Caine and able

6:02am Saturday 11th November 2006

SIR Michael Caine is not about to retire. He's tried it before and it didn't work. "I retired mentally, and it never sort of happened. I retired, then someone sent me a script and I said 'okay I'll do that'," he explains in his familiar cockney voice.

First, there was Little Voice. Then The Cider House Rules. Each time he thought to himself, "I've got to do that". And it never stopped. Children Of Men and The Prestige are his two latest releases. He was lined up to do a remake of Sleuth and another Batman movie when along came "a little British film" and "there goes September and October".

At 73, the Billingsgate porter's son born Maurice Micklewhite in the East End of London finds himself as busy as ever. Some of his remarks may see him edging into the grumpy old man territory but Caine is good company and was on top form promoting The Prestige, a Victorian-set drama about rival magicians that also stars Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman.

Thoughts of retirement won't enter his mind again "because what I've realised after all this time is this business retires you'", he says. "Suddenly there's a year when no scripts will come, or crap scripts come, or scripts with no money attached to them. And you go 'it's not really worth getting up at six on a wet Monday morning to work on a piece of crap with a load of people I don't like'.

"Obviously I don't have to work. So that's when I'll retire - when the business retires me. It's like being an old soldier, if you survive you slowly fade away."

He thinks of himself as stuck at 38, an age when "I knew enough to control everything and I was young enough to do everything I wanted to do", although he adds, "that's not quite true now, I can't run as fast."

He was introduced at an earlier press conference for The Prestige as an icon and confirmed when we met later that the title is official. He'd come hotfoot from recording BBC2's The Culture Show which had asked the public to nominate icons. Caine is joined in the top ten list by a pair of Kates - Bush and Moss - as well as Alan Bennett and a few other names he can't remember. His vote would go to David Attenborough.

"Then at the end of the programme I had to look at the camera and say 'vote for me as the number one icon'. And I did it," he says smiling at the silliness of it all.

The conversation ranges over modelling his ageing hippy character in Children Of Men on John Lennon; his pleasure at the new Bond, Daniel Craig, receiving good reviews; and the attractions of Scarborough. He was in the Yorkshire seaside town filming Little Voice, playing a dreadful club performer.

What he remembers most about the location is going out on the moors on a Sunday to a restaurant that served the best steak and kidney pudding he's ever had in his life. As for the resort itself, he recalls Scarborough as "a strange town but a wonderful town to walk in and there's a big bandstand on the front".

His big scene in Little Voice found himself singing - if that's the right word for caterwauling - Roy Orbison's classic It's Over. Caine knew his limitations. "Most professional singers can't sing Orbison songs because they need to be sung by a woman," he says.

"What I did with the director was say this was going to be so hard on my voice. I said do it with three cameras and two takes, and that's it. I couldn't do it more than twice because I still have dialogue scenes to do and I thought I'd have no voice."

He'd love to be able to sing. When he did Parkinson's TV chat show the other night, singer Tony Bennett performed his classic, I Left My Heart In San Francisco. "Just before he went on, he said he hadn't sung that on TV since 1960. And he's 80 years old," he says.

"There's a big note right at the end and he went right up. Michael Parkinson and I were sitting in the dark watching him, and we both turned simultaneously and went 'he's bloody 80', because when you were a kid, an 80-year-old was this old doddering person."

Caine and his wife Shakira, whom he married in 1973, keep fit by walking. An ex-infantryman, he calls himself an obsessive walker and hiker who does three, four, five miles a day.

Friend and sometime co-star Sean Connery tried - and failed - to teach him golf. "I thought he was going to kill me," he says. "For a start, I'm an actor and a kind of natural actor. Half my lessons have been sitting on the Tube watching other people behave. He said you get your hands like that and go like that and go like this. I said 'my body won't do that'.

"He gets in such a temper playing golf. And you say 'why do you play golf?' and he says 'relaxation'. And I said 'you're going to have a bloody heart attack'."

Caine acknowledges that the movie business has changed over the years but doesn't see it as all being for the worse. The industry is about box-office, but he points out that independents are thriving more than ever.

"I was reading Variety yesterday and independent movies are a $25bn industry. You have young film-makers who've come in under the wire, like Christopher (Nolan, The Prestige director) with Memento. He makes a movie that starts at the end and goes to the beginning. You can see Louis B Mayer saying 'what kind of s**t is this?'.

"I love all these young guys. We are all smarter than our parents, so these guys are smarter than me. They said that about young people seeing The Prestige and working it out. But they grew up with computers, they're smarter than us.

What he's learnt over the years is "you learn to go with the blows because you're going to get hit whatever you do. Don't get upset about anything. You get a new standard of honesty - you meet people who are honest because they will only stab you in the chest."

His long list of movie credits may look like he's done it all but he still has ambitions remaining - namely "to do what you do". He talks enthusiastically about a new director, John Crowley, who came to him with a film offer he couldn't refuse. "This is a script which is so emotional that I get a third of the way through and have to stop and have a cup of tea and a rest," says Caine.

"I know I am going to have to tear myself apart for six weeks to do this. That's what I love to do, strip away the masks and see the real people."

The story, Is Anybody Out There?, is set in an old people's home. It's not somewhere that hard-working Caine is likely to end up any time soon.

The Prestige (12A) and Children Of Men (15) are now showing in cinemas.