtz. And another name like that was Meryl Streep... I thought it was a funny name. Finally - you get into strange situations when you're an actor - and I was doing a movie in New York and Bafta was giving Meryl Streep an award by satellite for the one she did with Jeremy Irons -

BN: French Lieutenant's woman.

MC: Yeah, that's the one. They said, "Would you give the award, on satellite from New York - you being British and everything, and it's Bafta.?" So I said, "Sure." And we got there, and the satellite broke down, and so we had to wait about an hour and a half for them to mend the satellite. And then suddenly - I'd never met Meryl Streep before - they put us in a room with a bottle of white wine and two glasses, and left us there for an hour and a half. And neither of us had eaten. By the time we went on we were both pissed, you know when you've got an empty stomach. And I'd always wondered where Meryl Streep came from, what that name was. So I said, "What are you ethnically, Meryl?" When she says it, and you look at her face, she says, "I am Dutch." And you can just see her being Dutch, can't you? What with the hat and everything. She's got a sort of Dutch face when you think of it... Anyway, I just thought I'd tell you that. It's turning into a really intellectual evening tonight, isn't it. We're in the National Film Theatre after all and The Guardian lecture!

BN: Well I always thought her real name was Myrtle Speer, which is actually an anagram.

MC: Oh is it. Of Meryl Streep?

BN: Yeah, Myrtle Speer sounds better.

MC: Well, I'm glad we cleared that up, aren't you?

BN: I expect Myrtle is too! Anyway, down to the serious business of the night and Little Voice, which I saw last night. I think it's an extremely good film. Why? What interested you in it?

MC: Well, basically it was the character of Ray Say, which is the part I play. It's something which has always been dear to my heart. I've played a variety of sleaze bags in my life, it's because I am not. And you always like to be what you aren't. My view of actors is that basically they're all harmless lunatics who'd be on the psychiatrist's couch, except that we get this sort of catharsis every six months or so, and we go and be absolutely someone else. I loved Ray Say because he was a loser, and he was also an agent. And he was a duff agent. It was a sort of vendetta from my early life with all these agents who turned me down and I made him into a real sleazy type.

Plus, of course, they always forget the writer. A man called Jim Cartwright who'd written an absolutely wonderful part. It's a great part. And Blenda Blethyn, Ewan McGregor, Jane Horrocks and Phil Broadbent [sic] and Phil Jackson were in it, so I knew I was in great company which is what I was looking for.

As a matter of fact, I hadn't worked for about two years really, not on a movie-movie. I'd just sat waiting for a good script. I got scripts with other people's coffee stains and orange juice on them, and I knew that they'd been read by other actors and turned down. And I waited.

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. So there were two television movies where I thought, I know what I'll do, I'll test myself. So I played Stalin, which is a stretch for me -

BN: With your normal voice?

MC: He didn't speak English, but I did it with a Russian accent.... And I played ex-president De Klerk of South Africa. And then I just waited and finally, I kept reading these scripts, and suddenly one day I got this one: Little Voice. And I thought, this is it. And I yelled to my wife, this is it, this is the one.

I'd sort of stopped working because the joy had gone out of doing it. I finally wound up in Alaska with Steven Seagal...

BN: Well that would take the joy out of a lot of things, yeah!

MC: Which took quite a lot of joy out of it. And I remember ringing down to the desk in my hotel and saying, "Could you send someone up for the laundry?" And they said, "The laundrette's next door." And I was freezing my butt off, and I thought, I don't need this, so I stopped.

And I waited and waited and waited and waited and waited. I wrote an autobiography, I started a novel. I opened about three restaurants. I did everything, and I did these two pictures, just to test myself - I got nominated for an Emmy, by the way, for both of them, so I came out of it well. And then I got Blood and Wine, which was by accident. Which was a picture done by Bob Rafelson with Jack Nicholson, and I did that as another little test - but that was a sleaze bag. But this was the movie I was really waiting for, and it came. Mark Herman had done Brassed Off, which I'd seen. He'd only done the one movie that I knew of. But I had seen the play and I knew he was directing it, and he had written the screenplay . Now that was very important to me - working with a director who I didn't really know and who didn't have a massive track record - because he'd taken a talking play and made it into a moving picture. And he is a moving picture director. And I was absolutely right because Mark Herman, to me, is one of the great new directors, the British directors, from an actor's point of view, from a cinematic point of view, from a camera movement point of view... I cannot speak too highly of him.

