British actor and two-time Oscar winner Michael Caine has announced that he will retire from acting, at age 90, after the release of his last film. In a radio interview with BBC, Caine said he doesn’t know what he could do better than his last performance, “a film in which I’m the main character and I had incredible reviews.”
“I’ve been saying for years that I intend to retire. The only parts I can get at my age are those of a 90-year-old. Maybe an 85-year-old. I said to myself, I might as well finish with this one. We had so much fun shooting it.”
The film is The Great Escaper, alongside Glenda Jackson, who died last June shortly after completing filming. Caine and Glenda Jackson had previously starred together more than 30 years ago in A Romantic Englishwoman, Joseph Losey’s 1976 film; “we knew each other as kids.”
Oliver Parker’s film was released Oct. 6, so far only in British theaters, and tells the true story of a World War II veteran who escapes from a retirement home to go to D-Day (the Normandy landings) celebrations in France.
Born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite on March 14, 1933, Caine began acting on the big screen at age 23. He won two Oscars for best supporting actor, for Woody Allen’s Hanna and Her Sisters and for Lasse Haltröm’s The Cider House Rules, based on John Irving’s novel, in which he was the underground abortion doctor Wilbur Larcher.
He starred in more than 160 films over 80 years; but during lockdown he ventured onto another artistic side. He has written a thriller, Deadly Game, the story of a London inspector on the hunt for stolen uranium: scheduled for release on November 23 this year. “I always wanted to be a writer, but I had only written my biography. This time it was very different; I didn’t know if it would be published. It was. I was inspired by a newspaper article. I had so much fun writing it, will try again,” he told the BBC.
