“Life is an audition,” Michael Caine writes and he should know. He’s passed many of them in his 60-plus years in movies and touches on several in his memoir. Blowing the Bloody Doors Off and Other Lessons in Life is a witty look back at a career built from determination and good fortune.
Born in a poor but supportive London family, Caine came of age when being British working class was suddenly an asset for aspiring actors, musicians and playwrights. Those years just before The Beatles broke “were a vibrant, exciting time” he writes. London, rebuilt after the punishing air raids of World War II, was where it was happening. Any given night, Caine might run into The Rolling Stones or Roman Polanski in a nightclub. Harold Pinter was his mate.
“It’s easy to get swept off your feet with the glamour of it all, unless you have some sensible people keeping you grounded,” he insists, recalling his upbringing. Outside the doors of his loving family home, he survived by acting—tough that is. If school was a mediocre experience, he educated himself through books and movies” “you couldn’t find two more richly educational surrogates than the cinema and the public library.”
In Blowing the Bloody Doors Off, Caine offers several tips to actors. “Luck favors the prepared,” he writes, “so be prepared.” He repeatedly insists that there is no one path to success—you must find the one(s) that work for you, The man who played romantic leading men in his youth and Batman’s butler in old age adds that what works in acting applies elsewhere in life.
