Playboy Interview: Michael Caine

If any single symbol could be said to epitomize the breadth and bizzazz of Britain's renaissance in the lively arts— and the disintegration of its age-old class system—it would probably be the unlikely face and form of blond, bespectacled Michael Caine, a cocky Cockney whose forebears have toiled for more than two centuries in London's Billingsgate fish market. In two short years, Caine's arrogant, earthy portrayals of lowborn blighters, in such films as "Alfie," "The Ipcress File" and "Funeral in Berlin," have escalated him from obscure penury to world-wide fame and considerable fortune—and set him in the forefront of young British actors of working-class origin whose robust masculinity has shattered the screen stereotype of the Briton as a stiff-upper-lipped aristocrat.

Inauspiciously born Maurice Micklewhite in London 35 years ago, Caine was expected to carry on the family tradition by working at the fish market. But the rebellious boy, smitten by the acting muse as a bit player in no-budget stage shows at a neighborhood settlement house, dreamed of a legendary life just three miles, but many worlds, away— beyond the footlights of the West End, London's glamorous theatrical capital; and at 16 he left school, beset with visions of instant stardom. Reality soon intervened, however, and young Micklewhite found himself detoured and discouraged by the noninterest of the theater world in his acting ambitions—and the necessity of earning a meager living at an assortment of odd jobs: as a roust-about in a tea warehouse, as a pneumatic-drill operator on a construction gang, as a washer in a steam laundry.

After a tour of duty as a private with the British army in West Germany and Korea, he got back on the track of his elusive muse by answering an ad in a theatrical paper and joining a small repertory company. Although he quickly proved his talent, his career became mired in walk-on stage roles and one-line parts in eminently forgettable films. And it almost sank out of sight when he was suspended from films for nine months for slugging an associate producer who started "pawing" him in a fit of temper. "I won't let anyone swear at me or put a finger on me," he explained succinctly.

Caine's morale hit bottom when, in 1959, his three-year marriage to actress Patricia Haines broke up; and his father died soon after. Following a lonely period of stocktaking and self-exile in Paris—during which he bummed meals, slept on benches and finally found his bearings again—he returned to England, and in five years chalked up minor roles in three dozen films and 125 television plays. Eventually, he filled in as Peter O'Toole's understudy in a Royal Court Theatre production, then won his big-break role as a foppish British army officer in "Zulu." Among those impressed by his performance was Harry Saltzman, coproducer of the James Bond films, who had just purchased the screen rights to Len Deighton's best-selling spy story "The Ipcress File." When Saltzman offered him the part of Harry Palmer, the book's amiably insolent antihero, Caine accepted both the offer and Saltzman's invitation to join him for lunch at the exclusive Les Ambassadeurs off Park Lane. "It was the first time I'd been in a place as posh as that," Caine confessed later.

When "Ipcress"—and its laconic star —unexpectedly became a major box-office attraction, Saltzman tore up Caine's contract and told him to write his own. He did—a whopper. As the canny Cockney puts it, "In a capitalistic society, money means freedom." In the two years since then, Caine's memorable performances (as Palmer again in "Funeral in Berlin," as a cold-blooded Romeo in "Alfie," as a romantic rogue in "Gambit," as a shy, clumsy suitor in "The Wrong Box" and as a drawling Georgia bigot in Otto Preminger's "Hurry Sun-down") have established him as a major international sex star—a status he accepts with diffident ambivalence. His earnings, meanwhile, invested in blue-chip stocks, have brought him within arm's reach of the freedom—and the millionaire status—he covets with such single-minded concentration.

Though at the zenith of his popularity—and of a nonstop shooting schedule—Caine readily consented when Playboy requested an exclusive interview. In several evenings of conversation with interviewer David Lewin—at Caine's hotel room in Helsinki (where he was filming a new Deighton thriller, "The Billion Dollar Brain") and at his luxurious new apartment near Mayfair's fashionable Marble Arch, where he collects recordings, modern paintings and, according to rumor, a veritable aviary of exotic "birds," indigenous and otherwise—he made good on his promise to talk about himself "more fully and honestly than ever before."

[Q] Playboy: Your father was a fish porter and your mother a charwoman. Yet in a traditionally class-conscious society— and profession—you've become an international star. How do you account for it?

[A] Caine: It's just because my background was so ordinary that it happened to me. I'm an ordinary man, and the things that people recognize in me are not the things they expect to find in a movie star; movie stars are usually extraordinary people—the women with bigger busts, the men more handsome. I am lean—skinny, in fact—and I wear glasses; but my appeal, if I have any, is precisely because I am a reflection of ordinary people. You might say I'm sort of a boy next door—if he had a good scriptwriter. But I'm a product of my working-class background—not that we were ever poor in the sense of not having a roof over our heads or things to wear and to eat. But there was only one outside lavatory for everyone living in our block, and that isn't the best way for people to grow up. We were poor in the sense of not having any security. Every penny my father earned was spent, and there was never anything left over.

[Q] Playboy: What was your home life like?

[A] Caine: I had a happy, very strong family life; and although I am a divorced man, I still have a strong sense of love for family. I'll have my own family and children and a wife again someday. Anyway, going into show business—which can be neurotic—didn't bother me, because I grew up without any hang-ups or neuroses. I'm normal to the point of boredom. I have weaknesses, like a lot of men, but no neurotic weaknesses. I don't even act out of conceit, but as a form of mirror; I try to do things that I haven't seen anyone else try to do on screen— the little things that people do in real life without realizing it, that are sometimes silly or funny, though they may be meant quite seriously. I set out to become not a movie star but a professional actor; and, as time went on, a good professional actor.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think you've succeeded?

[A] Caine: Yes, and that's not conceit. I have been judged a professional by professionals who can act. I may do something wrong, but that's not because I don't know what I'm doing.

[Q] Playboy: Do you consider yourself a star as well as an actor?

[A] Caine: At the moment, no. But I'm a hell of a high rocket.

[Q] Playboy: Unlike Scofield, Olivier, Guinness, Redgrave, Gielgud and the rest of England's aristocratic "old guard," Britain's male stars of the Sixties—Burton, O'Toole, Connery, Terence Stamp, Albert Finney, David Hemmings and yourself—all share a working-class background. Do you see your success as part of the breakdown of the class system?

[A] Caine: Well, I'm certainly one of the lucky beneficiaries of that breakdown. I'm not only working-class; I'm ordinary-looking, I have a Cockney accent and I don't even have a voice like an actor's. I have a voice like people. When ordinary British people talk, their voices don't go up and down with lovely inflections. They talk flat, like me. The cinema today has become a medium of realism, and I talk the way real people do. And, like real people, I don't pull faces on the screen. A director will say to me, "When you see the girl, really raise your eyebrows. She's so beautiful." I say, "Why not cut to the girl, and if she's beautiful, then the audience will raise its eyebrows. Then cut to me and I'll do nothing, but it will look like I'm raising my eyebrows." The other day I was told that a director on a film set said to an actor who was making faces all over the place: "Why can't you do nothing, the way Michael Caine does nothing?" I don't know how he meant it, but I took it as a compliment. Yet I couldn't even have earned a living in the British theater of the Twenties or even later—except as a corny Cockney gangster or a dustman, like in Pygmalion. The young working-class actors of those days were forced to be caricaturists of their own class. On those few occasions when we saw Englishmen like ourselves on the screen, it seemed artificial, because it was a reflection of the theater of French windows, which had no room for young men—not just from our class but with our point of view, which of necessity was a realistic and practical one. The whole country wasn't represented on screen or on stage or in literature. I'm not saying the other ought to go—I love Noel Coward's plays—but I say there should be some representation of the other life, which, after all, is in the majority. My kind of Englishman has been around for 2000 years, except we never had the money to travel—so people abroad never knew about us. The Englishman the foreigner knows is based on a quarter of a million men; I'd like to point out that there are over 24,000,000 others of us just waiting about for enough money to go over to America and show you just what the Englishman is really about.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think there is any correlation between the tenacity of actors and deprivation of background?

