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Caine has been known to do bad movies for the money, the career nadir being the fiendish oil man who squares off against Steven Seagal in the gawdawful 1995 action film On Dangerous Ground. But he remains, at 66, an adventurous bloke, as evinced by his latest role, that of a kindly abortionist in The Cider House Rules.
The role, once designated for Paul Newman, required Caine to do his first American accent. He says that before he committed to the role of Dr. Wilbur Larch, he hired American dialogue coach Jess Platt.
"I said, 'Can you work with me for two weeks on this? And at the end of the two weeks, you tell me whether I can do the accent because I don't want to make a fool of myself doing this.'
"I've seen so many British actors trying to do an American accent and absolutely cock it right up, to embarrass me, let alone Americans, so I said, 'I don't want to do that to myself, or anybody else.'
"And at the end of two weeks, he said, 'You can do it.' "
When he accepted his Best Actor Golden Globe last year for his work in the Brit film Little Voice, Caine vowed that he wouldn't make movies for the money anymore and he is evidently living up to that promise with The Cider House Rules. He says he loved the character of the troubled Dr. Larch enough to take the risk with the accent.
But he also loved the film's anti-authoritarian subtext, which appealed to his working-class sensibilities.
"I grew up in England which, when I was young, was very class-ridden, and I came from the bottom class," he says. "And if you're in a class system, you want to come from the top one. I screwed that up very early on."
Born Maurice Micklewhite in London in 1933, he was the son of a fish market porter and a charlady. His family flat had been destroyed during the London Blitz, but he had moved to a country village where his anger at the class system bloomed to maturity.
"The thing I hated was the hierarchy of the village," he says. "The squire was the boss, and everybody was doffing their caps to him, and it sort of came down through the vicar, the doctor, the teacher ... There was this tremendous, strict caste system."
Caine's rebelliousness came to a head when he applied for a passport and was required to get two signatures from two members of "the professional classes" to confirm his identity.
"I forged the both of them," he says. "I got arrested by the Special Branch as a spy, because I forged a passport, and they said, 'Why did you do this?'
"I said, 'Because I don't give a s--. I'm not going to go to some doctor to prove that I'm an Englishman. I am me, I am here, I've got a birth certificate, and what the hell do I need a doctor, a teacher or a vicar or a priest to tell me who I am? ' "
Caine recognized that sensibility in the script for his new film, particularly in a crucial scene in which a fruit picker foreman (Delroy Lindo) listens to a list of rules posted in the workers' bunkhouse.
"He says, 'Whoever wrote those rules never lived here.' And that's what my life was like in England," Caine says. "I had to abide by rules and regulations made by people who never knew my life, who never knew who I was and had no interest in either of those two things. They just had rules."
Caine, who now lives a luxurious lifestyle in London with his wife and two daughters, acknowledges that his success has lessened the distance between himself and the rule-makers. But not that much.
"Movie stars, from any serious point of view, are inconsequential," Caine says. "The only people who take movie stars seriously are other movie stars."