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When the American actor Kevin Kline was in London to make A Fish Called Wanda, he frequently rented videos from a small shop in Kensington. The owners categorised their wares neither alphabetically nor by genre but in their own idiosyncratic fashion. Thus, Kline informed me, there was a section labelled: “Films not starring Brian Dennehy and Michael Caine.”

The two actors have clocked up 250 movies between them and, inevitably, their quality has been variable: for every Educating Rita there is a Swarm.

Maria Aitken, with whom Kline’s Oscar-winning Otto had a memorable exchange in the film, was at the time producing a television series on acting. Its most outstanding episode was Michael Caine on Acting in Film. No actor should step on a set without having digested this vital vade mecum.

Caine’s television advice (also produced as a book) abounds in practical wisdom: “If a member of the crew walks across my eyeline, off camera, I immediately ask for a retake. I may not have thought my concentration lapsed but the camera will have caught that minute flicker at the back of my eyes.”

Christopher Bray quotes approvingly from this book, as well as relying heavily on Caine’s autobiography, What’s It All About? In fact, he appears to relish the latter so much that he repeats quotations. Caine’s reaction to Jaws: The Revenge (“I have never seen the film but by all accounts it was terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific”) is printed on page 4 and again, lest we forget, on page 232.

Bray’s research has been assiduous, relating plots and offering strong opinions on them. In Escape to Victory, for example, he insists that Caine was wrong to play Pele in his prisoners’ soccer team against the Nazis, as the Brazilian had a temperature and a stomach bug. (Personally, I would have played Pele if he had had only one leg.) The “half-witted” Half Moon Street, Bray says, is let down by Paul Theroux’s “slim and deeply unsatisfying novel” and Sigourney Weaver’s “performance of stupefying inanity”; Caine, on the other hand, “survives with his dignity intact”.

Bray admires Caine, no doubt about that. His book’s subtitle, A Class Act, hints at his hero’s multi-faceted talents, and the index confirms it: “p126 [Caine has] one of the finest imitation German accents ever committed to celluloid”; “p203 one of the best drunks the movies have ever had”; “p245 since the death of David Niven, [he] had had no small claim to the title of cinema’s greatest living raconteur”. One is tempted to add, “Major, John, would never have become prime minister without Caine”. Something to do with sociocultural status. Not many people know that.

Nor, indeed, that “Mrs Thatcher [was] the first British prime minister to have a near instinctive grasp of the syntax of semiotics”. Thus she may be able to comprehend statements such as “Caine has almost brought upon himself the confusions that exist between his ontological presence and the epistemological readings of the presence he has projected on the silver screen”, which left this poor reader beached.

There is a paradoxical attraction in the author’s compulsion to interpret films academically. Thus The Italian Job is “a deeply troubled film and what troubles it is Britain’s uncertain place in the world. With its Europhobia and grab what you can and sod everyone else attitude, this seemingly harmless caper movie can be read as a blueprint for the Thatcher revolution of 10 years later”. This is indeed possible, and maybe Bray, schooled in film studies at Warwick University, has divined that this was what Troy Kennedy Martin intended, rather than a film about Minis.

My own inclination would be to simplify things. Caine was burnished by war in Korea and matured and educated by his years in rep. He came to stardom late in life and it is no accident that his most sublime performances — in Alfie, Deathtrap, Educating Rita and Sleuth (where he went mano a mano with Laurence Olivier) — were all film interpretations of established stage hits. His art is the brilliance with which he scaled down and retimed such roles for the cinema.

Ten years ago, Caine let slip in an interview with this newspaper that “the British actors were all drunks — O’Toole, Harris, Burton”. This produced a less than polite riposte from Richard Harris: “[Caine] is an over-fat, flatulent, 62-year-old windbag, a master of inconsequence now masquerading as a guru, passing off his vast limitations as pious virtues.”

Bray duly reports this spat, and draws the conclusion that “beneath the invective and disdain lay Harris’s jealousy for sic] the sustained success that had flowed from Caine’s quiet classicism”. But he fails to address the larger question that is implicitly posed: could Caine have played Lawrence of Arabia, or Hamlet, or King Arthur in Camelot?

Instead the actor is appraised in a vacuum, with semiotics standing in for any more rigorous insight or philosophy. At the end of this book (which has photographic reproductions that would disgrace a parish newsletter) we certainly know a great deal about Caine’s career, but we don’t know him.

The actor has entertained me magnificently over the years but maybe we have been a bit reticent in showing our appreciation. The key to the man lies in his acceptance speech for his Bafta fellowship when he was already an OAP: “For most of my career I’ve felt like the spy who came in from the cold — that I did not belong in my own country or profession.”

How wrong he is.

HARD TIMES

Caine’s childhood in south London was tough. Living with his parents and younger brother in a damp, dilapidated house that they shared with four other families, he developed rickets as a boy (due to a vitamin D deficiency) and had to wear surgically modified shoes. Caine’s mother had given birth to another son six years before she was married, in 1925, and had put him up for adoption. Caine only learnt of his existence in 1991, a year after his mother’s death.

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