“I keep saying I’m retiring. Well, now I am.” It was with this emphasis that actor Michael Caine spoke on BBC 4 Radio’s Today program on Friday, dispelling any doubts about his retirement from acting at the age of 90. On October 6, Caine premiered The Great Escaper in the UK, in which he stars alongside Glenda Jackson, who died in June, and in the weeks leading up to its release he took the opportunity to say goodbye he had threatened on previous occasions. This time he meant it seriously and justified it by saying that his body “couldn’t handle it anymore.”
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He leaves behind an extensive filmography with more than a hundred titles, including films such as “The Man Who Would Be King”, “Alfie”, “The Footprint”, “Hannah and Her Sisters” (his first Oscar) and “The Rules of Cider”. (his second Oscar statuette). . Hollywood, an award he has sought six times) and has become the veteran who always appears in Christopher Nolan’s films, calling him for his major productions, including the Batman trilogy in which he played Alfred the butler Wayne Manor.
In The Great Escaper, based on true events, he plays Bernard Jordan, a pensioner who escaped in 2014 from the residence in Hove, Sussex, which was due to take part in the celebrations of the 70th anniversary of D-Day in France . When police began searching, Jordan called and said he was OK. And he returned a few days after reaching his destination. He died the following year, aged 90 (like Caine). Since the film was shot last fall, Glenda Jackson was unable to see its completion. The post-production process of The Great Escaper and its release were slowed by the backlog of film releases caused by the lifting of lockdown restrictions in 2020. “The Great Escaper” has a few nods to Caine’s career: it stars one of his best friends since the 1950s, John Standing, also called Sir and a year younger than Caine (who forced him into the cast), and the German Wolf Kahler: The three met in 1976 in The Eagle Has Arrival over the plan to kidnap Winston Churchill in the middle of World War II.
Michael Caine, in a picture from “The Great Escaper.”
“The only roles I can get now are 90-year-old men. Or maybe 85”, he joked on the BBC Today programme. “At the age of 90 you no longer have any leading actors. They want you to have young and beautiful boys and girls. So I thought, ‘I’d better get out of here,'” he added, before revealing that he turned down the project three times because it involved a lot of effort. In September he had already said in various English media: “I’m 90 damn years old and I can barely walk straight, so I’m almost retired.” “My body can’t give anymore.”
Although the duration of his characters on screen decreased, his production rate has been maintained in recent years. After Tenet (2020), his last collaboration with Nolan, Caine tied up Twist (a modern take on Oliver Twist) and Best Sellers with Aubrey Plaza in 2021, and last year he released Medieval and made The Great Escaper.
Actor Michael Caine with his wife Shakira at an event in London in May 2019. Tony Clark / SplashNews.com (EL PAÍS)
In reality, Caine (his stage name, which he recently added to his passport, tired of the hassles at airports; he was born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite Jr.) has been closing chapters in his life for some time. In March 2022, he auctioned off numerous items he had collected over the course of his existence: “It will be quite painful to part with such beloved parts of my life and career, but it is time to move on.” I hope that these memories will bring their new owners as much joy as they did me,” Caine explained in the Bonhams auction house brochure. It had little to do with economic needs: the British media estimated that Caine’s fortune reached 65 or 70 million euros. Caine also put Keston Lodge, his Leatherhead villa (in Surrey) with swimming pool and cinema room, for sale in 2020 for €4.5 million. As CNN explained, selling this home meant he also wanted to clear out some of the items inside, such as Marc Chagall’s painting “Les Amoureux dans l’arbre,” a pastel work by British artist LS Lowry (1887-1976). ) called Peel Park, painted in 1920 and a portrait of Caine himself signed by John Bratby in 1977.
As for his personal life, Caine has shared his life since 1973 with Shakira Baksh, his second wife, who is of Guyanese-British origin and with whom he has a daughter, Natasha. “Meeting Shakira saved me,” he said in an interview six years ago in which he explained his problems with alcohol. “She calms me down, I tell her everything. I was already famous when I met her, but I couldn’t have gotten here without her,” he said. He saw Baksh in an ad and decided to contact her. In addition, having three grandchildren and wanting to see them grow up definitely kept him away from addiction, as he explained in 2021. “They are my fountain of youth and have given me a new chance at a life without worries and problems.” “I am totally in love with them and so is my wife.”
The actor’s withdrawal comes a month before the scheduled publication of his novel Deadly Game, which describes the adventures of a detective who does not respect bureaucracy. “It has been my goal for years to write a thriller. It’s the genre I enjoy reading the most and I was really looking forward to working on Deadly Game,” he explained on the radio, expressing his hope that “readers will enjoy getting to know his character Harry Taylor.” That’s why he’s retiring from acting, but probably not from writing. He has been involved in this art for decades and has reviewed his life several times. In the very strange autobiography “What’s It All About?” A 1992 autobiography already gave a candid look back at the vicissitudes of her life, without even cutting her hair, as she was a young man with Richard Harris or Peter O’ Toole and wrote this after appearing in a sequel to Jaws, as she called it dying out, the scripts, while still relevant, were not of the quality of earlier decades. Shortly afterwards he even played a villain in one of Steven Seagal’s films (“On Dangerous Land”), but then came “Blood and Wine” and especially “The Cider House Rules” and Caine reappeared. See you this fall.
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