One Bloody Happy Fellow

One of the reasons 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 is the son of a charlady and a father who worked as a porter at a fish market. There was really no more bottom rung of the ladder in Depression-era England. During the London bombings in World War II, young Maurice was evacuated to the countryside with his mother and brother, while his father went off to war. "We lived on a farm. It was fantastic," Caine remembers. "In my later life, I've returned to that farm, in a way. I live in a great big barn with a great big garden. When you get old, you relive your childhood, which is what I'm doing."

But with better wine. "Bloody right," Caine says.

He recalls: "After the war, we lived in a prefabricated house. Because we were bombed out. You put the house up in a day. If I were to show you this house, which was the size of this room, it was like paradise for me. If I were to show it to you, you'd think it the biggest piece of [junk]. But it was luxury for us. Hot and cold running water. It had a bathroom. Electricity! For me it was incredible."

After he became a movie star, he brought his mother to Los Angeles for a look. "I took her to Beverly Hills, like in February, when in England it's rain and snow and bloody bleak. We're driving along. It's all plants and flowers everywhere. I say to my mother, what do you think? And she says the truest thing ever said about Beverly Hills, even though it was a mistake. She said, 'Look at it, all that hysteria, growing up the walls.' "

Caine is laughing with pleasure at the memory. He can barely finish the story. "Boy, are you right, mum. Would you just look at it. All that hysteria growing up the walls."

Caine never formally studied acting. "When I got out of the Army" -- he served in Korea for two years, got malaria, the treatment almost killed him -- "I was working in a factory and I told this old guy I was going to be an actor, but I didn't know how to go about it. Where I came from, it wasn't a milieu where you'd even know there was such a thing as drama school. It was a very tough area. This old guy says to me, 'There's a newspaper advertises for actors, it's called the Stage.' "

Caine got a job as assistant stage manager out in the boonies. He had never been to see a professional play. "Never," he says. "I didn't have the money to go to the theater. It wasn't like that. 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. He says, "I played a lot of butlers, which was prep for this Batman movie," which is a role, let's be honest, that Caine could do handcuffed in a shark tank.

Over his career, Caine has 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 pluck -- a reckless appetite -- for an actor who appears in Woody Allen's "Hannah and Her Sisters," gets nominated for Best Supporting Actor Oscar, wins, but at the very same time is making a film called "Jaws: The Revenge."

"It was only a 10-minute role. It was only 10 days' work. In Nassau. In the Bahamas. And they were going to pay me a million bucks for 10 days, and I said, 'Hey, I'll do that.' I didn't take any notice of it," Caine says. "They made this disastrous movie. I've never seen it. I didn't write it, direct it, photograph it, produce it, didn't play any of leading parts, but I get the blame."

Fair is fair. "Well, I bought my mother a house with the money," he says, "so I was very pleased with myself. But I don't do that anymore."

Make bad movies?

"Right." He explains. "Movie actors do not retire, the movies retire you." It almost goes without saying: He doesn't need the money. But they do keep sending him scripts. He makes a little joke. "So I have retired mentally, but I didn't retire physically." Michael Caine gives us a nice last laugh.

"I've become very good at holiday-making," he says. "I'm practicing it. It takes time to get it right." Now he's off to lunch with his wife. He says he's starving.