Michael Caine has stopped using his real name of Maurice Micklewhite after one too many delays at airport security and will now officially go by the screen name he adopted more than 60 years ago.
The 83-year-old actor dropped his less than actorly birth name and adopted Michael Caine in 1954. He says that he has decided to legally take his screen name because of the increased intensity of airport security following the rise of so-called Islamic State.
“An airport security guard would say, ‘Hi, Michael Caine,’ and suddenly I’d give him a passport with a different name on it,” Caine said. “I could stand there for an hour. So I changed my name.”
Caine began his acting career on the Sussex stage as Michael Scott but had to change the moniker when he moved to London to avoid being confused with an already established actor who was also named Michael Scott.
Caine says that he decided on his new and very famous screen name curing a phone call to his agent. He has often told the story of how he looked outside the telephone box he was using and his eyes alighted on a poster for the Humphrey Bogart naval drama The Caine Mutiny.
“I was opposite the Odeon and I looked up, and my favourite actor is Humphrey Bogart, and there it was,” Caine said.
Caine recently signed up to play General Anton Vincent in the US comedy Coup d’Tat.
Vincent is a dictator who is overthrown by his people and turns up on the doorstep of a US high school student who wrote to him as a homework assignment.
