What should we make of Michael Caine?

Michael Caine is to be admired as someone who worked his way up from south London poverty to being a star name. He has honed his technique such that it looks effortless, that he is just being himself, yet he can act out of character if pressed to do so. Nor is he precious about it. He has passed on his expertise in master-classes. On The Man Who Would Be King, he ensured that he did not receive more screen time than his friend Sean Connery. In an interview in the latest Radio Times, he recalls that he felt it was terribly unfair that a talented actress might not get a part because she wouldn't do something sexual with the producer, but that when he was in Hollywood he was a nobody and could do nothing about it. He admits to still learning about the troubles that people of colour still have in the industry.

In personal life, he has used his money to look after his mother and other members of his family. After a young life as jack-the-lad, he married just once and is still with wife Shakira after 45 years, in a business where bed-hopping seems to be the norm.

He clearly appreciates that acting is a cooperative undertaking. Yet he seems to be anti-trades union and is so virulently against nations working closely together that he proclaimed on the John Humphrys programme on Radio 4, as reported by the Evening Standard:

"I don't listen to all these pundits. I'm a Brexiteer myself. Certainly.

“People say ‘Oh, you’ll be poor, you’ll be this, you’ll be that’. I say I’d rather be a poor master of my fate than having someone I don’t know making me rich by running it.”

Now I have heard those sentiments expressed locally, but by people who genuinely are not rich. It ill becomes someone who does not disguise his wealth to seek to condemn others to a dramatic fall in their incomes. One also notes that his latest release is part-produced by Studio Canal, a recipient of EU funds. As to mastery of ones fate, we still have it, but in much less than half of our public affairs, we have to share it with others - and we correspondingly have some influence on them.

I am not going to stop watching Michael Caine films* if they come up on TV, just as I will not stop watching films featuring Vanessa Redgrave in spite of her starry-eyed support of an impossible socialist dream. I just wish that their personal political views were not given undue significance simply because of their star status.

* However, I would not go out of my way to watch Swarm or Water.