Michael Caine's world has changed - along with ours - since he starred in Sleuth 35 years ago. Now playing the older man in a modern remake, the porter turned Knight of the Realm tells Donald Clarkewhy class still matters and why Laurence Olivier was no Jude Law

IT'S hard to write about Michael Caine without touching on the continuing importance of social class to the English. Indeed, place the original film version of Sleuth, Anthony Schaffer's durable two-hander, beside the new adaptation directed by Kenneth Branagh and all kinds of interesting conclusions on that subject present themselves. Joseph Mankiewicz's 1972 film starred an aggressively plummy Laurence Olivier as an eminent crime novelist and featured Caine - speaking what we would now call estuary English - as the "jumped up pantry boy" who has been shagging the older man's wife.

Now we have Caine, adopting the pose of a self-made man, in the role of cuckold and Jude Law, as posh as Olivier, if less distinguished, playing the young blade.

"Larry played it as a class thing, that's right," Caine says. "But they really were different times. I was working with Larry, who was then Lord Olivier, in very intimate surroundings and I had never met him. So he wrote me a letter saying: 'You may wonder how to address me. From the first moment we meet call me Larry and call me Larry throughout.' That was a nice gesture. I am now Sir Michael Caine and Jude Law is Mr Law, but you simply can't imagine me writing a letter like that now."

Michael Caine does not come across like a Knight of the Realm. Mind you, he doesn't come across as being particularly proletarian either. Uncharacteristically unshaven for his role in John Crowley's follow-up to Intermission (more of which later), Caine, once a porter in Smithfield meat market, has the easy, chatty confidence of a man who now exists outside class distinctions. You could imagine him telling his excellent stories on a billionaire's yacht or at the wrong end of the saloon bar. It is, rather, Jude Law - well cast 10 years ago as Lord Alfred Douglas in Wilde - who seems slightly trapped by his accent and demeanour.

"People often ask me what sort of advice I have for a young actor like Jude," he says. "I always say that I never give them any advice, because, when I was young, the only advice I ever got was 'give up'. Advice is free and that's what it's worth: nothing."

The popular legend has it that, after John Osborne put ironing boards on the stage in 1956, the acting community suddenly opened itself up to the meat porters and hod carriers of the world. It was not quite so simple.

It took Maurice Micklewhite, as Caine was famously christened, the guts of a decade to make it from grubby Rotherhithe to the cover of the Observer Magazine and, as he readily admits, the memory of those lean years drove him to work harder than he, perhaps, should have done. We remember Caine for the wry misogynist in Alfie, the cool spy in The Ipcress File and the crafty thief in The Italian Job. We try not to remember him in Jaws - The Revenge or The Swarm.

"Yeah, that springs from all kinds of insecurities, both artistic and financial," he muses. "When I finished shooting Zulu I still owed 4,000 quid. I was in this state where I had never worked regularly. I had even failed the original audition for Alfie. So I kept doing movies. I did a lot of movies because, each time I got one, I thought it might be the last."

Having become interested in acting after taking part-time work as a stagehand, Caine, born in 1933, did his time in rep theatre before flinging himself at the temporarily resurgent British film industry. The gospels of Swinging London identify the flat he shared with Terence Stamp as one of the holy places of that over-hyped era. Caine, who had been briefly married in the 1950s, happily confirms that he and his acting colleague had a whale of a time.

The work, however, remained elusive. Stamp has suggested that Michael set himself a time limit: if he didn't make it by the time he was 30, he would give up show business. He was 29 when he secured the role in Zulu.

"Yes, I was 29 when I got the part. But the rest of that is a myth. I didn't care about my age. What was disconcerting, though, was that everybody else became famous. My flatmate became famous. My barber, Vidal Sassoon, became famous. John Barry, the composer, he was another buddy who became famous. I was the last one to break through that barrier."

Caine smiles as he says this, but he can be a little sensitive about not being given his due. Seven years ago, when he was awarded the fellowship of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, he surprised the audience by complaining bitterly about the establishment's attitude towards him. "I never really belonged in my own country, in my own profession," he told the audience.

"That's true and I did feel that," he says. "Actually, I was quite surprised that everybody else was shocked. I thought everybody knew how I felt about the class thing. You have to remember I got terrible criticism from movie critics at the start. I got terrible reviews for Zulu. I got terrible reviews for The Ipcress File and for Alfie. I got terrible reviews for everything. It was like it is for Jude, today. I could do no right."

Michael Caine did allow himself to wallow in affluent complacency for some years. Happily married, since 1973, to Shakira, a beauty queen he first spotted in a coffee commercial, he lived for a while in Beverly Hills before moving back to England in 1989. Satisfied that he didn't have to work all the way to the grave, he eventually decided to give up on the business and devote himself to the easy life.

"I got to be about 63 or 64 and I felt myself scraping the bottom of the barrel professionally. I can't even remember the names of those films. I wrote an autobiography, bought a house in Florida and opened 10 restaurants."

It took a walking legend to rekindle his interest in the business.

"Jack Nicholson came out to Miami with Bob Rafelson, the director, and asked me to do a picture called Blood and Wine. That restored my faith in the movie business. It was a real character role and I was no longer trying to pretend I was young enough to get the girl. I then decided I would only do films where I really loved the script."

One of those scripts is, it transpires, for a project called Is Anybody There? "Yeah. It's a small British picture, but it's directed by a great young Irish director called John Crowley. Mark his name down. He's great."

Caine's decision to tackle character roles and take greater care when assessing scripts has enabled a late renaissance in his career. He won his second of two Oscars for The Cider House Rules in 1999 and, more recently, was fabulous as a colonial hangover in The Quiet American, an aging hippie in Children of Men and Alfred the butler in Batman Begins.

Now we have the strange entity that is Kenneth Branagh's new Sleuth. The film has its problems, but Caine is on top form and the dramatically reimagined script by Harold Pinter features some characteristically acidic putdowns.

It transpires that Sir Michael and Sir Harold have some history. They attended the same school during the war years and worked together on an early Pinter project.

"Yeah, I had a bit of an ulterior motive in doing this film," he laughs. "I did Harold's first play ever, The Room. It was a one-act play. I knew Harold as an actor, when he went by the name of David Baron. He said he was writing this play and they were going to put it on at the Royal Court. So I was happy to be in it. Then another 50 years passed and he never bloody wrote me another one. What's going on?"