[A] Caine: For me there is. It's like boxers. There has never been a heavyweight champion of the world who was an aristocrat, because an aristocrat doesn't have to go and get his nose smashed in in order to make any money. In America, actors have almost always come from deprived backgrounds, and now it's beginning to happen here in Britain, too—the O'Tooles and the Finneys and, to a lesser extent, myself. I've always burned my bridges to make sure I couldn't go back. And since in life you cannot stand still, I have had to go forward. To me this isn't tenacity or courage but an aid to a lazy coward. I never underestimate the bad things in myself. I can be lazy quite easily, and my cowardice is in not wanting to go back to what I was before. I put a stop to them early by working continuously and making it impossible to go back—because I had nothing to go back to.

[Q] Playboy: Part of the life you left behind were the grim years you spent in school. Is this a period you'd prefer to forget?

[A] Caine: I might prefer to, but it's difficult to forget being beaten regularly, like a gong, for four bloody years.

[Q] Playboy: Why were you beaten?

[A] Caine: I was considered incorrigible. I remember one report from my housemaster that stands out vividly. He wrote: "This is the most lazy, conceited object it has ever been my misfortune to have to teach, but I am sure we will make a laborer of him." And the headmaster agreed.

[Q] Playboy: Were you conceited?

[A] Caine: I don't think I've ever been conceited—although that is a conceited remark.

[Q] Playboy: Did you retaliate when you were beaten?

[A] Caine: Oh, yes. And I continue to retaliate, even to this day. I covet nothing and I wish nobody any harm; and if people leave me alone, I'm fine. But if anybody does anything to me, my retaliation is swift; and if it can't be swift, it's inexorable, because, if necessary, I'm prepared to wait for many years to win.

[Q] Playboy: You mean to pay someone back for a beating?

[A] Caine: I don't necessarily mean anything physical; it could be a slight to my dignity. It's a Cockney thing, that; we don't mind what you do, as long as you don't take our dignity away. If you do, we'll get back at you with something worse than you did to us. I won't take anything from anyone at any time. When I was in school, they used to let the student prefects whack you, and I wouldn't stand for this. If I was to be hit, it had to be by an adult. The headmaster was supposed to be more intelligent and better educated than I, but the fact that he had to resort to physical punishment lost him to me forever. That's something I rather like about Harry Palmer in these spy films—this complete disregard for authority. This is something I share with him. I will not take notice of people in authority, ever.

[Q] Playboy: Was this true during your service in the army?

[A] Caine: With a vengeance. I found out why war is hell: Army authority is absolute. But it was an educational experience; it taught me what a fascist state is really like. There is no recourse to justice in the army, because if something goes wrong, you are defended and judged by the same kind of people who accuse and prosecute you.

[Q] Playboy: You're reported to have said that if you were drafted again, you wouldn't serve. Is that true?

[A] Caine: I'm prepared to go to prison rather than serve again—except in one case: If somebody sets foot in England, then I'll be the first up. But I'm not prepared to fight wars in foreign lands anymore. I couldn't muster up much patriotism over Korea, which is where I served.

[Q] Playboy: Were you a poor soldier?

[A] Caine: I was an awful soldier. One of the most terrible things I could think of was to have my legs shot off, and I wasn't anxious for that to happen—even for king and country and crap like that—10,000miles away from London. So I fooled them. I did absolutely nothing; they never even knew I was there. I remember being in a platoon and the sergeant saying to me, "What's your name?" And I said, "Micklewhite," which is my real name. And he said, "How long have you been here?" And I said, "Three months." And he said, "Have you been on parade every day?" And I said, "Yes, sir." And he said, "I've never noticed you. What are you up to?" "Nothing, sir," I said. But I was up to something. I was trying to disappear. My boots and my buttons were shined to the minimum degree—just enough not to get nicked. And I did just enough labor to avoid the guardhouse. I'm six feet two, with fair hair, and he hadn't noticed me after three months in his platoon—which makes me think I would have been a good spy.

[Q] Playboy: You were mustered out and returned home in 1953. Was there any opposition from your family when you decided to become an actor?

[A] Caine: My mother's attitude was, "Well, if this is what you want to do, then you'd better go and do it. Then, when you're a failure, come back and do what all the other boys do around here"— which was to peddle fish in the market. My family had been fish porters for a couple of hundred years, since the market began. But I didn't want any of that. I wanted to do something glamorous. Later, when I was an actor and waiting for a particular part to come up and I had no money to live on and there wasn't time for me to earn any doing something else, my mother lent me some money.

[Q] Playboy: How much?

[A] Caine: Her life savings—around £200 or £300. Her attitude was that if a son wants to do something, then you help him up to the hilt; and if it fails, then you all start again from nothing—together.

[Q] Playboy: What was your father's attitude?

[A] Caine: He didn't like the idea, because he said the theater was a bunch of "queenies," which is a Cockney euphemism for homosexuals. The actors talked posh and they wore make-up, and that was enough for him. But he wasn't too worried about the fact that they were queenies—only by the fact that I wanted to join them.

[Q] Playboy: What did your friends think of your acting ambitions?

[A] Caine: There were two or three kinds of reactions. At first, everybody tried to put me on—or, as we say in England, "take the mickey." And they all started talking like girls or tripping around like ballet dancers, if I mentioned it in front of a group of fellows. That was in the wishful-thinking stage. Then, when I actually did it, their attitude was, "Well, who does he think he is? How dare he be so conceited?" And they all went out of their way to ignore me. Some working-class people are the biggest reactionaries in the world, you know. Whatever I did, I couldn't win. The only one who ever encouraged me was Mr. Watson, my English master at school. He was a marvelous man who took me through all the Shakespeare plays. I was good at English literature and grammar, because I had an interest in it, but lazy at the rest. Mr. Watson encouraged me to be an amateur actor—at night—and get a good job during the day. Instead, I became an actor in the daytime and found other things to do at night, which didn't need an audience.

[Q] Playboy: Do you keep in touch with Mr. Watson or any of your old friends?

[A] Caine: I don't keep in touch with anybody—not with anybody. This comes from my bitterness about the fact that when I was an unknown, broke actor for ten years, I spent those ten years on my own, and the only friends I had were not from where I lived, but other actors. From everyone else I got either the illconcealed attitude that I was a Cockney upstart bum or a kind of reverse snobbery, like the unctuous friendliness of those who are overnice to Negroes, nicer even than to their own mothers. It was one or the other, from both working-class people and the so-called upper classes. So you can understand why I have a tremendous affection for other people in the business, because they were the only ones to treat me like a human being, to give me money for a drink or to buy me a meal. I used to live in those days on two pounds, ten shillings a week, out of which the government used to take income tax. Tax levies for everyone started much lower then. They took two shillings a week out of two pounds, ten shillings. I have never forgiven them for that. I hate them more for that than for the tax they take from me now.

