Michael Caine

Born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite, Caine grew up in Southwark, London, in a working-class family. His father worked as a fish-market porter and his mother worked as a cook and cleaner. During the Second World War, he was evacuated from London to Norfolk, where he made an early stage appearance at a village school.

After the war, his family moved into prefabricated housing in Elephant and Castle. He attended Hackney Downs School and Wilson's School before leaving education and working as a filing clerk, messenger and other entry-level jobs connected with London businesses. He became interested in acting through youth-club drama classes and school performances.

Caine completed national service in the British Army from 1951 to 1953. After training with the Queen's Royal Regiment, he served with the Royal Fusiliers in West Germany and then took part in active service during the Korean War.

He contracted malaria and was sent home in 1953. His experience of combat, including surviving an encounter with Chinese forces, had a lasting effect on his outlook and later informed his reflections on courage, fear and making the most of life.

Caine began acting in repertory theatre after his military service, first using the stage name Michael Scott and later Michael White. He adopted the surname Caine after seeing a cinema marquee advertising The Caine Mutiny. For nearly a decade he worked in provincial repertory, television and small film roles, while also serving as Peter O'Toole's understudy in The Long and the Short and the Tall.

His breakthrough came in Zulu (1964), in which director Cy Endfield cast him against type as the upper-class Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead. He followed it with Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File (1965) and the title role in Alfie (1966). These performances established his screen identity as a working-class British leading man whose accent, glasses and understated delivery contrasted with the conventional image of the film hero.

Caine's major films of the late 1960s and 1970s included Funeral in Berlin, Gambit, The Italian Job, Battle of Britain, Get Carter, Sleuth and The Man Who Would Be King. He starred opposite Laurence Olivier in Sleuth and Sean Connery in The Man Who Would Be King, while his work with director John Huston highlighted his ability to combine comedy, adventure and dramatic intensity.

During the 1980s, Caine appeared in Educating Rita, Dressed to Kill, Deathtrap, Mona Lisa, Hannah and Her Sisters and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. He won his first Academy Award for playing Elliot in Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters (1986). His later roles included Ebenezer Scrooge in The Muppet Christmas Carol, Dr Wilbur Larch in The Cider House Rules, and Arthur in The Quiet American. His performance in The Cider House Rules earned him his second Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

Caine's career gained renewed momentum with Little Voice (1998), for which he won a Golden Globe, and The Cider House Rules (1999). He continued to move between serious drama, comedy, crime films and family entertainment, appearing in Miss Congeniality, Quills, The Quiet American, Secondhand Lions and Children of Men.

His association with Christopher Nolan became one of the defining professional collaborations of his later career. Caine played Alfred Pennyworth in Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012), and also appeared in Nolan's The Prestige, Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk and Tenet.

Other later films included Now You See Me, Kingsman: The Secret Service, Youth, Going in Style, King of Thieves, Come Away, Best Sellers and The Great Escaper. He confirmed his retirement from acting in 2023 after the release of The Great Escaper, in which he played Bernard Jordan.

Caine was married to actress Patricia Haines from 1954 to 1958, and they had a daughter, Dominique. He married actress and model Shakira Baksh on 8 January 1973. They have a daughter, Natasha, and have remained married since then.

Caine has residences associated with London, including Chelsea Harbour and Wimbledon, and has also lived in Surrey, Oxfordshire, Berkshire and the United States. He changed his name by deed poll to Michael Caine in 2016 to simplify airport security checks. He underwent back surgery for spinal stenosis in 2022, following earlier mobility problems including a broken ankle in 2018.

Caine received six Academy Award nominations across five consecutive decades. He won Best Supporting Actor for Hannah and Her Sisters in 1987 and The Cider House Rules in 2000. He also won Golden Globe Awards for Educating Rita, Little Voice and Jack the Ripper, and received a BAFTA Award for Educating Rita.

He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1992 and received a BAFTA Fellowship in 2000. Queen Elizabeth II knighted him in 2000, and he accepted the honour under his birth name, Sir Maurice Micklewhite. In 2011, France made him a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.