Back in 2021, Sir Michael Caine revealed that his role in Lina Roessler's Best Sellers was likely to be the last of his career. The actor's reps were quick to jump in to say he wasn't finished quite yet, though two years on, and it seems The Dark Knight star and big screen icon has indeed retired.
The legendary actor confirmed as much in a recent interview with The Telegraph when he said, "I am bloody 90 now, and I can’t walk properly and all that. I sort of am retired now."
As a result, it's likely Caine's final role will be The Great Escaper, the true story of a Royal Navy veteran who travels from his old people's home at 89 so he can travel to France for D-Day's 70th anniversary.
After praising the project, Caine said: "They gave me a very good walking stick, and I was able to do scenes that needed that. I’d just do them once, and then fall over. But just one take, and that’s it. Forget it."
Talking more about life at 90, he added, "The worst thing about it is that so much disappears from your life. You can’t run around, you can’t play football, and you gradually realize you’re approaching death. [Death] could be just around the corner at 90. But I’m quite happy. I’m sitting here writing, doing my thing. I like it."
"I have two children, three grandchildren and a wife. Everyone’s going to join me eventually. No one’s going to say, 'I’m so sorry you’re going to die - I wish you were like me and not going to die.' Everybody’s going to die. At least I’ve lived to [frick]ing 90; I didn’t die at 9, or 19 or 29. I’m 90, and I’ve had the best possible life I could have thought of."
"The best possible wife, and the best possible family," Caine concluded. "They may not be a family that other people would say is the best possible family - but the best possible family for me."
Caine has had an extraordinary career, starring in movies like The Italian Job, Get Carter, Inception, and Interstellar. No stranger to comic book movies, he appeared in Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises as Alfred Pennyworth and later showed up in Kingsman: The Secret Service.
We certainly hope Caine will be here for a while yet, but if his time in front of the camera really is over, it's been a bloody brilliant ride for us all.