The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [6]
My debut as an actor on stage was in the school pantomime when I was seven. I was very nervous but when I walked on, the audience roared with laughter. I was delighted. This isn’t so bad, I thought – and then I discovered that my flies were undone. Many years later when I was playing a psychiatrist in Dressed to Kill (that is, a murdering, transvestite psychiatrist, just to give the full flavour of the role), I read a number of psychological treatises and one of the conclusions that really struck home for me was the suggestion that we all become the thing we are most afraid of. I used to suffer from terrible stage fright and when I think back to my childhood and how shy I’d been, I think how much this idea is true for me. I was never one of those kids who would perform for anyone – if a stranger came round I’d dive straight behind the curtains until they’d gone. I think I was the shyest little boy I’ve ever come across and it could be that I became a performer to overcome that fear of being in front of people. When you act, you project a part in public and you keep your real self behind those curtains. A journalist asked me recently during a tour for Harry Brown, which character was most like me – Alfie, Harry Palmer or Jack Carter. I said, ‘I have never played anyone remotely like me.’ He couldn’t understand that. ‘Those are all people that I knew,’ I said, ‘not people that I am.’
My very first public appearance was in the charity wing of St Olave’s Hospital, Rotherhithe, where I was born on Tuesday 14 March, 1933. I didn’t have the easiest start in life – and I probably wasn’t the handsomest baby, although my mother always said I was. I was named Maurice Joseph Micklewhite, after my father, and I was born with Blefora – a mild, incurable, but non-contagious eye disease that makes the eyelids swell. I never asked Robert Mitchum if he had the same condition, but like many things that seemed like a problem initially, it turned out to be to my advantage: my heavy eyelids made me look a bit sleepy on screen, and of course sleepy often looks sexy. My eyes weren’t my only problem in the looks department: my ears also stuck out. I know this didn’t affect Clark Gable’s career, but my mother was determined that I shouldn’t have to go through life being teased and she used to send me to bed every night for the first two years of my life with my ears pinned back with sticking plaster. It worked, but I wouldn’t recommend it.
So there I was with funny eyes, sticking-out ears and, just to round it all off, rickets. Rickets is a disease of poverty, a vitamin deficiency that causes weak bones and although I was eventually cured of it, I’ve got weak ankles still. When I started walking, my ankles couldn’t support my weight and I had to wear surgical boots. Oh, and I also had a nervous facial tic I couldn’t control. I tell you, looking at me, acting would have been the furthest thing from anyone’s mind.
We may have been poor, and I may have been shy and – at least in the early days – pretty ugly, but when I look back I can see just how lucky I was. I can never remember once being hungry, cold, dirty or unloved. My parents were both traditional working-class