Why Michael Caine called himself “the original bourgeois nightmare”
The ‘working class lad done good’ is a tale as old as time, with Michael Caine one of the film industry’s most famous examples after he ended up becoming cinema’s first cockney superstar, something that wasn’t lost on the man born Maurice Mickelwhite after he made it to the top.
It was hardly an easy journey, either, with Caine and his family being evacuated to 100 miles away from their London home during World War II, before they were relocated into a prefab that he viewed as a luxury compared to the cramped abodes where he’d spent his earliest years.
Before he’d even taken his first steps into the world of stage or screen, he was already a military veteran, with Caine seeing active combat after being deployed to the frontlines during the Korean War. He was in his 30s before his breakthrough performance in Zulu had even been released, but it wasn’t long before he began rising to the summit of Hollywood.
Classic espionage thriller The Ipcress File, his first Oscar-nominated performance in Alfie, heist caper Gambit, timeless adventure The Italian Job, gritty gangster story Get Carter, and another Oscar-nominated turn in mystery thriller Sleuth all arrived within a seven-year span, entrenching him as one of the United Kingdom’s finest acting exports.
According to the BBC, when Caine decided to capitalise on his success by treating himself to a brand new car, he walked into a showroom with a shopping list scrawled on a piece of paper that outlined his intended purchases for the day: “Milk, bread, newspaper, cigarettes, Rolls Royce.”
He was turned away from the Jack Barclay showroom in London’s Berkeley Square on account of his scruffy appearance, only to buy a vehicle in Mayfair, where he’d promptly hire a chauffeur to drive directly past the building who wouldn’t accept his custom in a supremely confident show of self-satisfied defiance.
That’s why Caine dubbed himself “the original bourgeois nightmare” when he first made it big in movies, because he was “a cockney with intelligence and a million dollars.” The well-to-do section of city subculture wouldn’t even let him buy a car, only for the actor to find somewhere else willing to accept his money and do it anyway.
Caine previously reflected on the way people would treat his background, revealing he was often left fuming at the way people would “start talking about eight notches below my intelligence and four notches below theirs.” He knew he had what it took to achieve his dreams, and whether they’d let him into the most prestigious establishments for high flyers or sell him a Rolls Royce or not, he wasn’t about to let anyone forget that he was a cockney kid who’d done very well for himself.