Youth, 2015
THE OTHER DAY I was minding my own business, having a quiet dinner in a restaurant, when someone approached me with a look I recognised. He had spotted me and wanted a quick word. I looked up from my French onion soup and smiled.
“Are you Michael Caine?”
“Yes, I am,” I said.
“Bloody hell,” he shot back. “I thought you were a fucking hundred.”
That’s a back-handed compliment if ever there was one.
I know I’m old but I don’t feel old. Not in my head, where it matters. I forget all the time how old I am: it seems like about five years ago I was thirty-five. So I take things on that I shouldn’t. I accept scripts. I wheel manure around in the garden. I nearly rupture myself every day. Age, to me, is in the mind. I’ve seen seventy-year-olds who are already dead, and ninety-year-olds who can’t stop themselves living. I stay young by refusing to be old.
The only time I really feel old is when I catch sight of my stand-in on set. A stand-in is someone the same height and build as an actor, whose job is to stand and walk about on set in the actor’s place for the hours it takes to get the lighting right. When I first started working, my stand-in was a great-looking young guy and we became good friends. Now I see a poor decrepit old man being helped out of his seat and almost carried to the camera position and with a jolt I realise that’s my stand-in. That’s me.
Just like I didn’t do what I was supposed to in the 1940s and 1950s, when as a working-class lad I was expected to know my place and go and be a fish porter, I don’t do what I’m supposed to do now that I’m eighty-five. I’m expected to know my place and sink gracefully back into my sofa. But I don’t want to sit down; I don’t want to retire; I want to keep on going. And I’m expected to despise old age, and yearn for those golden years of my youth. But I don’t do that either and I suspect I’m not alone in that.
Of course ageing brings disappointments and inconveniences, frustrations and indignities, even despair, as weddings and birthday parties give way to hospital visits and memorial services. But it also brings its own joys and even occasionally a little wisdom. I look at ageing not as a problem but as a privilege. As the (old) joke goes—and it isn’t really a joke: I can never forget the early deaths of my father, of my childhood friend Paul Challen, who never truly enjoyed good health his entire life and died much too young, of my fellow struggling actors from the early days who gave up on life entirely, of burning talents, like James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Heath Ledger, who were extinguished too soon—it’s better than the alternative.
My approach to old age is, in many ways, like my approach to youth: I still use the difficulty, and I still look for the good in a bad situation, and I still keep striving to do what I love. I enjoy each year so much that as each one slips past I think, I’ll have another one of those, please.
Keep on using the difficulty
One of the toughest challenges of getting older is that, first, all your idols and mentors get old and die. That’s tough. And then, even worse, your friends get old, and some of them go and die as well. But I still maintain there is no difficulty so great it cannot be used. And so, though each blow has been harsh, I have, eventually, been able to use each terrible loss to remind me to enjoy the living, and enjoy my life.
My great hero John Huston died of pneumonia in 1987 at the age of eighty-one. He was funny to the last. At an awards ceremony shortly before he died, he was described as “living legend John Huston.” In reply John said, “My doctors assure me that that status will change with the first wintry blast.”
I had actually said goodbye to John once already. Several years earlier I had heard the sad news that he was on his deathbed. Sean Connery and I rushed to Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Hollywood to say goodbye, and when we got there he was rambling. “I was in a boxing match,” he was saying, “and it turns out the other guy had razors sewn into his gloves and that’s why I’m here.” John went on about the boxer for twenty minutes, and then Sean and I looked at each other and we were both in tears. We left the hospital, very upset. And then we heard that John had got up and made two more movies. When I saw him I said, “The next time I come to say farewell to you, you’d better bloody die or I’ll bloody kill you. Do you know how upset we were?”
John replied, “Well, Michael, you know, people get upset. And people die.”
“Yes,” I said, “but not twice.”
But I was dreadfully upset, of course, the second time John died. He had been an idol of mine, a great supporter of my career, a wonderful director to work with and one of the truly great talents of his era.