BN: Because he really has opened it, out hasn't he? I mean you wouldn't think it was a stage play unless you knew that already.

MC: Oh yeah. You don't get any idea that it was a stage play. Mind you, it was bursting at the seams in the theatre, trying to get out. Also, it's great for Jane Horrocks who never says anything. In the theatre you look at the person who talks. Of course, in the movie, you can cut to the person for a reaction. She plays a girl who suffers from agoraphobia, in a working-class family in the north.

And the best line in the picture is cut out. Somebody says to her mother, "Your daughter's got agoraphobia." And she shouts out, "If you've got agoraphobia you can get out!" And that was my only disappointment with the movie. I sat there, and I kept on saying, "There's this great line coming, you listen to the line." And it went by and they cut it out. I don't know why they cut that line out!

My second great line in it is - Ewan McGregor keeps pigeons, and there's this pigeon in it called Duane - it's a great name for a pigeon don't you think - and he'd gone to France and hasn't come back. And he meets this girl, the Jane Horrocks character, and she asks him what he does, and he says, "I raise pigeons." And he said, "I'm very miserable." And she says, "Why?" And he says, "Because Duane, my pigeon, is in France."

And she says, "Oh, what is he doing in France." And the other character says, "He's coming back." And if ever anything summed up the futility of some hobbies! Jane did it beautifully. She did this wonderful face. I mean it's worth the price of admission just to see Jane's reaction to that line. Anyway, what was the question.

BN: I don't think there was one...

MC: The reason I took this picture was because I thought it was going to be a success, and I've seen it now and I still think that.

BN: Do you still? I believe it used to be your habit, that if you got a script, you'd read the first twenty pages and then the last twenty pages, and if the character you were supposed to play hadn't changed then you didn't bother to read the eighty pages in between. Do you still do that?

MC: That's right yeah. I do do that. I mean if nothing had happened to him, what's the point of doing it. I must say, with Little Voice, I read the first twenty pages and I didn't even read the last twenty pages, I just screamed at Shakira, I got it! I got it! I got it! This is it.

BN: You've said that you believe, or anyway hope, that this film will do for Jane Horrocks what Alfie did for you.

MC: Yeah, I'm sure it will. I mean, she does these impersonations which are so brilliant, but she's also a brilliant actress. Really brilliant actress. She's not been plumbed to the real depths yet, but she'll just get better and better.

It's always great to make a movie where someone new comes out. I mean we know Brenda, we know me for God's sake, but when you get someone who comes out, it's so wonderful to do that. And it's wonderful for the British cinema too, because now you'll have a new star. Mind you, if you see Jane, she sings like on that fact that, because people just think she's lip-synching to records, she does it so well. To buy those records' lip-synch rights would cost about ten million dollars. But when you look at her, she weighs about forty pounds, wringing wet, and you don't know where the voice comes from. You know she's so skinny.

BN: She is, isn't she? She's a tiny little thing.

MC: Yeah, but it's great. Because she's all eyes. She's got these great big eyes and if you stick a camera on her, it goes wham.

BN: That was the tough bit about her role, wasn't it? That she didn't have much to say. Because it's hard to act when you're not doing anything.

MC: It's like I told her, I remember doing a play, and there was this long bit where I'd had a row and I sat down and sulked in the corner and never said anything. In rehearsals - this was very early on in rep -and the producer said, "What are you doing, Michael?" And I said, "I'm not doing anything, sir. I don't have any lines. I don't speak." He said, "You're doing nothing." And I said, "That's right." And he said, "You're not doing nothing. You're thinking of wonderful things to say, and you're listening and you're about to say something, but you think, I'm not going to say it. That would probably upset them, so you won't say it." And that's what it is, that's what movie acting is. It's listening, for God's sake, listening. And people don't listen.

