Michael Caine  Early life

Caine was born in St Olave's Hospital in Rotherhithe, London,^[6][7] the son of Maurice Joseph Micklewhite (1899–1957), a fish market porter, and Ellen Frances Marie Burchell (19 May 1900 – c. December 1989), a cook and charwoman.^[8] His father had English, Irish, and, reportedly, Irish Traveller ancestry,^[9][10] and was a Catholic. He was brought up in his mother's Protestant religion.^[11]

Caine had a maternal half-brother, David William Burchell (11 July 1925 – March 1992) and a full brother, Stanley Micklewhite (1936–2013). Caine grew up in Southwark, London, and during the Second World War, he was evacuated to North Runcton near King's Lynn in Norfolk.^[12] After the war, his father was demobilised, and the family were rehoused by the council in Marshall Gardens at the Elephant and Castle in a prefabricated house made in Canada,^[13] as much of London's housing stock had been damaged during the Blitz in 1940–41.

The prefabs, as they were known, were intended to be temporary homes while London was reconstructed, but we ended up living there for eighteen years and for us, after a cramped flat with an outside toilet, it was luxury.

=====================================================================

In 1944, he passed his eleven plus exam, winning a scholarship to Hackney Downs School (formerly The Grocers' Company's School).^[15] After a year there he moved to Wilson's Grammar School in Camberwell (now Wilson's School in Wallington, South London), which he left at sixteen after gaining a School Certificate in six subjects. He then worked briefly as a filing clerk and messenger for a film company in Victoria Street and film producer Jay Lewis in Wardour Street.^[16]

From 28 April 1952, when he was called up to do his national service until 1954, he served in the British Army's Royal Fusiliers, first at the BAOR HQ in Iserlohn, Germany, and then on active service during the Korean War. He had gone into Korea feeling sympathetic to communism, coming as he did from a poor family, but the experience left him permanently repelled.^[17] He experienced a situation where he knew he was going to die, the memory of which stayed with him and formed his character; he later said, "The rest of my life I have lived every bloody moment from the moment I wake up until the time I go to sleep."^[18] Caine would like to see the return of national service to help combat youth violence, stating: "I'm just saying, put them in the Army for six months. You're there to learn how to defend your country. You belong to the country. Then when you come out, you have a sense of belonging rather than a sense of violence".^[19]

============================================================================

A blue plaque erected in 2003 marks

Caine's birthplace at St Olave's Hospital

================================================================

Career

1950s

Caine's acting career began at the age of 20 in Horsham, Sussex, when he responded to an advertisement in The Stage for an assistant stage manager who would also perform small walk-on parts for the Horsham-based Westminster Repertory Company who were performing at the Carfax Electric Theatre.^[20] Adopting the stage name "Michael Scott", in July 1953 he was cast as the drunkard Hindley in the Company's production of Wuthering Heights.^[21] He moved to the Lowestoft Repertory Company in Suffolk for a year when he was 21. It was here that he met his first wife.^[22] He has described the first nine years of his career as "really, really brutal."^[23]Whilst in Lowestoft rep at the Arcadia Theatre (with Jackson Stanley's 'Standard Players') he appeared in nine plays. w/c 18/1/54 as Bryan Avery in the Wilfred Massey play "The Feminine Touch", w/c 1/2/54 as Philip Ryder in John Essex's play "The 10.5 Never Stops", w/c 8/1/54 as Peter (a young man) in R.C. Sherriff's "Miss Mabel", w/c 22/2/54 as Valentine Christie in Joan Morgan's "This Was A Woman", w/c 1/3/54 as Richard Baine in "Merely Murder" by Guy Paxton and Edward V. Hoille, w/c 8/3/54 as Ronnie in "The Maniac", w/c 15/3/54 as John Dixon (Ernest's rather erratic son of 23) in Armitage Owen's "The Dixon Family" and finally w/c 5/4/54 as Eddie Regan in Wilfred Massey's "John Marlow's Profession". On 3rd April he had married Patricia Haines at Lothingland Register Office whilst living in Cleveland Road, Lowestoft before moving on to London.

When his career took him to London in 1954 after his provincial apprenticeship, his agent informed him that there was already a Michael Scott performing as an actor in London and that he had to come up with a new name immediately. Speaking to his agent from a telephone booth in Leicester Square, London, he looked around for inspiration, noted that The Caine Mutiny was being shown at the Odeon Cinema in 1954, and decided to change his name to "Michael Caine". He joked on television in 1987 that, had a tree partly blocking his view been a few feet to the left, he might have been called "Michael Mutiny". (Humphrey Bogart was his "screen idol" and he would later play the part originally intended for Bogart in John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King.^[24]) He also later joked in interviews that had he looked the other way, he would have ended up as "Michael One Hundred and One Dalmatians".^[25] In 1959, he was Peter O'Toole's understudy in Lindsay Anderson's West End staging of Willis Hall's The Long and the Short and the Tall. He took over the role when O'Toole left to make Lawrence of Arabia and went on to a four-month tour of Britain and Ireland.

Michael Caine's first film role was as one of the privates in George Baker's platoon in the 1956 film A Hill in Korea. The stars of the film were George Baker, Stanley Baker, Harry Andrews and Michael Medwin, with Stephen Boyd and Ronald Lewis, and Robert Shaw also had a small part.

He appeared regularly on television in small roles. His first credited role on the BBC was 'Boudousse' in the Jean Anouilh play The Lark in 1956. Other parts included three roles in Dixon of Dock Green in 1957, 1958 and 1959, prisoner-of-war series Escape (1957), crime/thriller drama Mister Charlesworth, and a court orderly in The Caine Mutiny Court Martial (1958).