Michael Caine has confirmed that he has said goodbye to the acting profession after declaring a month ago that he had "more or less retired". 90 years, of which 66 spent acting, the two-time Oscar winner told the BBC that this time is the right time.
"I decided. I made a starring film and received incredible reviews. What could I do better?", said the star whose real name is Michael Micklewhite: "The only possible parts are those of the ninety-year-old. At most an 85-year-old.
I will no longer be a protagonist. So I said to myself: Better leave now. I am 90 years old. My concern is to arrive alive at lunchtime."
Caine had previously announced plans for retirement and that The Great Escaper would be his last film.
Today's announcement comes just weeks after the actor told the Guardian he planned to play Charles Darwin in a production scheduled for 2024.
In The Great Escaper, Caine plays Bernard Jordan, a Royal Navy veteran who escaped from a Sussex retirement home in 2014 to attend ceremonies marking the 70th anniversary of the Normandy landings. Michael stars alongside Glenda Jackson, the great actress and Labour MP who died in June, and John Standing, the latter in the fictional role of an RAF pilot who befriends old Bernard on the ferry that is taking them to France.
Caine, who first starred with Jackson in 1975's A Romantic English Woman, said of his costar that they got along quite well, even though he didn't share her leftist views: "She's an extremist. She doesn't like to be seen with me because I'm obviously rich and not a socialist," he said, adding that he had voted for then-Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Along with Jack Nicholson and Paul Newman, Michael Caine is one of only actors to have been nominated for Academy Awards for films produced in five decades: in the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties and two thousand. Michael has won two Oscars in his long career: in 1986 for Hannah and His Sisters by Woody Allen and then in 1999 for The Cider House Rules, in both cases as best supporting actor. He had also starred in films such as Alfie, Carter and Rita, Rita, Rita.
Most recently he played Alfred Pennyworth, Bruce Wayne/Batman's butler in the Christopher Nolan-directed Dark Knight trilogy, a director with whom he also worked on The Prestige (2006), Inception (2010), Interstellar (2014), voice cameos in Dunkirk (2017) and Tenet (2020).
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