Michael Caine wears two watches: an analogue for the time and an Apple for everything else. It even knows his pulse, he says, impressed. Right now, it’s telling him his flat is 26C: warm enough for his wife, Shakira, to pour iced coffee into his flask, but not hot enough for those balcony doors to be open: “It’s blowing a bloody gale in here!”
I slide them shut slightly. Is that OK? A bit more. Enough? Bit more. I close them completely. He’s happy now.
Caine lives in Chelsea Harbour: posh 80s condos and Princess Diana’s gym. He likes the security and tolerates the helicopters. His London penthouse has caramel carpets, 360-degree views, two Oscars and 5,000 photos of his grandchildren.
Below us lies Battersea Bridge, tide low, shore glittering. No, he shudders, he’s never mudlarked. Why not? After all, his first novel, out in November, is about binmen who find uranium down at the dump. “Well,” he says darkly, “other people do things and it goes all right. I do them and bad things happen.”
He looks at me. We’re waiting for his co-star, John Standing, who is stuck in traffic. Caine is a big man with whom to make small talk. It’s not just that your brain short-circuits each time he speaks (Michael Caine?!?!), it’s that at 90, he’s still 6ft 2in, undiminished and simply intimidating.
In 1987, he gave an acting masterclass in which he revealed the secret to being forceful on screen was a) don’t blink and b) mascara. It works face-to-face, too. The first one, anyway.
During the Blitz, says Caine, he watched the city get flattened from his dormer in Camberwell; from here, he’s seen it rise up again. He loves new-build and soft furnishings with the passion of a man raised in an attic with no hot water, one outdoor loo and rickets. Every time a bomb fell, the mattresses doiiinged. “Me and my brother would laugh all through the bleedin’ air raids!”
An update: Standing will be here shortly. I praise the pot-plants and Caine mourns his garden. He was evacuated to Berkshire, where he was fed a tin of pilchards a day and locked in a cupboard for the weekends, and then to rural Norfolk, where he discovered a love of horticulture – later energetically indulged at his own places in Oxfordshire and Surrey.
Less so in Hollywood. He sold up there after someone told him that if he wanted to grow daffodils he’d need to put the bulbs in the fridge for a fortnight. “That was it! Final straw!” But did he do it? “Oh yeah. It worked.”
In comes Standing, 89 but nimble as a debutante, all polish and apologies. They settle down, discuss the weather and a window is discreetly opened. Caine goggles at my iPad, which he mistakes for a phone: “Blimey, that’s a big one!”
The Great Escaper is brilliant, I say. Caine is surprised I’ve seen it, let alone enjoyed it. Didn’t he? “Yeah. But I’ve had films where I liked it but other people didn’t agree with me.”
No wonder it tempted them from retirement: meaty roles dry up as you approach 100. Caine plays Bernard Jordan, a real-life Royal Navy veteran who made headlines in 2014 when he travelled alone from his care home in Hove, East Sussex, to Normandy for the 70th D-day anniversary. The film – flintier than you might think, and very moving – fictionalises a friendship with Arthur, a former RAF pilot (Standing) he meets on the ferry.
Both actors did national service in Berlin after the war; Caine was then drafted to Korea – “a bugger”, he says (his memoir suggests this is understatement). “When we got there they said: the Chinese have just sent a million troops. What? But they were just young kids and old men to take all our ammunition. You shoot at them and then the real fighters come. And that was the Chinese in a nutshell.”
In the film, the pair make a pilgrimage to the war cemetery at Bayeux in Normandy. “What a waste,” cries Bernard as the camera zooms out to show the rows and rows of headstones. Caine doesn’t agree. “You had to have full cemeteries because you’d had to fight the German army, which was not a load of idiots. And the Germans had to be stopped.”
And Korea? Well, communism is “perfectly frightful”, says Standing. Caine nods. “It doesn’t take care of the working class quite the way they say. My father was a fishmonger in Billingsgate, so I knew when I saw the communists, they had no idea what it was all about. Do any working-class people want to live in North Korea?”
They both think national service should be reintroduced. “It gives you a whole new realisation of life,” says Caine. “I notice how different young people are today. They’re so free with everything. Military training makes you think about helping other people. My grandsons – all they do is play football.” (Still, he adds later, they’re also “incredible, unbelievable, and they worry about other people – which is handy”.)
Standing chips in: one of his daughters is “a bit woke” and cautions him about getting cancelled. “It’s horrible! We’re not allowed to say anything. I loathe it. My God, you’re not allowed to have mother-in-law jokes! It’s sort of barking.”
Then again, “things were far less complicated” 70 years ago. He smiles benignly. “Your telephone alone is the most complex thing anybody’s ever dreamed of. You’ve got all the information you ever want. You can chat to Henry VIII. Have you seen the man made of wood and iron playing the most immaculate game of ping-pong and thrashing the ordinary Briton at the other end?”
I haven’t. Caine confesses some concern over robots – that’s partly what his novel, a thriller, is about. “But I’m 90. I don’t worry about the future. I worry if I’m gonna make it to lunch.”