[Q] Playboy: How much is that?

[A] Caine: I make around £5300 [about $15,000] a week, of which the government takes about 95 percent; but even that still leaves me better off than when they took two shillings out of two pounds, ten shillings.

[Q] Playboy: Now that you're fairly well off, are you a saver or a spender?

[A] Caine: I'm not a spendthrift, but I'm not a mean man, either. I live in a good style, but I have various commitments to my family. While I know you can't take it with you, I don't want the money to go before I've had a chance to enjoy it.

[Q] Playboy: Are you a materialist?

[A] Caine: Very definitely. I know what the world is all about and I've had both sides of it—and it's better to have money than not to have it. Anyone who says that money can't buy happiness is putting out propaganda for the rich; it's utter nonsense. I've had 35 years of not having any money and I would now like, in all justice, fairness and decency, to have 35 years of absolute luxury—and if I can possibly get it, I will. But if I can't, I won't shoot myself. I'll shoot somebody else.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have a compulsion to get rich?

[A] Caine: It's not a compulsion to get rich, but a compulsion never to be poor again. I want to earn a million dollars in the next five years, so that my average earnings would work out to about £25 a week for the whole of my life. I don't think that's being extravagant.

[Q] Playboy: At the premiere of Zulu, in which you had your first big film role, your mother refused a seat in the theater and stood outside to watch the celebrities. Why?

[A] Caine: I fail to understand it completely, and she won't open up on the subject. When I talk about it, she says, "Have another cup of tea." I had the car and everything and invited her to come, and she wouldn't. I went, but what I didn't know was that she had come up by bus and watched me go in, from the pavement outside the cinema. And it was a cold night in January. I can understand why she came up by bus but not why she said no in the first place. And she hasn't changed since then. After I became a movie actor and started making really big money, I offered her a new home, but she kept refusing—I think because she thought I couldn't afford it. I've gone on so much about it, though, that she thinks I must be able to now. But she still won't move from the place she's always lived—in Brixton, a poor area of London. Moving my mother would be like moving an old lady from the Bronx to the best part of Boston.

[Q] Playboy: Your father died before your screen success, didn't he?

[A] Caine: It's a great personal tragedy for me that he died when I was unemployed, had no money and my marriage had just broken up. He died when I was a failure in work and marriage.

[Q] Playboy: Your former wife has described your marriage as "three years with no fun." Fair or unfair?

[A] Caine: Fair if she thought it. I had some fun.

[Q] Playboy: Did she approve of your ambition to act?

[A] Caine: Only if I was going to be an obvious success, which, of course, at the time, I wasn't.

[Q] Playboy: Did marriage have an effect on your work?

[A] Caine: I'll say it did. It's corny to say an artist must be free; I'd qualify that and say a young artist must be free. Well, at that time, marriage stifled me. I suffered from psychological claustrophobia. The worst performances I gave in the theater were when I was married—because you need to be terribly free emotionally to be an actor, and I didn't feel free. You need time to come to terms with yourself and know what you are about.

[Q] Playboy: Is that what went wrong with your marriage?

[A] Caine: My wife wanted security. What she didn't know was—so did I. But if I'd taken a job I hated just to live with her in security, what kind of security would that have been? I might as well be a bum on my own.

[Q] Playboy: Wouldn't that concern put you off marriage now?

[A] Caine: Oh, no. But any way you mention it, I failed the first time—as a breadwinner, as a husband and emotionally. You name it, and I failed. Except as a lover. But that's not to say I wouldn't try it again. That would be like an actor refusing to work with a director who has made a flop picture.

[Q] Playboy: It's said that you had a nervous breakdown at the time your marriage broke up. Is this true?

[A] Caine: It was a withdrawal from other people. Nervous breakdown is too serious a term. I didn't want people to witness my failure. This was another example of my cowardice. I just wanted to get away. I went to Paris, where no one would know me. I had about £25 and I lived in the air terminal, because no one notices you there. An American student who ran a sandwich bar used to give me some food to start the day off. You can survive on very little food. It's good for you—helps you keep slim.

[Q] Playboy: Was it hard to find work when you came back from Paris?

[A] Caine: I got four jobs, one after another. That's the thing with this business. Just when you think it's marvelous, it kicks you in the teeth. And when you think it's a swine, it gives you a hand up.

[Q] Playboy: Did you find it difficult to begin acting again?

[A] Caine: Not only was it not difficult; my acting had improved beyond all thought. It improved because I found things out about myself—a sort of strength that can't be busted, and that's a handy thing to have along on any trip.

[Q] Playboy: It was a long one; but after five years and several hundred minor roles in films, plays and TV dramas, you finally won the part of the foppish army officer in Zulu. What kind of critical reaction did you get?

[A] Caine: My favorite was a memo sent to London by an American film company. It read: "Who was the limey fag in Zulu?"

[Q] Playboy: Fortunately, there were more favorable reactions—most notably from Harry Saltzman, coproducer of the James Bond films, who offered you the role of Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File on the strength of your performance in Zulu. Did you expect the Palmer film to take off as successfully as it did?

[A] Caine: No, I suppose I underestimated the intelligence of audiences, which people in show business do all the time. We made The Ipcress File very cheaply, expecting, if we were lucky, to break even or make a little profit. I thought it would be a rather specialized movie. In the United States, it was the students and the intellectuals who started the whole picture off.

[Q] Playboy: Why? Did they identify with Palmer's insolence, his contempt for authority?

[A] Caine: I think so. Like a lot of young people today, Palmer is a kind of lonely anarchist—very lonely and very anarchic. So am I—though I haven't been too lonely lately. But I'm still anarchic.

[Q] Playboy: Is Palmer like James Bond in that sense?

[A] Caine: Yes. In addition to being lonely anarchists, Bond and Palmer are against government by big business. They believe in government by small business, and the small business is them. They are the judge, jury and executioner, should you come up to be tried before them. And they'll shoot you. based on their own judgment, without reference to anyone else.

[Q] Playboy: Do you share this attitude?

[A] Caine: Not literally; but I am insubordinate like they are. And I share Palmer's style of ironic non sequitur humor—or rather, Palmer shares mine, since I added this element to the role myself. But Palmer isn't really me. And neither is Alfie.

[Q] Playboy: Are you like Alfie in your taste for women?

[A] Caine: Of all the people I know, I am furthest away from him in character— despite the publicity I get always running around with girls all over the place. But Alfie didn't run around with girls; he ran around with himself, reflected in girls. My own thing with women is that I'm completely interested in them. Alfie is like a lot of young men today—or any day; he's interested in how interested the woman is in him. Alfie is also very narcissistic. He was always combing his hair, and he didn't like powder on his suit, so he had a handkerchief if the girl had to put her head on his shoulder. And I could never make love to a girl in a car, the way he did all the time: My legs are too long. In addition to being totally unlike me—legwise and otherwise—Alfie was a difficult role to play because he ran through all the emotions, from A to Z, with the added distraction of talking to the camera, which is extraordinarily awkward, because your whole training is to ignore it.

