BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. -- Bloody genius Michael Caine is having a bloody good time. He's got the bloody boffo house in the English countryside with the bloody huge garden. "I grow every bloody thing," he says. "I'm a bloody good cook." Sauces? Don't even get him started.
Actor Michael Caine and wife Shakira Caine attend the world premiere of “The Dark Knight” at Loews Lincoln Square on July 14 in New York. Caine stars as Batman/Bruce Wayne’s butler, Alfred, in the blockbuster movie.
When he's not puttering about as a millionaire farmer, he's in Miami Beach or on the Riviera with his wife, the former model Shakira Baksh. This is a man who has achieved a certain perspective at age 75. One of his favorite movies is "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels," because he got to live in the South of France for three months while filming it.
"Bloody marvelous," he recalls, and when Caine says bloody "marvelous," his marvelous just sounds better than your ordinary marvelous, thanks to the bangers-and-mash accent and that smile, being this giddy, gluttony, happy, wicked smile, which works even better because his teeth are yellow with the memory of a million marvelous meals accompanied by the kind of wine that robs precocious children of their college tuitions. White veneers? Not bloody likely.
Caine is in town to promote "The Dark Knight," the disturbing, hyperviolent continuation of the Batman story, starring Caine in a reprise of his role as Alfred the butler, with Christian Bale as the caped crusader and Heath Ledger as the rattlingly intense, slurring fast-cycling psychopath Joker. The critics agree that Ledger performance is the scariest/best thing about this summer blockbuster, and of course interest in the movie is only stoked by Ledger's sudden death earlier this year of an overdose.
"Lovely guy," Caine says. "I got to know him a little bit. I was so impressed by his performance. And when I saw the movie, I was bowled over. On set, we would be chatting about this or that. Then the director would say, 'We're ready, Heath,' and then he'd go straight into that maniacal thing. It was stunning on the screen. But to be there when he was doing it . . . " He lets out a long, slow profanity.
We mention that Caine himself lived some wild years. In a recent piece in the British press, he mentions drinking bottles of vodka.
"Oh, I just drink wine with food now. Though I thoroughly enjoy it. You know, I was never an alcoholic, but it is true I was on occasion very, very drunk."
On the topic of drink, Caine unspools his theory of the social history of the late 20th century. Oh, we had our times, he says, "but the difference with us, we were always getting pissed, with alcohol. Booze we were. That's why the '60s were so successful. Because with booze you're all out together, drinking. What screwed up the '70s was drugs, because you had to stay at home and take the bloody drugs and you couldn't go out or you got busted by the police. The '60s got finished around 1975 when everybody was high as a kite and couldn't go out. Couldn't find their bloody shoes if they wanted to go out. You don't go out and take drugs."
Caine is sitting in a $1,000-a-night suite. One reason it is so delicious to be Sir Maurice Joseph Micklewhite Jr. - he was knighted - is that he came from a two-room, gaslit, cold-water flat. Caine, the son of a charlady and a porter at a fish market, evacuated to the countryside during the London bombings in World War II.
After he became a movie star, he brought his mother to Los Angeles.
Caine never formally studied acting. He got a job as assistant stage manager out in the boonies. He had never seen a professional play. "Never," he says. "I didn't have the money to go to the theater. It was also a very tough area where I'm from. Tell someone you were going to see a play, they say, 'What is he? Gay?' "
He learned his craft doing 50 plays a year in regional repertory theaters in England. Caine has since appeared in more than 100 films - many of them memorable ("Zulu," "Alfie," "Sleuth," "Educating Rita," "The Cider House Rules," "The Quiet American") and many of them duds (like, um, "Beyond the Poseidon Adventure"). That is another reason that people like Michael Caine. The turkeys. Is there not a certain reckless pluck in an actor who wins a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Woody Allen's "Hannah and Her Sisters" while making a film called "Jaws: The Revenge"?
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. -- Bloody genius Michael Caine is having a bloody good time. He's got the bloody boffo house in the English countryside with the bloody huge garden. "I grow every bloody thing," he says. "I'm a bloody good cook." Sauces? Don't even get him started.
When he's not puttering about as a millionaire farmer, he's in Miami Beach or on the Riviera with his wife, the former model Shakira Baksh. This is a man who has achieved a certain perspective at age 75. One of his favorite movies is "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels," because he got to live in the South of France for three months while filming it.
"Bloody marvelous," he recalls, and when Caine says bloody "marvelous," his marvelous just sounds better than your ordinary marvelous, thanks to the bangers-and-mash accent and that smile, being this giddy, gluttony, happy, wicked smile, which works even better because his teeth are yellow with the memory of a million marvelous meals accompanied by the kind of wine that robs precocious children of their college tuitions. White veneers? Not bloody likely.
Caine is in town to promote "The Dark Knight," the disturbing, hyperviolent continuation of the Batman story, starring Caine in a reprise of his role as Alfred the butler, with Christian Bale as the caped crusader and Heath Ledger as the rattlingly intense, slurring fast-cycling psychopath Joker. The critics agree that Ledger performance is the scariest/best thing about this summer blockbuster, and of course interest in the movie is only stoked by Ledger's sudden death earlier this year of an overdose.
"Lovely guy," Caine says. "I got to know him a little bit. I was so impressed by his performance. And when I saw the movie, I was bowled over. On set, we would be chatting about this or that. Then the director would say, 'We're ready, Heath,' and then he'd go straight into that maniacal thing. It was stunning on the screen. But to be there when he was doing it . . . " He lets out a long, slow profanity.
We mention that Caine himself lived some wild years. In a recent piece in the British press, he mentions drinking bottles of vodka.
"Oh, I just drink wine with food now. Though I thoroughly enjoy it. You know, I was never an alcoholic, but it is true I was on occasion very, very drunk."
On the topic of drink, Caine unspools his theory of the social history of the late 20th century. Oh, we had our times, he says, "but the difference with us, we were always getting pissed, with alcohol. Booze we were. That's why the '60s were so successful. Because with booze you're all out together, drinking. What screwed up the '70s was drugs, because you had to stay at home and take the bloody drugs and you couldn't go out or you got busted by the police. The '60s got finished around 1975 when everybody was high as a kite and couldn't go out. Couldn't find their bloody shoes if they wanted to go out. You don't go out and take drugs."
Caine is sitting in a $1,000-a-night suite. One reason it is so delicious to be Sir Maurice Joseph Micklewhite Jr. - he was knighted - is that he came from a two-room, gaslit, cold-water flat. Caine, the son of a charlady and a porter at a fish market, evacuated to the countryside during the London bombings in World War II.
After he became a movie star, he brought his mother to Los Angeles.
Caine never formally studied acting. He got a job as assistant stage manager out in the boonies. He had never seen a professional play. "Never," he says. "I didn't have the money to go to the theater. It was also a very tough area where I'm from. Tell someone you were going to see a play, they say, 'What is he? Gay?' "
He learned his craft doing 50 plays a year in regional repertory theaters in England. Caine has since appeared in more than 100 films - many of them memorable ("Zulu," "Alfie," "Sleuth," "Educating Rita," "The Cider House Rules," "The Quiet American") and many of them duds (like, um, "Beyond the Poseidon Adventure"). That is another reason that people like Michael Caine. The turkeys. Is there not a certain reckless pluck in an actor who wins a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Woody Allen's "Hannah and Her Sisters" while making a film called "Jaws: The Revenge"?