I met most of my closest friends in London during the late 1950s and 1960s. Over the years we came to know each other, trust each other, appreciate each other, even love each other. We “Mayfair Orphans,” as we named ourselves, all led busy lives but whenever we could we met for lunch or dinner. There were ten of us, but now all but four—the nightclub host Johnny Gold, the composer Leslie Bricusse, the photographer Terry O’Neill and me—are dead.
I miss them terribly. My press agent Theo Cowan was one of the funniest men I’ve ever come across, with a quiet sadness about him. If you asked him how he was, he’d say, “The hard ones first, eh?” Theo went in the same understated way he had lived his life, settling down for a nap in his office after lunch and never waking up. It was a harsh reminder to us fun-loving Mayfair Orphans that our fun was not going to last for ever.
As one of our group said at his funeral, “They’ve started bowling in our alley.”
But Theo was older than the rest of us and at first the bowling balls came at mercifully long intervals. When I lost my agent Dennis Selinger in 1998 I lost not only an agent but a great guide, counsellor and friend. Dennis had assured us that his cancer was curable but, perhaps for the first time in his life, he was wrong. Or perhaps, I now wonder, he had sensed the truth, but he was being a good agent and true friend to the last: he must have known that the only way I would go to Hollywood to make my movie was if I thought I’d be coming back and seeing him again. There is still a huge Dennis-shaped hole in my life.
Mickie Most, the record producer, was the fittest of us all and we joked that he really must be sick when he cut his daily run down to five miles a day. It was a terrible shock to find out that he actually was—with virulent and incurable lung cancer, caused by the asbestos in the sound studios where he had worked all his life. The last time I saw Mickie, we both knew we would never see each other again but we laughed all the way through lunch. It started when I asked him what the doctor had actually said to him and he said, “I asked him, ‘How long have I got?’ and he said, ‘Put it this way: don’t send out any dry cleaning.’ ” I was still wiping the tears from my eyes as we hugged, then parted outside the restaurant. I turned back for one last look and he had disappeared around the corner of Berkeley Square by the Rolls-Royce showroom. I was crying but, knowing Mickie, he was still probably laughing. That was 2003 and Mickie was just sixty-four.
Five years later we lost Doug Hayward, our tailor and our dear friend, known to us all as the Buddha of Mount Street. It was because Doug would only ever give himself an hour off for lunch that we always used to meet in Mayfair and dubbed ourselves the Mayfair Orphans—although these days it’s more often the River Café. But Doug had really left us years before that, his razor-sharp brain ravaged by the cruel indignities of Alzheimer’s. When someone has Alzheimer’s you know they’re going but they take such a long time to go. With Doug, for me, it was like he was walking out of my life over the horizon and taking three years over it. One day I went to see him in his flat above the shop and he was sitting watching television. “Hello, Doug,” I said.
He turned, looked at me and said, “Hello.” Then he turned back to the television.
That was when I understood that Doug was never coming back.
Someone up there then obviously got his eye in, and we started falling like ninepins. In 2016 we lost trichologist Philip Kingsley,
who had always ensured there was not a dandruff-ridden or bald Orphan among us, and less than a year later, Roger Moore. Roger was one of the most genuine, trustworthy and generous people I have ever known. I first met him just after I had made The Compartment in 1961, when he was already famous from his TV show The Saint and I was very much not. I was walking along Piccadilly with Terry Stamp and we were thrilled to spot his suave, debonair figure stalking down the street in the opposite direction. He crossed the road towards us, and we looked around us to see if somebody was behind us. But no. He came up to us, smiling, and said, “Are you Michael Caine?” I said I was. “I saw you in The Compartment. And I just want to tell you, you’re going to be a big star.” Roger shook my hand and walked away and I didn’t see him again for another five or six years, by which time his prediction had come true. But it was a huge boost for me at the time, and a memorable start to nearly sixty years of friendship.