[Q] Playboy: Were you the first to be offered the part?

[A] Caine: All the scripts that came to me in those days had someone else's fingerprints on them. Alfie was offered to four or five other actors first: Terence Stamp, Laurence Harvey, Anthony Newley and James Booth. I got it only when they didn't want it. And Christopher Plummer had a crack at Palmer before I did, but he turned it down for The Sound of Music.

[Q] Playboy: How many more films in the Palmer series will you make?

[A] Caine: I should think one more—Horse Under Water—after the one I'm making now. There's another Deighton-Palmer book—An Expensive Place to Die. It was serialized in Playboy, as a matter of fact; but Harry Saltzman doesn't own it.

[Q] Playboy: Would you refuse to do any more after Horse Under Water?

[A] Caine: If Harry buys them, I'll make them. I enjoy them, and I get plenty of opportunity to play other parts—tons of them. This film I'm making now—The Billion Dollar Brain—is my ninth movie, but only my third Palmer. It doesn't worry me. You see, Palmer wears glasses— and the other characters I play never wear glasses.

[Q] Playboy: Sean Connery has played a number of non-Bond roles; yet he seems to feel he's typecast as 007.

[A] Caine: It's a different case for Sean. Even before he made the first film, about 5,000,000 copies of the books had been sold, and now it's about 40,000,000. So 007 was pretty well known: and for Sean, that's been a double-edged sword. The Bond films have made him a very rich, very successful man, but they have also typed him—and that's murder for an actor. Now Sean puts on mustaches and things when he plays other parts. Anyway, when I came along, I had Sean as an example: and I was fortunate in that Harry Palmer wasn't as well known as Bond; he didn't even have a name in The Ipcress File book. Deighton didn't call him anything. We had to give him a name for the film. There was no mystique connected with Harry Palmer, no hysteria. That came afterward.

[Q] Playboy: Do you get a good deal of fan mail now?

[A] Caine: Bales of it, mostly for Palmer— although far more people saw Alfie. I suppose they thought Alfie couldn't read. I've gotten some crazy letters from girls in America. One said: "You are the greatest actor in the world, because your nose is like Paul McCartney's."

[Q] Playboy: How do you feel about the sex-symbol image you've acquired?

[A] Caine: Ambivalent. It gets me into a lot of trouble, but I enjoy it because it's helping to construct a new image of the Englishman. In America, the Englishman has long been either a bowler-hatted nincompoop or a guy too asexual even to be a fag. It wasn't by intention, but I have altered that image slightly with the parts I've played.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think is the reason for your attractiveness to women, on screen and off?

[A] Caine: I've never really felt I was all that attractive, and you've asked me the question as though it were a statement. As a matter of fact, I grew up a very long, skinny, unattractive boy—a sort of long milk bottle—and it was a great handicap when it came to trying to date the girls. I was like the puny weakling in the Charles Atlas advertisements, and I suppose I still am, mentally. But now, only slightly filled out, that same figure is supposed to be attractive to women. So what's the point of doing weight-lifting? I've seen too many men die from an excess of good health. If I am successful with women, I suppose it must have something to do with my attitude toward them. The world seems to be full of men looking for a girl's shoulder to cry on. In real life—and I think I must give this impression on screen—I offer a shoulder for women to cry on. In a way, I have a Victorian attitude toward women—but only in a way. Those Victorians were pretty mixed up, you know; anyone who could faint over the glimpse of an ankle had to be mixed up. But I'm Victorian in the sense that I am always well-mannered toward women. I regard them as weaker creatures than I, who have to be looked after. When I was a young man and very, very broke, I never ever took a girl out until I could pay the whole bill. None of this sharing for me; I'd rather stay at home alone. Sharing negates what I am as a man: a provider. Any woman who is with me gets looked after: the decisions are made; everything is taken care of—but not dictatorially: if she wants to see a different movie, we see both.

[Q] Playboy: What first attracts you to a woman?

[A] Caine: Her eyes. Who said the eyes are the mirror of the soul? I wish it had been me. But I love the whole idea of women. They are everything I am not. They are soft. Yes—soft.

[Q] Playboy: And you're hard?

[A] Caine: Yes, very, although I'm a bit soft at the center. But I never ask for mercy nor give mercy to a woman in love.

[Q] Playboy: What do you find most unattractive in women?

[A] Caine: Conceit, and using their sex for money. I don't believe in the myth of the golden-hearted prostitute. If a whore had a heart of gold, she would have sold it.

[Q] Playboy: Apart from softness, what are the qualities you look for in a woman?

[A] Caine: The greatest quality a woman can have is respect for herself, especially sexually. That may sound funny coming from me, but it's so. I think a woman gels exactly the amount of respect from men that she has for herself. For that reason, I never go out with scrubbers. Scrubbers are dirty in body and mind and they have no self-respect. My woman, of necessity, has to be extremely beautiful, aware of herself without being conceited, intelligent and, above all— something I prize in women yet few have —she must have a sense of humor. Not to make me laugh, but to laugh at herself. It would be a marvelous thing to meet a fabulously beautiful woman who is intelligent and who can take herself unseriously. And I have met one.

[Q] Playboy: Who?

[A] Caine: Camilla Sparv.

[Q] Playboy: The actress? Tell us about her.

[A] Caine: Not any more than that. I'm like the Arabs, who won't have their photographs taken, because they feel they'll lose something; if I talk about her, I lose some of my privacy.

[Q] Playboy: Do you resent the way your personal life has been sensationalized in the scandal sheets?

[A] Caine: Only on the basis that it's usually reported inaccurately or upon non-existent affairs. They don't hesitate to link me sexually with all the women I go out with—and with a few I've never met—but they never say why I'm out with someone. I may be trying to start a romance, but it's equally possible that it's because her husband is my best friend and he's sick and wants me to take her to a premiere. Or perhaps she's a platonic friend. I remember Frank Sinatra saying that if he'd had the affairs he'd been credited with, he'd be talking from the bottom of a jar in a laboratory. I don't say I'd be in a bottle yet, but I'd be well on the way.

[Q] Playboy: Is your sex life that busy?

[A] Caine: It used to be. But not lately. I'm just with Camilla, and that's it.

[Q] Playboy: Before Camilla, did you keep a lot of girls in your black book?

[A] Caine: Oh, yes. When I was 20, I wanted more girls than the next man. I had just come out of the army, where it is very difficult to take any girl out on a private's pay, and I wanted to make up for lost time. But not anymore, because that's childish, and I'm no longer a child.

[Q] Playboy: What made you change?

[A] Caine: Camilla.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think the relationship will last?

[A] Caine: At the moment, I'm with this one girl. We shall see how we get on, and either we shall get married or we shall part. That's all. It's a very plain and simple thing.

[Q] Playboy: If you do get married, will it be an equal partnership?

[A] Caine: Not completely. I think I should be more equal than she is.

[Q] Playboy: Is that fair?

[A] Caine: I'm not interested in being fair. Men give up liberty on getting married and women find security, so she has to give up something herself.

[Q] Playboy: How about her liberty?

