📍Elephant and Castle, Southwark, London SE1, UK
1933 – 1950“Michael Caine was born Maurice Micklewhite in March 1933 at St Thomas' Hospital in London, and grew up in Southwark, south of the river, in a working-class family. His father, also Maurice, was a fish market porter at Billingsgate, and his mother, Ellen, was a cook and charwoman. He had a younger brother, Stanley. The family lived in a cramped flat near the Elephant and Castle, a busy, bomb-damaged crossroads of south London's working-class life. When the Second World War began, he was evacuated to North Runcton in Norfolk, where he lived in the countryside, made his acting debut in a school play and had a pet horse called Lottie. After the war his family was rehoused in a prefabricated house at the Elephant and Castle, in Marshall Gardens, where they lived for years. He passed the eleven-plus, and at Wilson's Grammar School in Camberwell an English teacher encouraged his love of literature. But his true passion was the cinema: he spent every spare penny at the local picture houses, watching Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney and dreaming of being an actor. He left school at sixteen, did national service in Korea, and then worked in repertory theatre, taking the stage name Caine from a poster for The Caine Mutiny. Zulu, The Ipcress File and Alfie made him a star in the 1960s, and he won Oscars for Hannah and Her Sisters and The Cider House Rules. He has always been proud of his south London working-class roots, and his Cockney voice became one of the most recognisable in cinema.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today