The family secret that Michael Caine’s mother kept from him until she died: “It was a terrible shock”
Michael Caine has always been pretty up-front and open about his life outside of acting. He grew up in a working-class household in London, far from the theatre or film industry, but managed to claw his way into several walk-on roles in the 1950s. Once he had the chance to show his acting chops, he was fast-tracked to stardom.
Now in his nineties, Caine has plenty of stories to tell. Whether it’s wild late-night antics with fellow Swinging Sixties icon Peter O’Toole or behind-the-scenes Oscars drama, he’s shared many personal anecdotes over the years in interviews and in his two memoirs. However, one of the most explosive stories revolved around a family secret that he did not uncover until he was in his sixties.
In a 2002 interview with Michael Parkinson, the Alfie star revealed that after his mother, Ellen Burchell, died in 1989, he discovered that he had an older brother who was institutionalised at a mental care facility. Neither Caine, his younger brother Stanley, nor his father had known about him until then. He only made the discovery when a tabloid reporter called him to tell him that they had uncovered the story. After a bit of investigating, Caine uncovered the truth.
His mother had been in a relationship with someone before meeting his father and had given birth to a child, David, out of wedlock. “What happened was, he was born okay, but medically he was treated badly and something went wrong,” Caine explained (via The Mirror). “My mother kept her secret for 30 years. She went every week and visited him, and none of us ever knew. My dad knew nothing about this whatsoever.” In fact, she kept the secret for over 60 years.
David was placed in foster care and was institutionalised after an epileptic incident left him disabled. According to Caine, his mother would visit her sister every Monday on a different side of London. He never gave her all-day absence a second thought because he and his brother were busy in school, but later, he realised that she had actually used the time to visit David. She even shared details of Caine’s career with her eldest son, and he had watched the future Oscar winner in his breakthrough role in the 1964 film Zulu.
“It was a terrible shock to me and to Stanley,” Caine wrote of the discovery in his 2010 memoir The Elephant to Hollywood. Still, he didn’t express anger over his mother’s secrecy. In fact, the initial shock quickly turned to admiration over her loyalty to her eldest son and sadness over her inability to bring him into the family. “There was nothing Ma wouldn’t do for her boys,” he wrote. “But perhaps that was also because there was one boy she hadn’t been able to do much for.”
When Caine learned about David, he rushed back to England from Hollywood to finally meet him in person. The encounter was full of sadness, but the actor was able to ensure that his brother was moved to a larger room with more amenities. When David died 18 months later, Caine and Stanley buried his ashes with their mother’s, “together at last,” Caine wrote, “In the way that they were never able to be during their lives.”
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