DON'T LOOK BACK, YOU'LL TRIP OVER: My Guide to Life

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Author: MICHAEL CAINE

Format: Hardback

ISBN: 9781399739979

The legendary boy from Elephant and Castle worked his way up from working class roots to global stardom and two Oscars, and this engaging memoir, written in the form of an interview with Matthew d'Ancona, sweeps us along with him on his fascinating journey. The teenage Michael Caine joined a drama group to meet girls, then after National Service and a dead-end job, a colleague told him the way to get into acting was to apply for dogsbody roles in local theatres and work his way up. The discipline of playing a range of parts was invaluable, and hanging out with playwrights John Osborne and Harold Pinter, before they were famous, gave him contacts that would be important later on. Caine's own breakthrough was as the officer in Zulu, and after that Harry Saltzmann cast him in The Ipcress File as Harry Palmer, the anti-Bond secret service hero. Ironically, Caine and his wife Shakira later became close friends with Sean Connery and his wife and also Roger and Luisa Moore. In the age of ensemble theatre in the seventies he was one of the stars of the blockbuster A Bridge Too Far, one of the military roles for which he abandoned his cockney to assume an upper class accent. After a move to Los Angeles in 1979, Cary Grant and Gregory Peck became great friends, and on the set of The Italian Job he got to know Noel Coward, relishing his talents as a raconteur. There were rejections too, but Caine has always cultivated resilience and never gives up, taking opportunities where he can. At one point he owned seven restaurants, employing Marco Pierre White and Gordon Ramsay. The eight movies he did with Christopher Nolan were the high point of his career, but Caine thinks Educating Rita was his best performance. The final section focuses on Caine's philosophy of life, and an amusing piece of wisdom gives the book its title. 257pp, colour photos.