‘American’ evangelist

Michael Caine is wearing mascara. The redoubtable English actor, now Sir Michael Caine, is not performing a replay of his famous cross-dressing psychiatrist from “Dressed to Kill.” In fact, the 69-year-old actor is merely noshing on potato-encrusted salmon at Beverly Hills’ Peninsula Hotel, in a black shirt and jacket and blue pants -- an outfit more professorial than fashionable.

While he was never blessed with chiseled matinee idol looks, his face hasn’t lost its impact as it ages. It’s an expanse of bland English features, ruddy but unlined, punctuated by a fiercely impudent nose and animated by an unruly, unpredictable intelligence and mercurial cerulean blue eyes, one just the tiniest bit sleepy.

The mascara is courtesy of one of Caine’s self-devised acting tips, which he promulgated in a now famous acting tape and book on acting: If you have blond lashes, always darken them, or, as he noted, “you might as well be in a radio play.” He demonstrates another dictum -- never blink to the camera -- opening his eyes to their fullest, and suddenly what had been rather kindly grandfatherly orbs radiate with the cool intensity of every evil character he’s ever inhabited, like the crime boss in “Mona Lisa.” It’s simply a display of technique, but it winds up being intimidating, perhaps because Caine believes that “cold people you play on technique because cold people live on technique. Cold people are easy to play because there’s no emotion. They are sort of acting with you.”

It’s not surprising that so much of his acting advice focuses on the eyes: They’re the hallmark of his naturalistic acting style, which has never been more on display than in his turn as British journalist Thomas Fowler in the new film “The Quiet American.” Almost his entire performance is carried in his gaze as it flows from cynical to crafty to wearily despairing. The eyes are forever registering subtly shifting degrees of loss.

The film, which debuted last Friday, is set in 1952 Vietnam. It details Fowler’s love for the young Vietnamese beauty Phuong and her relationship with his rival for her affections, Alden Pyle, a seemingly idealistic American aid worker who in actuality is a CIA operative.

Caine is wearing the mascara because he’s just emerged from several photo shoots. Part “Quiet American” evangelist, part perpetual one-man dinner host, Caine is determinedly stumping for the film, and is scheduled to appear in publications from Time to Modern Maturity as well as on talk shows. November has become the kickoff of the Oscar season, the time when contenders emerge from their tinted-window limousines to attend swank private parties and industry-heavy affairs where Oscar voters are known to lurk. (As an Oscar contender, Caine is hardly alone in his sudden ubiquity. Jack Nicholson, another strong best actor candidate, for “About Schmidt,” has even been spotted flirting on “Access Hollywood.”)

In the last four days, Caine has not only done a junket for “The Quiet American,” but also attended the film’s premiere and an AFI retrospective on his career, and he is soon off to give talks to members of the Screen Actors Guild and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. Although Caine and his wife of 30 years, Shakira, usually leave their home in the English countryside for the winter, this year’s destination is Beverly Hills, in part to be around to promote the film.

Caine’s mission has special urgency partly because the film almost was a victim of Sept. 11 jitters. Although Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1958 film version of the novel betrayed Graham Greene’s vision, turning Pyle into an innocent businessman and Fowler into a communist dupe, this version, directed by Australian Phillip Noyce, is much truer to the prescient darkness of Greene’s book. The first test screening took place Sept. 10, 2001, with subsequent test screenings going badly. The film’s fate hung in the balance for months until it was finally scheduled for release in January, usually a dumping ground for films.

“It was going to be dumped like it was the worst movie that ever happened. It’s anti-the CIA, who took America into Vietnam, which everybody computes as being anti-American,” Caine says. “Not in my case. I’m the most pro-American foreigner you’ve ever met, and I would never make an anti-American film. I have a feeling that a couple of critics that [Miramax co-chairman Harvey Weinstein] knew in New York had seen it and didn’t like it, and I think they had had an effect on him.”

Caine, who considers himself part of the informal Miramax family, having won a Golden Globe and supporting actor Oscar for such Miramax films as “Little Voice” and “The Cider House Rules,” lobbied the Miramax chief personally. “I said, ‘Listen, give us a shot.’ ” Miramax agreed to test the waters by letting the film premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September. After overwhelmingly positive critical response, particularly for Caine, Miramax decided to release “The Quiet American” for a two-week Oscar-qualifying run now and to go wide early next year.