* * *
Caine and Standing first met on another hot day, in the summer of 1976, shooting another war movie, The Eagle Has Landed. Caine played a Nazi eager to assassinate Churchill; Standing a rather flaky vicar. Memories of the shoot seem thin on the ground, but they agree moviemaking hasn’t changed much.
“I make my own world,” says Caine. “And if they employ me, they gotta leave me to do it my way. Otherwise I screw it up. And even if I do it my way, I screw it up as well.”
They both chuckle. “Michael, darling!” says Standing.
Have they changed?
Standing sighs. “We’re just so bloody old.”
“And we’re still here,” says Caine.
“Which is incredible! All my mates are brown bread.”
“Oh, mine and all. Sean Connery, Roger Moore. Everybody’s dead. It’s amazing.”
How does that feel?
“Lonely,” says Caine. “I had dinner last night here with eight women. Shakira gets ’em. I don’t get ’em. They’re the wives of my friends. I’m often sitting with a table full of widows.”
Standing empathises. “Hundreds of women round one all the time. And you sit there thinking: give us a break! Ask me something, anything you like!”
Caine nods. “Ask me a question about football! But I’m perfectly happy with all the girls. I love them.”
Again: consult his memoir for more details, but this is putting it mildly. Caine spent the 50s, 60s and early 70s hoovering up hotties across the continents, pausing only for relationships with Natalie Wood and Nancy Sinatra and to refuel on vodka with Terence Stamp and Peter O’Toole.
So when he says he was tired of bachelor life by 1972, you can believe it – he must have been exhausted. He had a night in, saw a Maxwell House ad on telly and resolved to fly to Brazil the next morning to marry the woman with the maracas. No need, said a pal: she was Indian, not Brazilian, and lived on the Fulham Road in west London.
This is one of Caine’s regular chatshow yarns and he duly does it for us today: “I tracked her down! Incredible!” Caine is a bit of an anecdote jukebox – tales triggered by the briefest mention of Cary or Larry or Frank – but with material like his, it’s hard to object. Though charming, he also dominates conversation in general – about which Standing is a gent. Does he miss the 60s? “I don’t miss it, but I love having done it. I used to get into trouble all over the place.”
He and Shakira have been married more than 50 years. Ageing is less awful, he advises, “if you’re married to someone really beautiful who doesn’t grow old. I wake up every morning and there she is!” It’s true: Shakira, 76, does seem preternaturally patient and gorgeous. “What is great about her is that she’s very bright. She was the secretary in the … I forget which country she comes from [Shakira was born in British Guiana, now Guyana], but she was the secretary of the American embassy, so she’s a great secretary for me. She runs everything. It’s unbelievable.”
At the heart of The Great Escaper is another enduring marriage, between Bernie and Irene, played by Glenda Jackson in her final film. She and Caine first worked together 48 years ago. “She was very young and pretty,” he says. “Very attractive. Bloody good actress. But a left-wing socialist and I’m all for making money because I come from a very poor background.” They never talked politics – bit busy making the movies. He saw her five days before she died in June: “She seemed fine.” He’s relieved it was quick.
Bernie and Irene are a devoted couple who, though the film doesn’t discuss it, didn’t have children. Might that have changed their dynamic? “Oh, tremendously,” says Caine. “You don’t have any other separate thing to talk about. You talk about each other. And you don’t have to judge how people feel about someone else. Only you.”
It’s a sharp insight, particularly given that he’s personally “always had children around me like wildfire”. His eldest daughter, Dominique, was born when he was 23, during a brief marriage to the actor Patricia Haines; he and Shakira have another daughter, Natasha. Picking up his eldest grandson from the school is, Shakira tells me later, the highlight of his week. “I love kids,” he says, a bit wistfully.
Standing murmurs agreement. He’s also been married for yonks. The secret, he says, is “laughing with each other”.
Caine is less on-message: “Don’t argue. Don’t try to prove it with arguments or a row. Let ’em do it.”
“Women are No 1 anyway,” says Standing.
“It’s the only place you can get babies,” nods Caine.
“But I gotta say this, Michael: have you seen what women do now?” says Standing. A dramatic pause. He’s a West End veteran, light comedies a specialty. “Cage fighting!” He turns to me. “What possessed your sex to do something like that? For men to cage fight is unthinkable. For women – boom, boom, boom, on each other’s faces! Deranged! But that’s modern life.”
Has Caine seen that? “Oh yeah,” he says blithely. “On television.” And? “I was stunned.” Why? “I wouldn’t do that to anyone. Even if I didn’t like them. I’d just knock ’em out and walk away.”
* * *
The real theme of The Great Escaper is – perhaps not one for the poster – that the only escape from old age is death. Yet Caine and Standing continue to produce work that will live on after they’re gone. Caine wrote his first novel bedridden during lockdown, and is now writing a second. Standing is a professional painter. They have six children between them. Are any of these enterprises better or worse as stabs at immortality? There’s only really one, says Caine: “Kindness.” And maybe Alfie. And The Muppet Christmas Carol.
