Michael caine movies

'I was once asked in an interview: "How would you sum up your life in one line?" and I answered, "All my dreams came true."'

I don't read many celebrity autobiographies. Of the countless books I've read there's been maybe 3? Or 4, if John Stuart Mill counts as a celebrity. (Perhaps he did, but not since he broke up with Kim Kardashian.)

Michael Caine is one of my favourite actors. I even enjoy some of his bad movies, or at least his movies that other people consider bad, like Blue Ice. And for some reason I just love the way he talks. So if I was ever going to read another celebrity autobiography, it was his.

I knew almost nothing about Michael Caine's life outside movies before I read this, so I was able to be suitably surprised at the places he's been and the things he's done. He's had a great life and an interesting one, and I'm sure he's still having a great life right now. If you've ever seen him being interviewed, you may have an idea of how he speaks: he writes just like that. It's always easy to hear his voice while reading his book. It's a good voice. If you have the idea that all celebrity autobiographies are ghostwritten, you can rest assured that this is written by the real Michael Caine. My hyperactive bullshit detectors decided this on the first page.

(As an aside, I'm not against ghostwritten autobiographies. In many cases, it's no doubt for the best. A good writer who's spoken with the subject, or seen some interviews, is probably better able to express that person's life, in their authentic voice, than the person who lived it.)

This is the story of Maurice (pronounced 'Morris') Micklewhite, a poor kid from the south of London who dreamed of becoming a movie star and made it, after years of struggle. He survived the Blitz, and poverty, and the Korean war, and years of being a struggling actor constantly in danger of going to jail for failing to pay child support, all the while sticking to his improbable dream. As time wore on, some of his like-minded friends found fame and fortune, making Michael think he'd missed the boat; and some, stricken by poverty and hopelessness, thought it would never happen and killed themselves.

The first few hundred pages of What's It All About?, recounting those years of struggle, are quite different to the rest of the book. I think this is largely because they're an excellent version of the 'rags to riches' story, one of those archetypal narratives, the 'seven basic plots'. These pages are also much better-written than most of the rest of the book. More care seems to have been taken with them, either by the author or an editor or proofreader. In a few passages Michael really brings to life London in the swinging sixties, communicating the spirit of that place and time as well as anyone ever has, in just a few paragraphs. These passages led me to lengthy contemplations of why the city I live in could never be home to a cultural revolution like 1960s London. (In summary: 1- the basic necessities of life are so expensive that few creative people can pursue a dream for the time it takes to learn a craft and get lucky, because they must either get a regular energy- and soul-sucking job or become homeless; 2- There's nowhere for fun creative people to hang out and meet, as all the night clubs are run by and for awful people.) The occasional foreshadowings of Michael's future life as a celebrity movie star, which are injected into his poverty-stricken youth, show that he knows exactly how to leaven the potentially depressing content with hints that it all turned out all right in the end. Also, these flashforwards to the celebrity life could be seen as bones thrown to those movie fans who want to know why this book about movies is all about poor people being bombed by Nazis.

Perhaps it's easier to write well when you're writing a story that fits one of those 'seven basic plots'. Perhaps the terrible deadline that oppressed Michael as he wrote the book (he mentions it several times) led to some haste. After Michael becomes rich and famous, the book seems less artfully constructed, more prone to clichéd expressions, more inclined to include dinners and meetings and trips and films that don't seem 'book-worthy'. In anyone else's book I'd wince at some of those clichés, but because they sound perfectly natural in Michael Caine's conversational voice, I was able to accept them in his book. A couple of times I thought, after several attempts at an incomprehensibly ungrammatical sentence, 'If you or anyone else had re-read that before sending this book to the printer, it would be a very different sentence now.'

After fame strikes, the book stops being a great story and becomes a series of anecdotes, many of them great, and some only OK. A lot of them are about movies, and your enjoyment may depend on whether you have seen those movies. The quality of the writing often seems proportional to the author's emotional investment in the story he's telling, making me wonder if the most important stories, the personal ones, were all written first, and finessed, and proofread, and the rest of the book was written quickly to meet a deadline.

I've seen a lot of Michael Caine's movies, more than half I guess, and I largely read this because I like a lot of them, so it was interesting that I liked the book best when Michael wasn't talking about movies. After he becomes famous, the best stories are about his beautiful wife Shakira. I loved the story of how they met. He's also very good at expressing his love of the great homes he's lived in, and I can't think of any book that has expressed this aspect of life, the joy of living in a really great house, so well as this one.