Michael Caine Biography

Since the 1960s Michael Caine has been the cinema’s most famous movie star with a Cockney accent.

Caine has been a leading man and character actor whose roles have included nearly everything, from naifs and villains to comic leads and foils.

In the 1960s he met the spotlight as a caddish womanizer in Alfie (1966), then starred as the dark hero Harry Palmer in the spy film The Ipcress File (1965) and two sequels: Funeral in Berlin (1966) and Billion Dollar Brain (1967).

In the 1970s he was memorable in The Man Who Would Be King (1975, with Sean Connery) and he won a best supporting actor Oscar for his role in Woody Allen‘s 1986 movie Hannah and Her Sisters.

As he matured into a wry and deeper older leading man, Caine won a second Oscar as the melancholy orphanage doctor in The Cider House Rules (1999, with Charlize Theron).

He played Alfred, the butler and confidant of Bruce Wayne, in the movies Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012), and his other high profile movies have included Inception (2010), Interstellar (2014), Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014) and Tenet (2020).

Often a working-class hero in the movies, Caine is a famously hard worker in real life, having appeared in more than 120 films in the 50 years between 1958 and 2008, and another two dozen since.

Caine was knighted in 2000 by Queen Elizabeth II. His autobiography What’s It All About? was published in 1992.