[A] Caine: Well, she has given up one thing for another. Love is the great incentive —not just sex.

[Q] Playboy: If you decide to remarry, will you be faithful? You once said that the church's morality of one man, one woman in marriage through life was "a pretty losing game" to preach today.

[A] Caine: Wouldn't it be marvelous if you could find somebody to love and to want until death do you part? But life being what it is, what can you do? Sex is free for all, and the marriage ceremony was written when the life expectancy was 37 years. So getting married at 21 and staying married until you were 37 and died wasn't too bad. But take a kid today getting married at 21 to a girl he met six weeks before. Can they hold out until they are 97? It's not possible, this one-man, one-woman ideal, although I believe it's more possible for women than for men. I know I'm hypocritical about this and have a double standard. But I don't believe a woman can have sexual relations outside marriage without falling in love for as long as it lasts. And there's the infidelity. But a man can. A man is more animal and he can have a sexual affair outside marriage without falling in love. Otherwise, how come there are so many female prostitutes in the world and so few male ones?

[Q] Playboy: If you get married again, do you intend to practice this double standard?

[A] Caine: No. It doesn't apply for me when I'm married; because however corny it may sound, when I marry, I stay faithful. Otherwise, what's the point in marriage? It's all very well for people to say it doesn't matter, because the wife doesn't know or the husband doesn't know. But the person who's doing it knows, and that's enough. And whenever you're seen with someone else, that makes the wife or husband cheap. If you need someone else—a new partner—then go and tell her it's all over and you want a divorce. Because marriage is like a house. If love is the foundation and sex is the roof, the house isn't going to be much good if the roof leaks and lets water in to rot the foundation. It's better to pull it down and start again. I believe in the double standard—but only before marriage. Sexual responsibility lies with the man. If he doesn't know how, he'd better go out and get some practice. You've really got to know what you're doing; otherwise, she'll be off with the milkman. I really believe that no man should be a virgin at marriage—but every woman should.

[Q] Playboy: Obviously, if every woman were a virgin at marriage, it would be difficult for every man—or any man—to get premarital experience.

[A] Caine: Fortunately, not everyone takes my advice. I try to make other people's failings work for me. I know—I'm being hypocritical and I have this complete double standard. Well, so be it. I'm a creature of contradictions.

[Q] Playboy: How do you plan to reconcile these contradictions for your daughter when she grows up and begins dating? Will you advise her to remain a virgin until marriage?

[A] Caine: Absolutely. There'll be bloody hell to pay if she doesn't. I don't want her growing up promiscuous and having affairs at 17 or 18 and thinking it's all a lot of fun. By 25, those girls are alone with a gas oven in Earls Court. I know that losing a girl's virginity doesn't mean she would become promiscuous, but it could start that way. Anyway, for religious reasons, I would want my daughter to be a virgin until she married.

[Q] Playboy: But many theologians no longer insist on virginity. In any case, are you so religious?

[A] Caine: It's not what theologians say; it's what I say. As for being religious myself —yes, I am, but not in a pious way.

[Q] Playboy: Who are the girls you've made love to supposed to marry?

[A] Caine: I'm not concerned about them.

[Q] Playboy: Would you want your daughter to treat men as you treat women?

[A] Caine: I would want her to be treated by men with courtesy and consideration, but I don't think a woman should "treat" men, in any sense of the word. That presupposes some set rule. I would want something spontaneous; you can't "treat" someone if you're spontaneous. I would like her natural respect for men to be what she would expect from them.

[Q] Playboy: What would you expect of a son-in-law?

[A] Caine: Respect for her, love for her and an ability to provide for her.

[Q] Playboy: But not virginity?

[A] Caine: Her, yes; him, no.

[Q] Playboy: Couldn't this create problems during an engagement?

[A] Caine: Of course it could, but I don't believe in engagements. Engagements are public-relations stunts for jewelers to sell rings. Either you love a woman enough to marry her or you don't. But you can't get married as a man without having had previous sexual experience.

[Q] Playboy: Did you, before your first marriage?

[A] Caine: I lost my virginity when I was 15 with an older woman in a park. She invited me and I accepted. She was very understanding and nice about it, because, although she satisfied me, I couldn't satisfy her; I didn't know the first thing about it then. After that, I couldn't get anybody else for two years, and two years is a long time, especially when you don't have any TV in the evening. That's when I went home and looked at myself and said, "You'll have to learn how to chat up the birds if you're going to get any, Michael. You're going to have to be a talker. It's no good standing in the corner of the room and waiting for them to come and grab you, because they won't." So that's what I became. Promiscuous. Promiscuous? No, I'm not promiscuous. But I did become a bit of a lad when I came out of the army at 20, because, as I said, I tried to increase the list. Then I realized that's impossible, and so I became a romancer. That's what I am—a great romancer— not a libertine.

[Q] Playboy: Wouldn't it be fair to say, though, that sex plays a central role in your life?

[A] Caine: Well, I prefer it to watching TV. But it's not all that important to me: It would be important only if I wasn't getting any. It's like money. Money's not important if you have it; but it becomes enormously important if you don't.

[Q] Playboy: How much emotional involvement do you think there should be before one makes love?

[A] Caine: That depends on how old you are or how drunk you are.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever told a girl you loved her in order to get into bed with her?

[A] Caine: Never.

[Q] Playboy: If you promised marriage to one girl, would you stay out of bed with another?

[A] Caine: I have never promised marriage, so I have no frame of reference. Either I got married or I didn't. When I was married, I was faithful.

[Q] Playboy: You wouldn't promise marriage if you didn't mean it?

[A] Caine: If I promised, I'd mean it. A promise is like buying something, which is why I've never been with a prostitute and never will.

[Q] Playboy: How long could you—or would you—go out with a girl without making love to her?

[A] Caine: Depends what I thought of her. If I went out in the first place just to make love, then one night. If I liked the girl very much, I'd probably get bored after two weeks. But if I was madly in love with her, it wouldn't matter to me how long I waited. I'd have someone else in the meantime, of course—but that would be her fault, wouldn't it?

[Q] Playboy: Has any woman ever said no to you?

[A] Caine: Yes. Several.

[Q] Playboy: Do you accept rejection easily?

[A] Caine: Immediately. I don't argue about it—and I never ask again. Mind you, there is a certain kind of rejection where she says no but means, "Would you like to come in for coffee?" But there's also the kind of no where she slams the door in your face. You can't make love through a shut door.

[Q] Playboy: If you really wanted someone, would you take no for an answer?

[A] Caine: Yes. Life is too short to fight losing battles. I don't believe in the old-time maxim that if you woo a woman long enough, you'll get her. Today, if you woo a woman long enough and in the end you do get her, you'll find you didn't want her in the first place. And you'll have missed all the others.

[Q] Playboy: As a rule, how long do your relationships last?

[A] Caine: About three years.

[Q] Playboy: Do they tend to be violent, tranquil or passionate?

[A] Caine: All three.

[Q] Playboy: Why did you say you end your affairs "with an ax and give the girl her passport"?

[A] Caine: I can't stand the long-drawn-out thing. I've tried it that way and it's like tearing people from limb to limb. To do it slowly is much, much worse. Of course, you can't end an affair without inflicting some pain, but it's minimal if it's done quickly and cleanly.