You see some actors on screen, especially inexperienced actors, their faces like that, waiting for their cue, and then they say their line. But if you look at a person when they're talking, their face changes as they listen to you... You say, how do I get home to the Elephant and Castle. Half way through Elephant, they're already thinking, I think the number twelve goes there. By the time you're said Castle, they've said, the number twelve goes there. That's the slight difference. The thought comes on the Elephant rather than the end of the cue, when you say Castle. It's thinking.

Movies are behaviour... Oh God, I'm playing an American, I'm getting an American accent. I've been playing an American on this movie, and every now and then I go into this American accent. The 'behavior' was very American. Well, they scream at me all day. Anyway, where were we now? Oh yes, Elephant and Castle.

BN: How long did it take you to learn all this Michael? Had you learnt it when you made Zulu and the Ipcress File and Alfie?

MC: No. I'd done a lot of television by the time of Zulu, so I understood the technology. I did tricks in Zulu.

I remember I had a pith helmet, You know, the English soldiers' pith helmets. If you've seen the picture, everybody wears them and everyone wore them back slightly so the light goes in their eyes, because otherwise you're down here and you've not got any light in your eyes. And if you see me, I'm always coming on like this [hat over eyes]. And I went to rushes - the first and only time, I've never been back to rushes - and once it gets dark everyone thinks that no one else is there. And I came on like this and the lighting cameraman says, "I told that stupid bastard not to put the hat down." He said, "All the others have got their hats - look at that silly sod, look at him." And he didn't know what I was doing. The thing was - and I learnt this off off Marlon Brando, but he didn't use a hat, he had his eyes - I was using the hat whilst I was listening to what someone said, and as I spoke, I would go up and the light would hit me in the eyes. But they didn't notice that.

The reason I never went back to rushes was because this person came on, quite strange to me, completely awful looking, quite strange. Suddenly this terrible voice came out, and there was this terrible acting going on, and I threw up on the floor. I threw up and I rushed out, and I've never been back to rushes. And my view of rushes is that if you go to rushes you'll get so upset about yesterday you screw up tomorrow. So I never see myself on the screen at all.

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.

BN: And then what's it like? You go into the cinema, there's the finished film. Nothing you can do about it anymore. How do you approach that? With trepidation?

MC: Well, I think you know. I mean I knew that, at the minimum, for instance, Little Voice would be all right. I already knew that Brenda and Jane and the two Phils and Ewan, because I'd seen what they'd done. The only doubt in my mind was me, and I thought even if I was duff the picture would be great.

BN: Were you duff?

MC: No. No. I'm very proud of this performance because it was a very difficult one, and technically difficult as well. There were some difficult speeches to get across, because they are so brilliantly and intricately written.

There's a speech in it that I have to do, which is so brilliantly written by Jim Cartwright, in which a duff agent goes to a girl who suffers from agoraphobia. And in seven minutes - the speech is seven minutes and forty two seconds long - I know because I asked the continuity girl when I'd finished shooting And he convinces a girl who has agoraphobia not just to go out on the street and do some shopping but to do a cabaret act, and you believe it. I promise you, when you see it, you will believe it. And that was the best piece of writing I've had in a long time and the best scene I've done in a picture in years. It's my favourite scene in any film I've ever done, and when you see the film it's the one where I talk about the bluebirds... You're thinking, what the bloody hell is he on about, but when you see the film all will become clear.

BN: Michael, you've made, what, eighty-odd films now.

MC: Eighty eight. I'm just doing eighty nine.

BN: Is it eighty nine?

MC: Yeah, I started eighty nine on Monday.

BN: And this is all in, what, thirty four years?

MC: Yeah, thirty four years.

BN: Why do you work so hard?

MC: I don't!

BN: Well you do. You're ubiquitous.

MC: Well I used to work hard. I've made seven pictures in ten years. And I told you I didn't regard the TV movies. They were sort of exercises for me, while I panicked and waited for a good movie script to come along. Just exercises.

