“She had an illegitimate child before she met my father.”
Sir Michael Caine
Introduction
Much has been written about Michael Caine’s successful film career and millionaire lifestyle. The South London lad, born in Rotherhithe and raised in Elephant and Castle, had a burning ambition to become an actor, the son of a Billingsgate fish porter and a char lady who signed on in the dole queue with Sean Connery in the Sixties and who would rise to stardom after his appearance in the 1964 film Zulu, starring alongside Stanley Baker who also directed the film. He was an actor who would go on to star in more than 160 films, never losing his distinct cockney accent and someone who mastered the craft of making the camera work for him. Yet beyond the glitz and glamour of cinema acting lay a dark secret that evaded Michael for years. Unknown to him, his mother Ellen, who Michael looked after financially when he became famous but refused to give up doing a hard day’s graft, would secretly visit a son she had been out of wedlock for over fifty years. His name was David, and Michael didn’t know about him until several years after his mother died in 1989.
Hidden
Michael Caine was involved at the time in writing an article about the state of mental health establishments in England, visited a facility and was approached by a woman claiming to be the girlfriend of his half-brother David. Rushing over to the journalist, she said, “You see that man over there? That’s Michael Caine’s brother.” This shocking revelation led to the journalist later contacting him and telling him that the story would be exposed in a story in the press that Sunday. Michael asked if he could visit him. Caine found out that his mother had given birth to a son six years before she married Caine’s father, Maurice Joseph Micklewhite—the result of a secret affair that even her husband never found out about. David, who had epilepsy so severe that it affected his brain function and speech, was visited at the hospital by his mother every Monday for fifty years since the Second World War. She covered a secret by saying she was shopping and buying chocolates and ice cream, which she gave David. A secret that later dawned on Michael as there was never any food in his mum’s house. She even got the nurses at the asylum to swear on the Bible, never to disclose the secret. Yet David knew that Michael was his half-brother, keeping a picture of Michael in the film Zulu above his bed. Ellen, who accepted a lift in Michael’s Rolls Royce after visiting Michael in the country, would purposefully be dropped off by his driver at a bus stop at Streatham High Road round the corner from the asylum, Caine Hill, in Streatham.
Michael, who later visited him when he had been moved to another establishment, visited his brother for eighteen months, having long conversations with his brother through a nurse because Caine couldn’t understand what he was saying because of his distorted speech ravaged by epilepsy. David, who it was revealed had been locked in a cellar with a stone floor for long periods, had been left to convulse, resulting in brain abnormality. An intelligent person who sadly became someone in a near vegetative state. Someone who had given up as a baby and handed over to the Salvation Army. A bastard child who, because of the times and the fact that Ellen was born in 1900, a Victorian age where an illegitimate child was the ultimate shame but a secret that Michael was just shocked to hear but never stopped loving his mum and didn’t hold it against her.