“Michael, darling,” says Standing, “I said to someone the other day: ‘Have you heard of Peter O’Toole?’ She said: ‘Well, I know the name.’ Once you are dead, you are dead. You think of Bogart! But young people only know Goose. What’s he called? Gosling. Big names in the theatre – Gielgud – mean nothing.”
That craft and that class is history, they reckon. When I ask Caine who today’s version of him is, he agrees there isn’t one.
“Because you don’t get young people now who are that far back in society. That had to come forward in great leaps. I think my type of person is extinct. I can’t think of anybody who had a life like mine.”
It wasn’t just the poverty, he says, it was Korea and then, six months later, malaria (he nearly died). “And so it never stopped, you know? Until it did.”
And yet it sort of hasn’t. Caine remains an icon of a time and an energy that feel increasingly exotic. He still calls himself working class and frets over any potential betrayal of his roots. The fate of his brother, Stanley, troubles him. “He just stood there and watched me become a millionaire when he didn’t even have a job. I turned him into someone who couldn’t move. I should have gone and moved him.”
Once, Caine was shopping for a sofa and Stanley – who’d been awol for a while – appeared as part of the team lugging it in from the back. “I grabbed him. I said, ‘You are outta here.’ Oh, it was terrible. I didn’t know where he was.
“He became an alcoholic. So I bought him two houses: one to live in and one to rent so he could have some money to buy some booze.” Caine’s eyes are rheumy. “He’s three years younger than me. And he’s been dead for five years.”
There was an older brother, too, David, born with severe epilepsy and confined to an institution. Caine only found out about him after their mother’s death – though she had visited David secretly each week. Caine then made him as comfortable as possible. His mother spent her final years living in one of the houses he’d bought her with a carer and her two young sons, “who loved my mum like a grandma. I was very happy with that. I did everything for everybody. So that’s it. I’m sitting here, I’ve done it. I can’t do any more.”
* * *
The Great Escaper has been widely described as Caine’s final film, just as Harry Brown was in 2009, and then – 24 films later – Best Sellers in 2021. It’s not. He’s shooting another in January: “It’s about someone who is so famous I’d never heard of him. Charles, Charles …”
“ … Darwin,” says Standing.
“Yeah. I play Charles Darwin. And that’ll be it. I won’t do another one after.”
He’s sure?
“No! But the point is, can you do it? Can you remember all the lines? I’ve got used to not working and staying in bed till 11am and staying out late at night. I love it.”
In The Great Escaper, Jackson has a line about life being fun when you’re young, but once you hit her age, “you’re basically buggered”. Present company queers that pitch. “Oh blimey,” says Caine. “I have a great time.” Standing nods. His one concession to old age has been to give up tap-dancing – though you suspect he might oblige in an emergency.
Neither man can think of a single instance in which they’ve been ill-treated because of their age.
“Nobody patronises me,” says Caine.
“We don’t look like we need help,” says Standing.
In Caine’s case, that’s not entirely true. His skin is smooth, his cheeks full – “I’m very lucky the whole face has not collapsed” – and The Great Escaper showcases them with loads of fantastic closeups. Yet he does use a walker and wheelchair. Never had qualms about being seen with them, he says. “Nope. It’s my life and I do what I want.”
“I think you are bloody brave,” says Standing. “Michael, man-to-man, it was an admirable thing to say: ‘Bollocks, I will do the film’, in spite of all those things.’”
I think he’s right. For someone with an image as familiar – and cultivated – as Caine’s, to visibly concede frailty feels courageous. It’s a shame, I say, that “mobility issues” were given as the reason the Queen didn’t attend various events near the end – as if being seen in a wheelchair was inconceivable.
Caine opts not to criticise the Queen. Instead he cues up the story of the first time they met, at a dinner, when she asked him to tell her a joke. He couldn’t think of a clean one. “She pointed to the man on her other side and said: ‘I’m gonna talk to him now. In five minutes I’ll be back and I want a joke.’”
I don’t know what I’d imagined Michael Caine’s Queen impression to sound like, but it’s definitely a lot more mobster. That was quite frightening, I tell him, once he’s finished the joke (long, about a chicken). Does he see any similarities between them?
“I think everyone sees a similarity between themselves and the Queen.”
Even Standing, an actual baronet, demurs at that one. But the fact Caine believes it adds weight to the idea they do share something – the ability, perhaps, to unsettle others through their presence alone. The Great Escaper taps that, too. Bernie prompts in people – Arthur included – profound reckonings, without really trying. Can Caine relate?
“I don’t know,” he says. “A bit, probably, yes. But it could be quite unpleasant. I don’t do things that are unpleasant.”
But you feel you have that power?
“Yeah, oh yeah.”
And what’s that like?
He grins. “Great.”
Our time is up. Caine checks his watch. “28C,” he says, “and that’s with the bloody windows open.”
• The Great Escaper is in UK cinemas on 6 October.