In the early days I used to make a lot of films. I'll tell you a story. I was doing publicity all weekend once, for this movie in New York. And Tony Hopkins was doing a junket across town, and we were sending messages to each other through reporters. And I said to one reporter, "Tony Hopkins is a great impressionist and he does a great me." And then he comes back to me the next day, and says "I said to Tony Hopkins, 'Why do you do so many films?' So he explained to me, for five minutes, in your voice, why he does so many films." He said, "Eventually I said to Tony, 'No, do your voice, and you tell me why you do so many films.' And he said, 'Fear.'" And if you've been a young actor and no one wanted you, the fact that someone wanted you to do a movie at all is amazing. And then big people give you movies, and you just take them because you're so afraid it's going to stop. But in the end, I got to a situation where I wasn't afraid it was going to stop. I stopped it myself.

This isn't a sort of comeback, but it is a kind of restart.

BN: But it was a good policy taking all of those films, wasn't it? Because if one was a clinker there'd be another one coming out.

MC: That was the trick you see. That's why you do em fast. If this one goes in the toilet, I've got this one backing it up already.

Also, there's something else you have to think about. I come from a very poor family. I don't want everyone to go 'aww', because it's just that that is a fact. An extremely poor family. So you say, okay, he's poor, so he's got to make some money for himself right. But what you forget, you see, is that you are the only person you know who has any money eventually, and everybody, all your family, is poor too. So you have to take them with you. Some films meant there was a house for my daughter, and a house for my mother and a house for someone else. I did pictures to buy houses at one time.

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. And I'm not trying to say that I'm some great charitable organisation, because I'm not, I'm very very tough.

BN: This is to stop the begging letters before they start!

MC: Yes! There's no point writing me. If you want to look at me as anything, in a philanthropic sort of way, I'm really like a godfather. You get something, but then you're in my grasp. There's always payback, and eventually I'll make you an offer you can't refuse.

BN: I remember about ten years ago, when you barely had one restaurant to your name, and I said, "When you've been poor and you become rich, are you ever rich enough?" And your answer then was: "Probably not." Is it still the same?

MC: No. Do you know what happens to you if you become rich?

BN: I'd love to know. I'd love the experience!

MC: Let me tell you. You spend a lot of money. But also what happens to you is that you meet a different set of people. Usually in a room somewhere, at a party or a dinner, my attitude hasn't changed, because I'm usually the poorest one there. So I still feel like I'm a poor person.

I have three very close friends - nothing to do with money, just my close friends - who are billionaires. And all four of us will be standing there talking and one will say, "I sold Fox yesterday - Twentieth Century Fox." And he did, he sold it to Rupert Murdoch, a man called Marvin Davis. And there's another one who owns all the Latin television stations in America.

And you'll say, "I bought a wonderful book yesterday." And a person will say, "No, I bought that." You'll say, "No, I bought it yesterday." And he'll say, "No, I bought it two weeks ago." And you realise that he's talking about the film rights! His face goes white, he thinks he's been duffed up, you know! I said, "No, I just paid nineteen bucks to read it. "

BN: Michael, going back again to the beginning. In Zulu, you had this very posh, toff accent. Was it a deliberate choice on your part not to continue acting like that, but to go back to the voice you have now. It's a London accent you have now isn't it, and an identifying accent; you wouldn't say this is Bermondsey any more, or whatever.

MC: My voice has become my voice. That's my voice. People do impressions of me.

BN: Everyone does impressions of you.

MC: Yeah, everyone does impressions of me. I do it!

BN: Go on, show us.

MC: Hallo, my name is Michael Caine. (Loud applause.) And in case you didn't get who it was, it goes: "Not many people know that." I always come out as some bloody moron with glasses. The voice goes right up here, and they always use bad grammar, which annoys me. The idea that someone who has a cockney accent is a moron. People say, you always play cockneys, and I say, what does that mean. And they say, a lot of times you have a cockney accent. Well we know you did Zulu and Educating Rita, but for a lot of parts you had a London accent - the implication being that I play the same person all the time. It's a sort of classist thing, in this country anyway. Don't get me started on class for Christ's sake.

BN: Oh, I was looking forward to that.

