Michael Caine (1933- ), British actor, the first star since Harold Lloyd to appear regularly in glasses, a gesture appropriate to his demotic, no-nonsense approach to acting. Born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite in London, on March 14, 1933, Caine started out as an amateur and turned professional inauspiciously, with over a hundred small roles on stage and in television under his belt before he made his film debut, unbilled, in A Hill in Korea (1956). Several small roles followed, until Zulu (1963), in which he played an aristocratic officer. This led to The Ipcress File (1965), its two sequels, and his role as the secret agent Harry Palmer. He also took the title role in Alfie (1966), in which his cockney character seduces almost every woman in the cast, and starred in the British crime thriller Get Carter (1971).

Hollywood offers then flooded in and continued for the next 35 years. His best-known films include: Sleuth (1972), in which he held his own against Laurence Olivier, under the direction of Joseph L. Mankiewicz; The Man Who Would be King (1975) by John Huston, where he proved to be no match for Sean Connery; California Suite (1979), as the homosexual husband of Maggie Smith; Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), as the brother-in-law of Woody Allen, for which Caine won a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award (Oscar); Sweet Liberty (1986) by Alan Alda, as an ego-driven show-off film star; Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988), with Steve Martin, both playing conmen; and Noises Off (1992), as a harassed Broadway director.

Caine has intermittently appeared in prestigious television films, such as Jack the Ripper (1988) and Jekyll and Hyde (1990), and after a number of big-screen failures it was to television that he turned again, when he resurrected the character of Harry Palmer in Len Deighton’s Bullet to Beijing (1995). In 1996 he co-starred with Jack Nicholson in Blood and Wine, and went to South Africa to make One Man, One Vote, which tells the story of the struggle of Nelson Mandela. In 1998 he made an acclaimed appearance as the sleazy but ambitious theatrical agent Ray Say in the film Little Voice, for which he won the Golden Globe award for Best Actor in a comedy. Caine won another Academy Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his part in The Cider House Rules (1999), a screen adaptation of the book by John Irving. In 2000 he appeared in an American remake of Get Carter and the comedy Miss Congeniality, and in 2001 in Last Orders, adapted from the novel by Graham Swift. In 2002 Caine used his influence to argue successfully for the release of a new version of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, in which he also starred, after distributors delayed the film over its perceived anti-Americanism. He later starred in The Actors (2003), the directorial debut of playwright Conor McPherson; in the Norman Jewison thriller The Statement (2003); as Bruce Wayne's butler, Alfred Pennyworth, in Batman Begins (2005); and in Children of Men and The Prestige (both 2006). A 2007 remake of Sleuth cast Caine in the role of the cuckolded crime writer Andrew Wyke, played in the original by Olivier, while Jude Law assumed the role of Milo, first played by Caine.

In 1992 Caine published his autobiography, What’s It All About? He was awarded a knighthood in the 2000 Queen’s Birthday Honours.