Michael Caine turns in on "Blowing the Bloody Doors Off"

LONDON – Michael Caine looked back and, overall, he likes the view. Regrets? He had few.

The star of "Alfie", "Get Carter" and "The Dark Knight", 85, remembers with emotion "Blowing the Bloody Doors Off", whose title is an adaptation of the title of 1969. "The Italian Job". Published Tuesday in the United States by Hachette, it is a memoir, a manual of advice for future actors and anyone who nurtures an elusive dream of success.

Most of the tips are definitely out of date. Learn your lines. Work hard. Be nice to people. And to be lucky. Caine knows that he was extremely lucky.

"The luck I've had, you can not get away with it," Caine said in an interview in his London riverside apartment with a panoramic view of the Thames. "I mean, even once I was successful, I made a lot of movies on the flop. But I only did three at a time before I had a shot. "

In letters and in person, Caine describes her success as a sequence of lucky breaks. His first major film career, as a British Army officer in "Zulu" in 1964, was followed by a weary spy role around the world in "The Ipcress File". In advance, his breakthrough as an insensitive man-girl in "Alfie". This film made Caine a symbol of Swinging London, a blonde with glasses, which earned him the American fame and earned him the first of six Oscar nominations.

He then won two Oscars – for "Hannah and Her Sisters" and "The Cider House Rules". Later, he played the role of hotel master and mentor in three Batman films directed by Christopher Nolan. Along the way, he became an icon and his signature glasses and Cockney accent gave birth to a thousand imitators.

Caine said his optimistic outlook was rooted in his first difficult years. Born Maurice Micklewhite into a working-class London family, he was a child in the London blitz and later called as a conscript he was sent to fight during the Korean War.

"Since then I have found it easy enough to be happy," he notes in the book. "Once you've done maneuvers in Korea, everything else seems to be a lot of fun."

Upon his return to London, Caine decided to become an actor, while he was not sure how to do it.

"I was no one from nowhere who knew nothing," he said. His desire to succeed came from despair – from his determination to become something other than a factory worker.

"My father was an example of what I was and of my chance to be born all those years later," he said. "My father was an extremely intelligent man, but completely uneducated and a total brain waste – and that was what happened to me, and I could see him."

Answering an ad leads to small pieces in a provincial repertoire business. Then come work on the London scene, television roles, film roles and world celebrity. If he has a secret, he says, it is that he continued when others gave up.

"If anyone rejected me, I never worried about it," he said. "I tried again, because my only alternative was to go back to work in the butter factory.

"But also, timing has played a decisive role in my career."

Caine began at the time of the emergence of a new generation of writers – playwrights like John Osborne and Harold Pinter, who were telling stories about the life of the working class.

"Suddenly, all the boys in the working class who were getting ready to work said: I'm going to do something I want to do and do it my way," he recalls. "And that's how the 60s began."

The '60s made Caine a star and he was not alone. Suddenly, he writes in the book, "everyone I knew seemed to become a household name".

Caine enjoyed fame, but also worked extremely hard, realizing at one time 12 films in four years.

The result is a summary of more than 100 features of varying quality. Caine is cheerful about weak points, movies like the sequel to schlocky Shark "Jaws: The Revenge" or "The Swarm", a two-way disaster movie of the word where Caine and her co-stars learned another lesson : never work with bees.

"None of us realized that it was a disaster until about halfway, when the bees arrived," Caine said. "We were doing a scene and they all shit on us.

"I learned from them and also won from them," he said about his critical misses. "I had the same money for flops as for successes."

When the foreground pieces dried, Caine retired briefly. The last two decades have brought the most rewarding parts of his career, including his six films with Nolan, which Caine calls "a brilliant director … the new David Lean".

Today, Caine is happy that she has not retired and is reconciling work and time with her family: Shakira, his wife for 45 years; his two daughters; and his three grandchildren, aged 9 and 10, with whom he is "obsessed".

"I'm having such good times with them," said Caine. "What amazes me what they know. It's like talking to a 20-year-old man. "

Among his recent films, he is the proudest of the film "Youth" by Italian director Paolo Sorrentino, in which he played the role of an aging conductor.

"I do not play the main roles in the movies now, I'm too old to get up every morning at half-past six," he said. "I'm just taking small pieces of character and I'm having a good time.

"You do not give up the movies, they give you up. And as long as I have these parts, I will continue to do them. " MKH

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