MC: We'll be here 'til one o'clock in the morning! And I always point out to them, don't just listen to the way people talk, listen to what they are saying to you. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Charlie Chaplin and Ronnie Kray all started life talking with my voice, now can you think of three more disparate characters than that, yet they came from South London. They all had the same accent. Not that I speak with it now, because I'd never be understood in America. This voice has come about because everybody in America would be like, what the hell's he talking about? I use a London accent if a guy's working class.

In this picture, it's all very north country. I said to Mark Herman, the director, I can do a north country guy, I can do it (putting on north country accent). You know I played Willy Mossup years ago, like that, and I can do all that, and I said to Mark Herman, I'll do that and he said, no, this is for Little Voice ... all that will happen is that everybody will be sitting there and say, there's Michael Caine doing a North country accent, let's listen to see if he makes a mistake!

It worked great for the character too. Because I play an agent, obviously a Londoner, and he's come from London to the North, and that denotes failure instantly!

BN: What a good job we're not in Scarborough tonight!

MC: No, they'll tell you that up there. If you want to make it and you're born in Scarborough and you want to make it in show business you go to London. Here's a guy who's born in London who's making it in Scarborough. He'll wind up doing shows in the Outer Hebrides.

BN: Was it hard for you with your background to break into acting at that time? It's probably not so difficult now, but this was the beginning of the time, when there were people like Bailey and Terence Stamp making it big.

MC: Well, it was the writers. It was the writers, see. It was Look Back in Anger. I mean up till then everyone had gone to Rada and everybody spoke with a sort of Rada voice - except that you even had the rebels at Rada, like Finney and O'Toole, who didn't give a toss about it, but they could do that. But for an actor like me, who was classically untrained, the fact that working-class men and women started writing plays about working-class characters was a godsend and that really didn't happen until the 50s, with John, when he wrote Look Back in Anger which was about working-class people.

And then television came along. You always had to have policemen and things like that, and the people who came in at the end.

Oh, there was a funny line, which summed up the theatre in those days. It was a kind of Agatha Christie type thing, set in the country manor where all these murders have been going on, and the old colonel who owned the house was a bit blustery and didn't know what the bloody hell was going on - a bit dim - and finally the inspector comes in, and all the guests are there, and the colonel comes down and says, arrest most of these people. And I would have been the inspector.

But, I was in the theatre for ten years. I didn't have a great time in the theatre. I learned a great deal, and finally I got into movies and I never went back into theatre. My first, and only, play in the West End was at the Criterion. It was called The Next Time I Sing to You - for which I got excellent reviews by the way, even in The Guardian! - and Stanley Baker came and saw me and put me in Zulu and I never went back. And one of the reasons I never went back was, I was sent a play and - I love the theatre, but when you're a movie actor, for the first ten minutes you're thinking it's over the top, especially if it's a drama - and I got this play, and it said: First Act: Rome: 240 years BC. And then it said: Second Act: Twenty minutes later! I remember I went with Robert Bolt, a great friend of mine, and I went with Bob and he said, "You must come and see Clytemnestra." Or something - you know one of those Greek plays where someone comes on with someone's head in their hands and then tears someone's throat out and then someone screams: "Woe is me." And I sat there and I started to laugh, and Bob eventually ordered me out of the theatre and I never went back.

But, when you do see a great play, I understudied Peter O'Toole in The Long, The Short, and The Tall, which is where he became a star, which was one of the finest theatre performances I've ever seen in my life. I saw it, what, four or five hundred times, so I do know what great theatre is 'cause that was one of the greatest performances I've ever seen in the theatre, and I've seen several since. But I do still go with great trepidation, because unless it is absolutely great, I keep thinking, twenty minutes later.... Also, I'll go to anything, any theatre with tap dancing in it. I love tap dancing. Forty Second Street I saw about four times and thought it was great.

BN: Bernard Levin swears that when he was a drama critic he once went to a play and someone rushes on the stage shouting, "Oh my god, the hundred years war has just started!"

MC: I'm supposed to be the funny one here! He's paid to be the straight man! Stealing my act here! I'll remember that, I'll remember that.

BN: I'm sorry. I'll return to my humble abode!

MC: No, if you've got any more you could save my arse here thisevening! If anyone from the Christian Science Monitor's here, I apologize.

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