Then last year, 2017, one bright spring evening, the sun was pouring through the windows when our friend Leslie Bricusse called us from his house in the South of France to tell us that Roger had just died. He had been sick for a while so it was not a surprise but it was still a shock and it still hurt. An hour later, Leslie called again to say that one of my closest Hollywood friends, Jerry Perenchio, the kindest and most charitable rich man I ever met, had just died. I was stunned with sadness. “Leslie, don’t take this the wrong way,” I said, “I love you, but I really don’t want to speak to you again tonight.” I went to bed and unplugged the phone.
I have seen people go fast, like Mickie and Theo, and I have seen people go slow, like Dougie. Both ways have their cruelties, for the individual and for those around them, but I know what I want. I want to live a long life, like Roger, work to the end, like Dennis, laugh my way through lunch, like Mickie, then die in my sleep, like Theo.
It is desperately sad when your family and friends start dying and your close circle gets smaller and smaller. It can be hard to find a way to use the difficulty. And each successive death does not get any easier to bear. I have, though, found that as our little group has become smaller and smaller, it has also become closer and closer. I have also enjoyed getting to know my friends’ widows better than I did when their husbands were alive.
Yet another cabbie also made the point to Alec Guinness, in his own inimitable London-cabbie way, that as everyone else your age fades away, there’s less and less competition for the good parts. That was many years ago. The great British actors Anthony Quayle, Rex Harrison and Laurence Olivier had all died in quick succession. “Are you an actor?” asked the cabbie.
“I am,” said Alec.
“Dropping like flies, aren’t you?” I’m sure he didn’t mean to sound unkind, and I don’t wish to either, but the harsh fact is that the longer you survive as an actor or in any other profession, the lonelier it gets at the top, which is bad for the heart and soul but good for the career.
I feel each loss—my parents and brothers, my idols and mentors, my friends—acutely, and I mourn each one deeply. But for as short a time as possible. I go so deep, I can’t stay down there for very long or I would drown. So I come up quickly, gasping for the fresh air of the living. I return with greater interest to those around me who are still here: I see them with fresh eyes and new appreciation.
The other major challenge of getting old is that, even if on the inside you still feel sprightly, on the outside everything starts falling apart. Your looks fade, your eyesight goes, your hearing, your back, your memory. For an actor, this used to mean either retiring gracefully, or ploughing on regardless in a state of denial, chasing after increasingly inappropriate roles.
But, these days, things are different and I have been fortunate that I have been able to use this difficulty too. Just as I was getting old, the baby-boomer audience was getting old with me, and, just as being working-class became fashionable in the 1960s, in the twenty-first century it became fashionable to be old. In 2012, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, a ten-million-dollar British movie about a bunch of old people living in a hotel in India, took $150 million at the box office. Producers realised that the generation who had come of age in the 1960s was still very much alive and kicking and wanting to see their lives reflected on the big screen.
Now, instead of turning you out to pasture, they will write parts for you. They will write your lines on the wall or a blackboard if your memory’s gone and you can’t remember them, and say them in an earpiece if your eyesight’s gone as well and you can’t read them either. (I haven’t had do to that yet, honest, but I’ve seen it done.)
In fact, not only are there still parts for me: as I have aged, the parts have got more interesting. It’s fabulous. Earlier on, it was boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy regains girl. That was my career. Very glamorous, very show business. But now the old boy—or the old girl—can get anything, lose anything, regain anything. No offence to the girls, but it’s much more interesting, much more real.
In the last ten years alone (and I have been “old” for longer than that) I have played, among other things, Alfred the wise father-figure butler in The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises; Clarence, an ex-magician in the early stages of dementia in Is Anybody There?; Harry Brown a lonely ex-Royal Marine turned vigilante on a mission in Harry Brown; a very cool spy car, Finn McMissile, in Cars 2; NASA physicist Professor Brand in Interstellar; symphony orchestra conductor and composer Fred Ballinger in Youth; a cartoon gnome (twice) in Gnomeo and Juliet and Sherlock Gnomes and an elderly bank robber (twice) in Going in Style and The King of Thieves.
