This Time Around, Caine Will Play a Different Kind of Sleuth

Michael Caine has just made his eighth film in three years and has a TV miniseries set to roll, but the Oscar-winning star of “Sherlock and Me” says he still worries about being out of work.

“You feel uneasy if you haven’t got something to do,” Caine said in North London’s Camden Town, where the $8.5-million movie was concluding its nine-week shoot.

“People say I work all the time, but I don’t. What they (distributors) do is always put the bloody things out at the same time.”

The actor’s on-screen good cheer has been one of the few constants in the ever-changing Hollywood scene.

Last year, he played Sally Field’s love interest in “Surrender” and a British intelligence agent in “The Fourth Protocol.” He starred in films as quintessentially American as “Jaws IV--The Revenge,” and as quintessentially English as “The Whistle Blower,” a political thriller.

In 1986 he was a British diplomat romantically linked with call girl Sigourney Weaver in “Half Moon Street” and had vivid supporting roles in “Sweet Liberty” and “Mona Lisa.”

Then, too, there was his Academy Award last year for best supporting actor for his performance in “Hannah and Her Sisters.” The erstwhile Cockney, who was born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite in 1933, the son of a porter at Billingsgate fish market in London, had integrated himself into the bittersweet world of Woody Allen’s Manhattan neurotics.

“I’d known Woody for years, and I knew New York so well,” Caine said. “I don’t have a voice which is posh British, anyway.

“My attitude is that I’m more like an American, coming from a working-class background. Lots of Americans think I’m Australian, or something like that--Crocodile Dundee’s father.”

Caine’s previous Oscar nominations were for “Alfie” in 1966, “Sleuth” in 1972 and “Educating Rita” in 1983.

In his new film, he impersonates that celebrated sleuth, Sherlock Holmes. Caine is a boozing, down-on-his-luck actor who is hired by Dr. Watson to play the famed fictional detective to prove him real.

“I get to play two parts and a particular hero of mine, which I like, because I’ve always been a great fan of Holmes,” he said.

“We have the pipe, the magnifying glass, everything,” said Caine, referring to the traditional Holmes accouterments. “It’s a chance to play a hero who I’m not really right for and to do it in an entirely different way, as a comedy.”

The film, due out in the fall from Orion Pictures, co-stars Oscar winner Ben Kingsley (“Gandhi”) as Dr. Watson, who is forced by public demand to find a real-life Holmes to match the figure he has been writing about in a magazine.

Caine compared his creation to the part of the inimitable Inspector Clouseau, created by the late Peter Sellers in the popular Pink Panther series. “Peter would have laughed at some of the physical humor I do. The character is such a putz,” Caine said. “I’m having fun, I’ll tell you that.”

On March 14, Caine moves on to his next assignment: a CBS miniseries, “Jack the Ripper,” which marks his first TV work since he played Horatio to Christopher Plummer’s Hamlet in a 1966 production of Shakespeare’s tragedy.

Caine will play the fictitious Inspector Frederick Abberline of Scotland Yard in the $5-million show.

The show, said to be based on confidential police and government files, will be aired in the autumn to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the notorious mass murderer, who terrorized Victorian London in the late 1880s.

Caine said he has made a conscious effort to vary his parts and his performances. “It gives you cachet as someone who can play anything,” he said.

“I’ve been a leading actor, not a movie star who comes on and does the Michael Caine personality performance like a Cary Grant or a John Wayne, although I admire both of them very much.”

His salary, he joked, reflected this attitude: “I know a lot of actors like Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, who don’t do pictures for years, but they get $6 million, $7 million, $15 million a picture.”

“I don’t. I get $1.98 and a bollocking (reprimand) for being late on Monday morning,” he joked. Caine is one of the few British actors who reportedly commands around $1 million a movie.

Caine said the British had reacted oddly to his decision in June, 1986 to return to his native country with his wife, Indian model Shakira Baksh, and their 14-year-old daughter, Natasha, after living for nine years in Los Angeles.

“People here treat me as if I’d just come back from some fearsome jungle and survived,” he said. “Americans are just like we are, except they work harder--that’s what frightens the British. You’ve got to get up at 8 o’clock Monday morning and go out and do something; you can’t just sit there.”

Caine is glad to be home. He divides his time between an apartment in London’s elegant Knightsbridge and a 15th-Century manor house in rural Oxfordshire.