[Q] Playboy: Are your motives always so magnanimous?

[A] Caine: Probably not. I suppose it's cowardice, really—or selfishness. But if you want to know the truth, there has never been a woman I really wanted to leave.

[Q] Playboy: Then why do you leave them?

[A] Caine: If you're a nice fellow, people start taking liberties. If you settle down to a long relationship, the woman one day will start ordering you around. She thinks, "I've got him." The day a woman thinks she has got me, that's the day she has lost me. I just let people be natural with me and I never tell them what I like or dislike, and then I know exactly what they really feel. That way you find out the truth. That's what I do with women. I let them be themselves and I watch them and I'm as tame as a mouse. Then one day they say, "Darling, would you make the tea?" and I make the tea and throw the bloody lot all over them and tell them to get out.

[Q] Playboy: You haven't literally done that, have you?

[A] Caine: Practically every time—if not literally, then metaphorically. I just wait for that one order that says, "I've got you where I want you," and that's the end of it. And suitcases go out of the window. I can't remember a romance I've ended where suitcases didn't go out the window.

[Q] Playboy: Since you're still going with her, Camilla Sparv obviously isn't taking you for granted.

[A] Caine: I don't know, but I'm watching. I shall find out as sure as God made little apples. And He did.

[Q] Playboy: Apart from Camilla, do you have any close friends in show business?

[A] Caine: Most of my close friends are in the business. Surprisingly enough, I'm very close to my agent and my producer, Harry Saltzman, and not because of business—although I met them through business. My other close friends are John Barry, who writes the music for the Bond films; and Terence Stamp, who is my oldest friend. Our interests and backgrounds are the same. And my brother Stanley, who is tremendously loyal.

[Q] Playboy: With the exception of your brother, do you ever find yourself questioning these relationships, wondering if they would still be your friends if you weren't a well-known movie star?

[A] Caine: No, because I don't become close with anyone for a long time and until I know I can trust him. The only thing that worries me with old friends like Terry Stamp and John Barry is the reverse: whether they'll still be friends with me despite my success. They might drop me; that's the only worry I've ever had.

[Q] Playboy: Stamp is your ex-roommate as well as a fellow actor. Is there any rivalry between you?

[A] Caine: Never. Terry was successful before I was; and the thing between us is that when a part came up where the choice was between him and me, I know he would have turned it down because the only other choice was me. He knew because he was successful he could get something else and I couldn't.

[Q] Playboy: Have you acquired an entourage of hangers-on since you became a star?

[A] Caine: No. It might look like it when I pick up the bill, because some of my friends don't have any money. But what people don't know is that five years ago they picked up the bill because I had no money. I know who the hangers-on would be; and although I regard myself as a sensitive man, I can be as hard as nails when I sense that sort of thing. Then shutters come down and alarm bells go off.

[Q] Playboy: Apart from socializing with friends, how do you spend your free time?

[A] Caine: Living the good life. I regard myself as a complete sinner. The sins of the flesh have always been very attractive to me—all of them. Not just women, but good food, wine, clothes. I spend about £2000 a year on clothes.

[Q] Playboy: How large is your wardrobe?

[A] Caine: I have between 30 and 40 suits and outfits. And suede coats in varying weights. I love suede.

[Q] Playboy: It's said that you own 50 identical light-blue buttondown shirts. Is that true?

[A] Caine: Not at all. I own 150 identical light-blue buttondown shirts—always the same color, because I can't stand white shirts. Not on me, anyway. White is so negative. I'm not keen on red, either, except on plush seats in theaters—and red doesn't suit blonds.

[Q] Playboy: You mentioned your partiality to good food and wine. Are you a do-it-yourself gourmet like Harry Palmer? Or would you rather have someone else cook for you?

[A] Caine: I'd rather have someone else do everything for me—well, almost everything.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have any favorite dish?

[A] Caine: Yes. Camilla Sparv.

[Q] Playboy: We hear you've become a patron of the arts. True?

[A] Caine: Yes. I spend hours and hours with art dealers and antique dealers, just sitting around in dungeons and cellars, finding out what's being done—and by whom. Not buying. Anyone with a quarter of a million dollars can go out and buy a Toulouse-Lautrec because he saw Moulin Rouge and liked it, and everyone who comes to his dinner parties says what fantastic taste he has in art. But how about buying modern unknowns, which is what I do? It's not particularly courageous, because they're cheap—but it's much more fun. They will all hang in my new flat—as soon as I get it decorated.

[Q] Playboy: Do you plan to do it yourself?

[A] Caine: No; like my cooking, I'll have it done for me; it's more practical. But I'll have everything to say about it. I shall have it filled with beautiful things, and these to me are paintings and antiques. But I also like to live efficiently, so I won't keep my socks in a 300-year-old chest of drawers that takes me 20 minutes to open in the morning when I'm in a hurry. The things I look at I want to be beautiful, and the things that work should work fast and smoothly. I like 17th Century Spanish furniture and I've bought a lot of it: but there's no room in my house at the moment, so it's all over the place, with little red labels on it saying SOLD and it's all mine, waiting.

[Q] Playboy: The only appurtenance of affluence that's missing from your life seems to be a Rolls-Royce limousine. Why haven't you bought one?

[A] Caine: I don't really need a car. Whenever I have to get around, I hire one with a driver. Besides, I can't drive. I can't do anything, really, except act. I can't play tennis, golf or chess; I can't sing, dance, ski, water-ski, sword-fight or ride a horse. I can ride a bicycle and I can swim, but that's about it. I'm a real pain in the neck to producers who say, "Now, you get in the car and drive up to---" And I say, "Hold on. I can't drive." And they have to rewrite the whole scene and tow the car away with ropes.

[Q] Playboy: Is there a reason why you never learned to drive?

[A] Caine: I've spent my whole life learning to become an actor. It hasn't been easy for me. Now I don't need to drive a car and I don't own one. Acting took all my time; it wasn't natural for me. At first it was a painful thing—and nerve-wracking. It still is, but I conceal it more. People say, "Look at his confidence." But all I have is confidence. Beneath it is nerves. At the end of each day, my shirt is wringing wet. Hell, after every take.

[Q] Playboy: Why the strain?

[A] Caine: Acting—for me, anyway—requires tremendously hard work. You don't mind failing if you don't work very hard. But supposing you sweat your guts out and you're a leading man with a picture costing $3,000,000, like The Billion Dollar Brain. You're constantly trying to improve what you do; but suppose what you do doesn't improve it; suppose it just ruins the whole damn thing. That's where the nerves come in. It's a quicksilver quality that I'm trying to find. Directly you've got your finger on it, it's over the other side. For me, it's an uphill battle, because I'm always trying to do more than I know I can. That's what makes you sweat.

[Q] Playboy: You've also said that "unprofessionalism" puts you on edge. Would you elaborate?

[A] Caine: By unprofessionalism I mean working with a bad actor. I always try to work with people who are better than I am. It also irks me to be called hours before I'm used. I always know my lines, I'm always on time and I always know my moves, even if the director changes them. But I never lose my temper. No one has ever seen me do that on set.

[Q] Playboy: Is it wise to bottle yourself up?

