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Michael Caine was doing the eye thing. It’s a trick of his, developed over years of film performances and close-ups: Let your gaze rest on your scene partner, but only with one eye.
The other eye, the one closest to the camera, can connect with the lens. The camera “will not miss anything,” he said, “including the bad. So you have to watch it.”
Of course, there is little bad when Caine, 79, is on screen. In more than six decades of work, he has been a sterling presence, inimitable except that so many have tried. (In the BBC series, The Trip, the comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon do a riff on his Cockney accent and measured delivery that is as hysterical as it is accurate.)
Caine is asking for it, though: In 1987, he led an acting workshop for the BBC that has since become a touchstone for performers, absorbed by everyone from Gwyneth Paltrow to Jim Carrey. It contains one of the Caine-iest bits of acting wisdom, a surefire path to a heightened dramatic moment: Do. Not. Blink.
To blink, or not to...
“Not blinking,” Caine said, “is strength. If you want to be weak or funny, blink.”
“I think I blinked twice during this interview,” he added, jokingly, sitting in a private room in the Four Seasons restaurant before a recent luncheon in honour of The Dark Knight Rises, the final installment of Christopher Nolan’s Batman series. As Alfred, the loyal butler and father figure to Bruce Wayne, Caine has served as a conscience and a consigliere, shepherding and humanising the hero, played with chiselled — unblinking — intensity by Christian Bale.
It was a part he quickly accepted at the start of the franchise, Caine said, when Nolan turned up at the door of his home in England one Sunday morning, carrying an early copy of the script for Batman Begins, the 2005 kickoff to the series, and demanding, for secrecy’s sake, that Caine read it on the spot.
“He had written great parts for real actors,” Caine said, “rather than ciphers who are in big special-effects movies, because they haven’t gotten enough money to pay any actors.”
Still, Caine invented his own back story for Alfred. “I thought, I wanted to be the toughest butler in the world,” he said. Alfred, he envisioned, was part of a British military force, the Special Air Service, like the Navy SEALs. “He was a sergeant in it,” Caine said.
“He got wounded. He didn’t want to go to civilian life. Then he went into the sergeant’s mess and ran that, which is where Batman met him. I needed him to have social skills, like making cocktails and serving things. So that’s why I put him in the bar, as a wounded ex-soldier who didn’t want to go back into civvy life.”
Nolan and Caine have now worked together five times. Caine appeared in Inception and The Prestige, also opposite Bale. Warner Bros., the studio behind The Dark Knight series, is hoping that their director-actor rapport will help sell the film to Oscar voters, who don’t tend to go in for blockbuster sequels but are often swept away by nuanced performances by older character actors. (Caine is a six-time Oscar nominee and two-time winner, as best supporting actor, for Hannah and Her Sisters and The Cider House Rules. Nolan has been nominated thrice, for Inception and Memento, but never won.)
Full of praise
Caine heaped praise on Nolan, a friend whom he said he’d scarcely seen since the killings in Aurora, Colo., on the opening night of The Dark Knight Rises. He called him one of cinema’s greatest directors, comparing him to David Lean. Nolan, he said, even had a leg up on that Lawrence of Arabia filmmaker because he was also a screenwriter. The crowd at the lunch, replete with members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, seemed impressed.
For his part, Nolan heaped the praise right back. “I think being able to say, ‘my great friend Sir Michael Caine’ is one of the great pleasures of my life,” he said, adding that Caine’s reputation was the inverse of the old Will Rogers line: “He never met a man who didn’t like him.”
“Or a woman!” came the shout.
True enough: Caine’s breakthrough role, as the titular playboy in the 1966 film Alfie, was once not far from reality, though he has been married for nearly 40 years, to Shakira Baksh, a woman he famously fell for after seeing her in a commercial for Maxwell House coffee.
Upon his arrival in Hollywood, he was welcomed by Shirley MacLaine, Gloria Swanson and Frank Sinatra, and rolled through 1960s London with Warren Beatty, chatting up the likes of Candice Bergen. Caine is working on a documentary of this period with Simon Fuller, the British TV producer. His early years serve as constant fodder.
Caine, who was knighted in 2000, is a noted raconteur; he has written two well-received autobiographies, Elephant to Hollywood in 2010 and What’s It All About? in 1992.
“He’s the best storyteller that I’ve ever met,” said Lasse Hallstrom, who directed Caine in The Cider House Rules. As an actor, “I think he goes by instinct,” Hallstrom added. “After all, he grew up a working-class guy. There’s nothing pretentious about him. He’s a natural.”
Caine, though, considers himself a Method actor and abides by Konstantin Stanislavsky’s maxim that “the rehearsals are the work; the performance is the relaxation,” as Caine puts it.
“Before I ever say a line in front of a camera,” he said, “I’ve said it a thousand times.”
His choice of movies, after a half-century as a star, is guided by a few criteria, like whether his grandchildren can see them and whether they are a creative challenge — anything that’s a stretch for “the son of a Cockney Billingsgate fish-market porter,” he said adding gleefully: “For $10 million, I’ll do a movie. But nobody’s offered me that yet. I look at email every morning to see.”