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Snubbed by Oscar

After 48 years in the movie business and more than 130 films and TV movies, Caine has never won a best actor Oscar, although he’s been nominated three times, for “Alfie” (1966), “Sleuth” (1972) and “Educating Rita” (1983). He knows just how lucky he is to be having a career resurgence at just about the time he qualifies for Social Security. Just eight years ago, Caine temporarily quit the movie business, disgusted with the level of scripts coming his way.

“What happens is, if you’re a movie actor, you don’t retire, the business retires you,” he says. “The great thing is never to be fashionable -- as in the aphorism ‘Always be in style, never in fashion.’ I think I’ve done it unconsciously,” he says.

To Caine, his performance as Fowler is the best he’s capable of. “I transfused myself into Thomas Fowler. When I met Fowler, he was an empty shell. When I got home, I was the empty shell.”

Caine based the character specifically on Greene, whom he knew slightly. The first time they met, however, was hardly auspicious. Greene stopped Caine in a restaurant to tell him how much he hated the 1983 film version of his book “The Honorary Consul,” in which Caine also starred. “He didn’t like it at all,” recalls Caine, who was surprised to have the 6-foot-5 author looming over him. “It was all right, because in the end he said, ‘I’d just like to say, I did like your performance.’ ” He adds, self-deprecatingly, “And I thought, oh, he’s just letting me off a bit lightly here.”

The part of the soul-exhausted, jealous Fowler is a high-wire act for an actor. Director Noyce says, “There’s a real task here: Can you maintain the audience’s sympathy while absolutely testing their loyalty? There would be no forgiveness in the wrong hands.”

And yet the role seems to fit Caine so effortlessly that most will miss the fact that he’s not even using his normal Cockney accent, but more enunciated, middle-class British tones. When he’s not performing, Caine makes a point never to use anything but his naturally broad South London voice.

“Yeah, there’s a lyric in ‘My Fair Lady,’ it takes an Englishman to open his mouth for another Englishman to despise him,” says Caine, summing up class differences in England. “My own view of class in England was, I wanted everybody to know where I came from, especially the people who were where I came from, to know that it’s not impossible.”

Caine was born Maurice Mickelwhite in 1933. His father was a fish market porter, his mother a charwoman. His childhood was marked by extreme poverty and evacuation from London during World War II. (He stayed with a family who locked him in a closet while they went shopping for hours until his mother rescued him.) He saw Asia around the time of “The Quiet American” -- as a 20-year-old British soldier attached to an American division in Korea.

He describes his experience as similar to those of soldiers in World War I: “trench warfare, bombardments every day and then at night. We were on one side of a valley, the Chinese on the other. In the nighttime you try to keep control of the middle, which is a scary thing.”

He spent another eight years trying to break into show business, and didn’t succeed until the age of 29, when he appeared as Lt. Bromhead in “Zulu.” He emerged as one of a new breed of working-class actors, including Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay, who defied the assumption that Brits were only good to play swank toffs and Shakespearean heroes.

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Driven by fear of poverty

Still, several decades of success later, Caine tells the SAG audience that his greatest fear remains poverty. It’s a childhood horror of returning whence he came that drove some less-than-inspired career choices. Indeed, the proliferation of such commercial Hollywood clunkers as “Jaws: The Revenge” and the Steven Seagal flick “On Deadly Ground” on his resume threatened to obscure Caine’s immense talents.

“I never thought I was going to get another [movie], so I always took ‘em,” Caine explains, adding, “If you come from a very poor family, everybody around you is poor. It’s the old cliche, he’s a young boy, he’s got to buy his mother a house. I bought everyone a bloody house. You cannot go into a luxury area, leaving everybody else behind living like pigs. You have to take everyone with you!”

One of the good things about his temporary retirement was being able to return with a new set of priorities. “I went away for a while in order to become someone else,” says Caine, who spent his two years off writing his autobiography and running his six restaurants. “I’d been a movie star for a long time. I came back as a movie actor, which means, I’m older, I can do what I like. I came back without the responsibility of having to do work of any kind because I needed the money. So now I only do what I judge to be excellent.”

Ironically, in the last few years, even his commercial Hollywood films have been winners, and this summer he was inspired in spoofing his ‘60s spy persona as Mike Myers’ secret-agent dad in “Austin Powers in Goldmember.”

After lunch, Caine retires for yet another photo session, trotting through his paces like a well-seasoned thoroughbred. As he sits in one of the Peninsula’s anterooms looking professionally pensive, a deliveryman wanders by and stops, clearly delighted to have spotted him.

“I’ve never seen a famous person,” confesses the passerby. “I know he’s famous, but I don’t know who he is.” Caine looks up under his hooded lids and says dryly, “I guess I haven’t done enough publicity.”