Film

A New Photo Book Celebrates the Iconic Mod Style of Michael Caine

Photographer Terry O'Neill's new tome traces the actor's career from working-class roots to swaggering superstardom

Michael Caine during the making of "Get Carter"

English actor Michael Caine in the film 'Get Carter', 1970.

By Tobias Carroll

In the new book Michael Caine: Photographed by Terry O’Neill, editor James Clarke revisits some of the actor’s most storied and stylish roles.

“I think that at the heart of Caine’s sense of style are those earliest days that defined his life and movie career in the Swinging ’60s of London,” Clarke tells InsideHook. “He has spoken very eloquently, and I think quite movingly, actually, about his years as a child and a young man striving to find his place in the world and the ways in which actors and pop singers with working-class backgrounds really broke through in the early 1960s here in the U.K.”

Clarke also argues that Caine’s work in Get Carter represented a milestone for both his work and the way he dressed. “Within the setting of this hard-as-nails crime story, Caine’s suit is distinctively well cut and really does play on his well-established image by the early 1970s as a suavely-dressed Londoner,” Clarke says. “I think that this specificity of time and place really enriches his film star persona and is one of the aspects of his amazing career that audiences have taken to heart.”

PHOTO: Terry O'Neill / Iconic Images
Michael Caine stops for a chat during the filming of Mile Hodges’s gangster classic “Get Carter,” 1971.

By Terry O’Neill, courtesy of ACC Art Books
PHOTO: Terry O'Neill / Iconic Images
Michael Caine takes a nap during the filming of “Woman Times Seven” by Vittorio De Sica in Paris, 1967.

By Terry O’Neill, courtesy of ACC Art Books
PHOTO: Terry O'Neill / Iconic Images
Michael Caine during the filming of Guy Hamilton’s “Funeral in Berlin” in London, 1966.

By Terry O’Neill, courtesy of ACC Art Books
PHOTO: Terry O'Neill
It was Bob Hoskins who had approached Caine to appear in the film as crime boss Mortwell in the 1986 film “Mona Lisa.”

By Terry O’Neill, courtesy of ACC Art Books
PHOTO: Terry O'Neill / Iconic Images
Michael Caine on the set of “Get Carter,” 1970.

By Terry O’Neill, courtesy of ACC Art Books
PHOTO: Terry O'Neill / Iconic Images
Michael Caine in his early years as an emerging film star in “Funeral in Berlin”

By Terry O’Neill, courtesy of ACC Art Books
PHOTO: Terry O'Neill / Iconic Images
By the late 1980s, Michael Caine was a well-established international movie star, and “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” was a high point in his Hollywood film career. Here he is with co-star, Steve Martin in 1988.

By Terry O’Neill, courtesy of ACC Art Books
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