Taking the Michael

 Although at 78 he’s at an age when some might be thinking of comfortable retirement, Sir Michael Caine entertains no such thoughts.

“If you’re in the movies you don’t retire,” he states, “the movies retire you. I started out as a repertory actor playing different parts and my mentality is still that of a repertory actor. I’ll just keep going until no offers come in.

“The great thing about being an actor, is you don’t ever have to retire because someone’s got a movie with a 90 year old bloke in it.”

His latest role sees him voicing the evocatively named character Finn McMissile in Pixar’s latest Car 2.  And soon he will be seen playing Bruce Wayne’s loyal butler Alfred once more in The Dark Knight Rises.

But it’s a sign of how very long Caine’s career is that some of his biggest hits have been remade for new generations, though not always with the best results.

Anyone looking to enjoy Get Carter and The Italian Job would be well advised to seek out the earlier versions than the remakes made in 2000 and 2003.

What, we wonder, would modern filmmakers do with a re-boot of his dour everyman spy character Harry Palmer?  Caine, it seems, is not averse to the idea.

“There was one novel that Len Deighton did that we didn’t film, with a great title. It was set in Paris, and it was called An Expensive Place to Die. I would buy that novel, make that first then go backwards: Billion Dollar Brain, Funeral in Berlin and Ipcress File.

“But I think you should only remake crap films. I did one, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, was a real crap film that starred Marlon Brando and David Niven – called Bedtime Story. It was a disaster. We made it and we called it Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.

“And my first movie in America when Shirley MacLaine was Gambit. It’s very interesting who’s remaking that – the Coen brothers, who’ve cast Colin Firth and Cameron Diaz in it. I think that could be a very good remake with their pedigree.”