[A] Caine: I suppose it would be better to lose my temper and not save it up until the evening and rant and rave at my girlfriend—though even that doesn't happen very often. But I hold onto myself, because if you lose your temper, you lose control for that day on the set. You become the villain for that day and the work you do will probably be rubbish.

[Q] Playboy: Peter O'Toole refuses to see his own movies, good or bad. How about you?

[A] Caine: No, I see all of Peter O'Toole's movies.

[Q] Playboy: We deserved that. How about your own?

[A] Caine: I do, and I react as though I were the producer. I take a very objective view of everything—from my own performance to the lighting and the direction.

[Q] Playboy: Do you like yourself on the screen?

[A] Caine: If I do something good.

[Q] Playboy: Do you nag yourself about a poor performance?

[A] Caine: No, because that's concentration going backward. I concentrate on what's ahead; if I do something bad, I concentrate on not letting it happen next time rather than worrying about it last time.

[Q] Playboy: How do you react to criticism of your acting?

[A] Caine: Better than anyone I know, whether my performances are good or bad. When I read a critic, I first read what he has to say about me—and then compare it with what I know. If he's wrong, then he's an idiot, as far as I am concerned. I watch to see if the critics can pick it out—if the script was bad or the leading lady awful, or if she was marvelous and I was awful. I always know and I watch to see if they know, too. All I ask from them is justice. If I do something good, I want their approval; but if it's bad, I want their disapproval. If I get it in inverse ratio, I become very upset.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel the same about offscreen criticism?

[A] Caine: I don't give a damn about that. I have an automatic stop-up in the ears, because it bores me. Especially opinions on me as a person.

[Q] Playboy: At the risk of boring you, could we consider a few of those opinions?

[A] Caine: If you insist.

[Q] Playboy: Whenever you're criticized personally, it's most often for being rude and insolent. Are you?

[A] Caine: On the contrary, I consider myself one of nature's gentlemen. I am very sensitive to other people's feelings and I bend over backward to avoid hurting them—provided they have the same respect for me. I am never unintentionally rude; and if anyone who reads this has been upset by anything I've said, it has been bloody deliberate.

[Q] Playboy: A few of your ex-girlfriends have accused you of selfishness and egotism. Guilty or not guilty?

[A] Caine: I can be selfish, but only when I feel I'm being taken advantage of. Basically, though, I think I'm fairly unselfish. I can't claim to be modest, but I don't agree that I'm egotistical. I do consider myself a humble person, though—if anything, too humble.

[Q] Playboy: You've also been called opinionated and overbearing.

[A] Caine: I can't deny that I have strong opinions, but they're all carefully considered, and I'm entitled to them just as you are to yours. I might try to persuade you that I'm right and you're wrong, but I wouldn't ever try to impose them on you. If you want to be a bloody fool, that's your own business. With or without anyone's advice or consent, I'll always be in constant rebellion against everything I don't like—and there's a great deal I don't like. But I don't rebel just for the sake of it or for other people's causes.

[Q] Playboy: Does that rebellion manifest itself politically?

[A] Caine: No, only socially. For me, professional politicians are like a lot of stars in show business who are terribly highly paid, earning more money than I ever will, but they can't act. Can't act at all. Politicians are like those stars. They are professional opportunists—all of them, (continued on page 166)Playboy Interview(continued from page 58) left and right. I think it's silly for people in England to say they are a rabid socialist or a rabid conservative, or in America a rabid Republican or a rabid Democrat. I think in terms of a social rather than a political framework. If I were a Chinese peasant now, I would be a Communist. If I were a millionaire in America, I would be a Republican.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have any religious views?

[A] Caine: I'm a Protestant and I had a strict Church of England upbringing. To me, the value of religion is in the phrase "Love thy neighbor." To me, all religions are valid if they do this. Man is an animal: and without some spiritual value, he might as well be a hyena. I've noticed in the United States that the members of the Ku Klux Klan, which hates Negroes and Jews and Catholics, are always Protestants; and it has always rankled with me that these people should be of the same religion as myself. But I don't really recognize race or religion.

[Q] Playboy: Do you believe in God?

[A] Caine: Yes. But He's not a Protestant. I don't think He belongs to any religion.

[Q] Playboy: Many of those who've taken hallucinogenic drugs have reported experiencing transcendental religious visions. Have you?

[A] Caine: Never at any time—with or without drugs. I get worried if I have to take an aspirin.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think is the reason so many young people are experimenting with drugs?

[A] Caine: The reason is weakness. They have a hole in the middle they're trying to stop up. I can understand a woman taking drugs, but never a man. As soon as a man takes drugs, he loses the right to the title of a man. I'm not against drug addicts: that's a medical problem. I'm just against taking drugs for "experience." I've been with people who take drugs and they regard me as a square and a bore. By God, if they only knew how boring they were to someone in command of all his senses.

[Q] Playboy: Let's get back to your career. You've said you have no love for either theater or TV. Why?

[A] Caine: For ten years I gave everything to those two businesses, and I never made a respectable living. The theater gave me nothing; neither did TV. And it's one of the hardest slogs in the world —the mental and artistic slog of doing live drama, not just the physical slog of a half-hour movie each week. I did every piece of crap that came along, just to make a living, and I thought I could disguise it as something else. I thought, if I can't earn any money, at least I might win an award.

[Q] Playboy: Did you?

[A] Caine: I was nominated twice, but never got one. The awards always went to the guy in the series who had 26 shots at the same character. I resented it at the time. I lost again this April at the Academy Awards; but at least I can comfort myself now with the thought that I'll wind up a rich man, if not an honored one.

[Q] Playboy: How do you react to disappointments of this kind?

[A] Caine: An immediate cut-out. I forget it ever happened. This is my cowardice coming back.

[Q] Playboy: Apart from your emotions on Academy Awards night, what did you think of Hollywood?

[A] Caine: I had read every book there was about the place and I was in love with it before I went. But I quite expected to be let down. I wasn't, because it lived up to all my wildest dreams. It was fantastic. It's the people who make it. Everybody talks about the number of phonies among movie stars; well, I've met more phonies working in a factory of 250 people than I met during my entire stay in Hollywood, when I must have met in the region of 15,000 people. People want to dislike people who are a success; they want them to be phony. But the people in Hollywood were kind to me and they wanted nothing from me. It's nothing to do with my being a success. What could they get from me, anyway? Money? Another picture? If I never made another picture, their studios wouldn't collapse.

[Q] Playboy: To judge by the gossip columns, most of the people in Hollywood who were kind to you seemed to be female—Natalie Wood, Nancy Sinatra and Liza Minnelli, among many others.

[A] Caine: I did go out with all the girls you mentioned: but in every case, it was simply because neither of us had a date that night. Just for the record, they are all very nice girls—in every sense of the word—but there was no romance. I was a stranger in a strange town and people were prepared to go out with me, out of hospitality, not romance. This is where people get wrong ideas; they see pictures of me at premieres with my arm around some girl's waist, without knowing that the photographer asked me to do it for the picture. It's very nice to put your arm round a girl's waist, but it isn't necessarily salacious.

[Q] Playboy: Did you like Los Angeles well enough to live there?

