Michael Caine Quotes
-
You have to remember, I never became successful or wealthy till I was 30.
-
In England, I was a Cockney actor. In America, I was an actor.
-
I'm a frustrated stand-up comic. If you hand me a microphone and I get one laugh, then I'll go on for 20 minutes.
-
For me, the performance was always playing different people. And so when I got older, was no longer the romantic leading movie star, it became more and more interesting for me, the characters I played, you know?
-
When I was 6 my father went to fight in the war, so he was my big hero. I thought he was the greatest thing.
-
In my early days, I didn't know what a good film or a bad film was, and I was trying to make some money. As it happens I was lucky. I made some good films.
-
As an actor, my attitude towards using of film versus digital is, if you have film, filmmakers have to cut eventually so you don't have to learn all that dialogue. With digital, they can just go on forever and it's a nightmare. So, I like film - nice short takes.
-
Hey, I always say: if you want a quiet life, become a monk.
-
I'm very much more choosy now. I do stuff that I really, really, really like.
-
Things are not quite what they seem always. Don't start me on class, otherwise you'll get a four-hour lecture.
-
My own mentality is that I've retired. They send me these scripts and if I absolutely have to do it, then I go to work.
-
If you're a movie star, you get the girl, you lose the girl, and then you get her back. But if you're a character like me, you lose the girl, then you get another one, then you get another one, then you lose them all, then you lose your life.
-
The American cinema in general always made stories about working-class people; the British rarely did. Any person with my working-class background would be a villain or a comic cipher, usually badly played, and with a rotten accent. There weren't a lot of guys in England for me to look up to.
-
Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath.
-
I heard my first laughter on stage, when I was about 10 years old. It was gold pantomime and I remember I was playing Baron Fitznoodle, who was the father of the ugly sisters in "Cinderella." And I walked on and got a great big laugh and I thought that was fantastic, until I looked down and found that my flies were open. And so I always check my flies. I even check my flies on radio.
-
Comedy is underrepresented in every actor's life, because it's so bloody difficult to write.
-
You're never too old to be crazy.
-
Ive read an awful lot of books, Ive read alot of awful books
-
To me, 'Educating Rita' is the most perfect performance I could give of a character who was as far away from me as you could possibly get and of all the films I have ever been in, I think it may be the one I am most proud of.
-
I had been in that part of the world as a soldier in Korea, so I had been interested in Vietnam.
-
The old guys like me started in the theatre. I was in the theatre for nine years.
-
I was born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite. Imagine signing that autograph! You'd get a broken arm. So I changed my name to Michael Caine after Humphrey Bogart's 'The Caine Mutiny,' which was playing in the theater across from the telephone booth where I learned that I'd gotten my first TV job.
-
You've got to be flexible. Directors do a massive amount of planning and homework, and if after all that your director decides to throw it all out of the window and shoot spontaneously, then you must follow his lead.
-
My dialogue coach said to do a Texas accent, you lean on the next word, and that was the clue to me.