I even managed the unlikely feat, nearly twenty years ago, of being cast as a dead man in Last Orders, a tiny, low-budget British picture with the great director Fred Schepisi and a wonderful best-of-British cast, including Helen Mirren, Bob Hoskins, David Hemmings, Tom Courtenay and Ray Winstone, as my son. Although I had only a small part in that movie it was meaningful, not just because of my wonderful fellow actors but because it was the closest I ever came to playing my father.
Find the good
One of my all-time favourite movies—in my view terribly underrated—is the 1963 movie Charade. It is a romance but also a comedy and a thriller, set in Paris, including a sequence shot in Les Halles, which makes me nostalgic for the times I used to go there for French onion soup at two in the morning, and full of brilliant one-liners from its stars, Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. This is one of my favourites:
REGINA (AUDREY HEPBURN): I already know a lot of people and until one of them dies I couldn’t possibly meet anyone else.
PETER (CARY GRANT): Well, if anyone goes on the critical list, let me know.
Of course, the line is less funny when you get to my age and the critical list is a mile long. But I have been lucky enough to meet some wonderful new people and make some wonderful new friends in my old age, including the Armenian philanthropists Bob and Tamar Manoukian. Bob and Tamar, now two of our closest friends, are warm and generous people, and exceptional philanthropists. They have taken us to places we had never been, including Armenia and Lebanon, and introduced us to fascinating people from outside our usual world of show business, who we would never normally meet. They also introduced us to the Clooneys at one of their always-memorable dinner parties. I spent a lot of the evening in a slight daze because George and Amal were even more beautiful in real life than they already looked in pictures, and they were also smart, funny, socially engaged and kind. But the point when I knew I had made a new best friend was when George told me about the business he had just sold: it was a tequila company he had set up with friends to create a tequila you could sip all day and night, straight or on the rocks, without getting a hangover. We drank a great deal of George’s Casamigos tequila that night.
And there has been another miracle to save me from despair and give me new zest for life. The happiest surprise of my long, very happy and very surprising life has been my incredible grandchildren: Taylor, who will be ten by the time this book is published, and A
llegra and Miles, who will be nine. I consider grandchildren to be God’s gift to old people, and I consider being a granddad to be my greatest role to date. They keep me young, and I will do whatever I can to be with them for as many years as I possibly can.
Keep doing what you love
Sir John Gielgud, a terrifically gifted actor who died at the age of ninety-six, worked right up until the end of his life. He celebrated his ninetieth birthday by playing King Lear, with Judi Dench, Eileen Atkins and Emma Thompson as his daughters; he was still ringing his agent at the age of ninety-two to ask him, “Any scripts in this week?”; soon after that he sacked an agent for not getting him a part in the TV adaptation of David Copperfield. He also developed a nice line in butlers, winning an Oscar as Dudley Moore’s in Arthur. I like to keep his example in mind as I continue to refuse to retire.
I have always said anyway that, in the movies, you don’t retire, the movies retire you. And they nearly did, in the early 1990s. But since my near-retirement experience, I have enjoyed another whole fulfilling career. My grandson Taylor, who likes to hang out with me in my office, was counting up all my awards the other day, and he pointed out to me that I’ve won the majority since I hit sixty. When am I going to retire? How about never? Why would I retire when I can keep getting paid doing something I love?
I still love acting so I still do it. But I also love other things—my garden, cooking for family and friends, my grandchildren, time spent with friends, quiet evenings in with Shakira and quiet evenings out with Shakira—so the balance has to be right. My priorities have changed as I’ve got older. I haven’t become one of those old actors you have to watch out for who will make any old piece of rubbish if the money’s right. I’ve been there and done that already so for me now it’s the other way around. I’ve become fussier about what I do.
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