[A] Caine: No, because as an Englishman, I need to live in England. And also because I am a European. That doesn't mean I don't love America. I do, wholeheartedly. When I spend two hours in Helsinki being homesick for London, I also spend two hours being homesick for New York or Los Angeles or Chicago— any of the places in America I visited and where I was so happy.

[Q] Playboy: Does that include the South, where you made Hurry Sundown?

[A] Caine: I can't say I'll miss that part of the country too much, no.

[Q] Playboy: While you were filming the picture there, did you become involved, as so many prominent movie personalities have, in the civil rights movement?

[A] Caine: I got involved in nothing down there—except some very potent drinks made of rum. But now that I'm home, I can say, as a visiting Englishman for ten weeks, that the whites there can't give in and they can't succeed. And the Negro —he has now created his own fascists. The white man has been wrong for the past 300 years, and it looks like the Negro will be wrong for the next 300 years. At one moment the Negro will say, "Treat me like an individual," and the next minute he'll say he has inherited the white man's hatreds. What kind of individual is that? Why can't he be a man standing on his own feet and with a little human mercy for whites?

[Q] Playboy: Did you ever try saying that down there?

[A] Caine: No. I wanted to come home.

[Q] Playboy: Did you find it odd that as an Englishman you should be called upon to play a bigoted Southerner?

[A] Caine: I can't think of many American actors who'd want the part.

[Q] Playboy: Otto Preminger, your director in that film, has a reputation for intimidating actors. How did you get along with him?

[A] Caine: Marvelously. I think he intimidates only unprofessional actors. Otto and I are great, great friends; and even if the reviews on Hurry Sundown are bad, we always will be.

[Q] Playboy: You once called yourself "the world's youngest Otto Preminger." Why?

[A] Caine: Because of what I consider one of the worst things in my own character: a complete hatred of inefficiency when people don't do their jobs right. I immediately lose my temper, because I'm efficient myself. Another thing I can't stand is unpunctuality—something I'm never guilty of myself. And being charged enormous prices in hotels and restaurants and then not getting good service. If I go into Joe's Café and pay 25 cents for something, I don't mind walking up to the counter and fetching it myself. But if I'm charged exorbitant prices, people had better start running around; otherwise, there is bloody murder from me. It's intolerant, I know, and without reason—but there you are.

[Q] Playboy: Do you consider yourself emotionally mature?

[A] Caine: Not yet. I wouldn't consider that I was emotionally mature until I had married again and made a success of that marriage, and with a family. At the moment, and for the past ten years, I've had such a marvelous time being immature that I'm beginning to worry about the desirability of becoming mature. But I'll reach it; in fact, I feel it coming on.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever seen a psychiatrist?

[A] Caine: Cockneys call them "trick cyclists," and that is exactly what I think of them. I'm talking about the psychiatrist with a posh office and rich patients, not about those who treat real mental illness. I won't have anything to do with them. I would rather go mad than see a psychiatrist.

[Q] Playboy: Do you act, as some do, to find an identity—or to hide your own?

[A] Caine: I know exactly who and what I am, and I'm not ashamed of it. I'm a man first and an actor second. I've always felt that people—including myself —don't understand enough about one another, and I've always tried to find out a little bit more. That's one of the reasons I became an actor. My study of acting is not a study of books by Stanislavsky but of people I meet in subway trains or buses. I try to reflect and illuminate a little bit of what they don't understand in one another. That may sound Godlike, but I'm not a god or an oracle. It's just my job, like some people make bathroom fixtures—except that my job isn't as necessary as theirs.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have trouble getting out of character when you've finished a picture?

[A] Caine: None. As soon as a director says "Print!" at the end of a scene, that scene is finished for me and I forget the lines. It's all a matter of concentration. During a take, a lamp can fall over, but I'll go right on, because I haven't noticed it. But when the movie comes to an end, I'm thinking with 100-percent concentration about where I'm going for my holidays. Except I don't have any holidays.

[Q] Playboy: If you were able to find time for one, where would you go and what would you do?

[A] Caine: Lie in the sunshine, anywhere there is a good beach and good food. I would take Camilla and we would be on our own and I would just forget it, forget it all. I could use a long rest. But I don't want to find myself back where I began. So I keep on going.

[Q] Playboy: Is that why you haven't taken a real break between pictures since making The Ipcress File two and a half years ago?

[A] Caine: I'm following the advice of the assistant director of Hurry Sundown, who said to an electrician who asked him what he should do with his ladder, "Just go out that door and keep on going until your hat floats." Well, I shall keep on going in this business until my hat floats. Then I'll come up for air and buy a new hat. Moviemaking isn't like mountain climbing; you can't plant a flag to show you've arrived. When you reach the top, that's when the climb begins.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel you have to compete with other actors?

[A] Caine: I envy no one and I covet nothing. Quite honestly, I have never envied anyone in my life—to the point of smugness. I have always been terribly happy to be me.

[Q] Playboy: If you could change anything about yourself, what would it be?

[A] Caine: The color of my hair and eyelashes and eyebrows. They're blond. I'd like to have a nice dark, handsome face. Well, dark, anyway.

[Q] Playboy: Do you ever worry about your future? Do you think you might wind up like Alfie—alienated and alone?

[A] Caine: I'll never be lonely like Alfie, because I'll be married, with a family: I already have a nine-year-old daughter. I'm sure she'll love her old dad. But I don't worry about the future. I've always loved today. My mother used to say to me, "You're a long time dead, and today will never come back." I've lived my life on that premise—by my own rules, which is to have no rules, except to avoid deliberately hurting others.

[Q] Playboy: Do you ever lean on anyone, ever go to anyone for advice?

[A] Caine: No one.

[Q] Playboy: Whom have you learned from?

[A] Caine: Funnily enough, from the Chinese, when I was fighting in Korea. They didn't know they were teaching me anything, but I learned a lot, and what I learned was about me. It is a marvelous thing to happen to a young man—but please God it doesn't have to happen again in a war. One day in Korea I knew I was going to be killed. Obviously, nothing happened; but at that point, when I was 19 and certain I was going to be shot, my immediate reaction was, "OK, but I'm going to take as many of them with me as I can." And that is the key to my character—if anyone is interested in looking for the lock, let alone the key. And the key is this: Anyone who does anything to me, as I said before, no matter what, I'll go after them —to the point of death, and I'll take them with me if I have to. I am not afraid to die—so there's nothing you can do to me. It's one of my great advantages that I found it out when I was 19. I started out without a penny, not an ounce of training and working in a factory to earn some pennies. If I fail, I'll go back to that. Well, that's what I was destined to be at birth. I've been a failure and I've been a success, and I'll probably be a failure again a couple of times and a success again. I've been "in" and "with it," and I'll probably be "out" someday—but if I am. I hope it's in Switzerland, where the taxes are lower. Even if it's not Switzerland, even if I fade away tomorrow, I've had 14 years of fantastic living—a bonus that nobody starting in ten minutes' time can take away from me.

[Q] Playboy: How would you like to be remembered? Or doesn't it matter?

[A] Caine: After I'm gone, I won't give a damn. I can face death, although I'd hate to die stupidly. But when it happens, I'll go to heaven, because I haven't done anything really bad in this world— and I'll just sit up there watching you all. And I shall say, "Now, let's see if you can make a better job of it than I did. Let's see what's so hot about you, then."