Michael Caine: The butler with bite

Michael Caine has put his personal stamp on the important role of Alfred in Batman Begins. He talks to Tiffany Rose

Dressed in casual attire - black tailored trousers, navy windbreaker over powder-blue shirt - Michael Caine is perfectly at ease. He's cooped up in a Los Angeles hotel to talk about his role as the butler, Alfred Pennyworth, in Batman Begins: "Since Alfie, I've come up in the world, because I'm now called Alfred."

Dressed in casual attire - black tailored trousers, navy windbreaker over powder-blue shirt - Michael Caine is perfectly at ease. He's cooped up in a Los Angeles hotel to talk about his role as the butler, Alfred Pennyworth, in Batman Begins: "Since Alfie, I've come up in the world, because I'm now called Alfred."

Directed by Christopher Nolan (Memento, Insomnia), the $150m movie boasts a heavyweight cast: Christian Bale as the caped crusader, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Liam Neeson, Tom Wilkinson, Katie Holmes and Cillian Murphy among them.

The role of Alfred threads through the Batman series, and Caine wanted to put his own twist on the character. "I was intrigued immediately, because I was familiar with Christopher's work and then he came round to my house one Sunday morning with the script and said, 'Read that.'

"He gave me half an hour to read it, because he wouldn't let the script out of his sight. It was called The Intimidation Game then, and he was very secretive about it. I mean, he wouldn't leave the house until I'd finished reading, and then he took the script away."

Caine explains: "There wouldn't have been much point in just playing an ordinary butler in another Batman film: you know, coming in and saying, 'Dinner is served,' or something. So I formed my own back story on him.

"I wanted him to be the toughest butler you'd ever seen, not the normal English suave butler. So I made him an SAS sergeant. And he's wounded. He didn't want to leave the Army, so he became in charge of the sergeants' mess. Then he was found by Bruce Wayne's father, who wanted the toughest butler he could find. So I used the voice of my own sergeant when I joined the British Army; that's his voice. That's the back story. I'm waiting for Christopher Nolan to do Alfred: The Beginning," Caine jokes.

Shooting in Shepperton Studios in Surrey proved to be a full-circle experience for Caine. "When I walked into the Batcave for the first time on this big sound stage, I realised it was the first place where I'd ever played a scene in a movie. The same place! It was just so weird. I made a tiny film called A Hill in Korea, a British Army picture, when I was very young. I had eight lines in that picture, and I screwed up six of them.

"So, there I am in this great big bat place, and I ask, pointing up, 'Those are great false-looking bats hanging from the ceiling.' It was then they casually informed me, 'They're not false, Michael, they're real, they're asleep.' They said, 'Don't wake them up, whatever you do.'"

Caine has clocked up more than 130 feature and television films in almost 50 years - A Hill in Korea was released in 1956 - and is one of the most recognisable actors on the planet. But his longevity has provoked a philosophical streak in the actor, and he is keen to talk about mortality and coming to terms with the ageing process.

"It's terrible," he says. "Every six weeks it's Christmas. In Catch-22, the hero says, 'Time is going by so fast, I have to make my life more boring.' That's what I've got to do, because my life is so interesting and I enjoy myself so much, I've got to make it more tedious, because I'll be a hundred in a minute."

He continues: "My mother died when she was 90, so I've got just under 20 years left. The terrible thing is that in obituaries, you read, 'He died at 74, he had a good life.' You think, bloody hell, I've only got 18 months to go.

"And another strange thing about ageing - as you get older, it gets faster, and you see people you haven't seen in what you think is five years, but it turns out to be 25 years. You say, 'I made that film 10 years ago,' and they correct me - 'Thirty, Michael. Thirty.'"

Caine has in the past said that the UK film industry has failed to recognise his achievements, but he certainly seems to have recovered from his discontent. Commenting on the Alfie remake with Jude Law, which performed disappointingly at the box office, Caine says: "I was rather sad that it didn't do so well, because Jude is a friend, and I hoped it would be a hit for him. I want everybody to be a success, especially Jude, because I want to do a remake of Sleuth with him. If he'd been a big hit, we'd have got the money years ago."

He adds: "My view is that you should always do remakes of failures. Then you've got nowhere to go but up, you know? They can't say, 'Well, it's not as good as the original, you made a piece of crap. They'd just say, 'What a piece of crap that was,' anyway."

'Batman Begins' is on general release