Roger Lewis

The man in the iron mask

Isn’t it peculiar when people change their name? John Wilson becoming Anthony Burgess, Peggy Hookham being borne aloft as Margot Fonteyn, or Richard Jenkins leaving Port Talbot as Richard Burton. When a person insists on being called somebody else we are witnessing an identity crisis. (Frank Skinner was Chris Collins until 1987. It is rumoured that as Chris Collins he still attends Johnson and Boswell conferences in Lichfield and presents academic papers.) The cocktail of vanity and self-loathing involved in renaming yourself is pungent and extreme — and helps to explain the career of Sir Michael Caine CBE, who was born in 1933 as Maurice Micklewhite, the son of a Billingsgate porter, and raised in a one-room flat off the Old Kent Road.

Has anyone ever gone to see a film expressly because Michael Caine is in it? (He’s hard to avoid, I know. The recent Batman Begins was a disappointment because I wanted the marvellous Michael Gough still to be Alfred, not Caine.) He is not really an engaging or attractive actor. (Sean Connery’s gleeful turn as Indiana Jones’s father would be quite beyond his range.) He always seems exasperated and sour — shouting and crying and baring his teeth in a monkey snarl. He pushes his face forward, ‘gives his voice a harsh cawing quality’, and his characters are the very reverse of relaxed or at ease with themselves or their surroundings. Whether he’s a cat burglar, sex-mad gangster, German paratrooper, transvestite mass murderer or portly Open University professor, Caine is incapable of being genial. He has pained eyes. Something is eating him, leaving us with the impression of a man who finds it hard not to be cynical and aggressive.

Bray is an excellent commentator on Caine because he refuses to hide the fact that he’s in two minds about his subject.

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