Biography: I've always been ambivalent about Michael Caine. Certainly, as his most recent biographer, Michael Bray, argues, he is an emblem of a certain type of Englishness - that wide-boy accent, a touch of insolence towards those who make the mistake of considering themselves his superiors, a kind of languid energy that he exerts when and how he chooses.
Jude Law made the mistake of thinking that he was Michael Caine, throwing everyone into a fit of nostalgia for the real thing. Law's Alfie was so anodyne, so circumscribed by political correctness, that by comparison Caine's late-1960s East End playboy suddenly seemed like a study in complexity. Was he perhaps not so much a relic of his era's unthinking misogyny as a clever deconstruction of just that?
Bray is unequivocal on this; Caine's Alfie was, he tells us, daringly Brechtian. When eager critics conflated Caine with his creation, finding in the actor the epitome of the new national mood, then who was he to argue? Like Brando, he was simply getting into character, though as even his admiring biographer concedes, the character was getting into him, too.
That Caine was - and remains - a most talented performer needs no defence. Along with his peers, John Osborne, Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay and the other so-called Angry Young Men, the grammar school boy from the London slums sloughed off the middle-class domination of the British stage, refusing to engage either in the overwrought performances of "theatah" folk or the stereotyping of the working class.
As Harry Palmer, he was deliberately cast as the antidote to that other cultural construction of 1960s cinema, James Bond. Palmer is a low-life who joins up to escape a jail sentence and lands a post in the British secret service, where they know they need types like him and they don't want to know how he achieves his results. In The Ipcress File (1965), Palmer is royally tortured for Britain, an ordeal from which he emerges, perhaps without clarity of vision but certainly with a new insight into the real source of corruption, which is to be found at the heart of his own organisation.
In another defining role, as Jack Carter in Get Carter (1971), Caine is once again a vigilante, his performance so laconic as to make a viewer wonder how he stays awake long enough to see through his final act of retribution.
Those were the great performances, then there were the rest. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Caine churned out a film a year and his biographer valiantly follows him, arguing in weaker and weaker tones for the exceptional brilliance of Caine's acting versus the mediocrity of the script, the director, and the other cast members. The money that came in was snapped up by the British tax people and Caine moved to Los Angeles to make more money and more dross. If Woody Allen's decision to cast him in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) was an early signal that his career was not over, then, as Bray acknowledges, Neil Jordan's direction of him in Mona Lisa (1986) was the key to his revival, one that eventually led him to a second Academy Award (after Hannah) for The Cider House Rules (1999) and on to The Quiet American (2002).
Bray justifies this new biography on the grounds that the story of Michael Caine is the story of Britain during the 20th century. This scholarly aspiration fortuitously allows the writer to omit the details of his subject's brief first marriage and how his daughter developed a relationship with an often absent father, or even Caine's own response to a phone call from a tabloid journalist wondering whether he knew that he had a half-brother who had spent his life in a psychiatric institution. In the place of the kind of kiss-and-tell journalism no self-respecting Telegraph writer would stoop to, Bray offers us a perceptive analysis of Caine's masterpieces, a cynical take on Hollywood and a dogged account of the rest that substitutes too readily for the tedium of seeing it again. How dull that reliable Caine could be and how conservative. Or then again, how very British?
Ruth Barton is O'Kane senior research fellow at the School of Languages, Literatures and Film at UCD. Her last book was Irish National Cinema (Routledge, 2004)
Michael Caine: A Class Act By Christopher Bray. Faber & Faber, 338pp. £20