Is Michael Caine banned from public transport?
There are many things a person might want to ask Sir Michael Caine. What is his favourite movie? Which director did he enjoy working with most? Is Christian Bale sufficiently deferential toward him? Does Christopher Nolan actually have a secret smartphone, after all? Things like that.
Chances are, public transportation isn’t high on the list. As one of the most famous actors of his generation, it’s reasonable to assume that Caine isn’t regularly hopping on the circle line in London or waiting in vain for an American train to appear within three hours of its scheduled arrival.
However, the actor’s relationship with public transport is surprisingly fraught, at least according to a tantalisingly bizarre quote that follows him around the internet. Perhaps you’ve seen it: “Every major city has banned me from using their public transit system except Melbourne, Australia,” Caine supposedly declared at some point, apropos of something. “I have no idea what their breaking point is, but mark my words, I will fucking find it.”
If you were a public official in Melbourne, you’d be frantically reading the traffic code after that last statement. If a figure of his cultural stature threatens you, you’d better listen.
So, is it true?
It is a wonderfully sweary quote, but alas, it is not attributable to Caine. It seems to have originated from the satirical news website ClickHole, which specialises in fabricating unlikely celebrity quotes.
So, as far as we know, Caine is not banned from all forms of public transport outside of Melbourne, and he probably wouldn’t know if he was anyway. Aside from his childhood and early days as a struggling actor, he probably hasn’t so much as glanced at a bus or underground station.
That said, he hasn’t explicitly denied the statement in the fake quote, so for all we know, he might be. It’s a Shrödinger’s Cat situation. Until proven one way or another, both realities could be true.
But does Michael Caine know how to drive?
One thing we do know about Caine and his relationship with transportation is that he didn’t get a driver’s license until he was 50. Under most circumstances, this would be fairly normal for a person who grew up in London and then became so famous that they could afford to have a driver follow them everywhere. In Caine’s case, however, there is an interesting catch: The Italian Job.
Released in 1969 when the actor was 36, The Italian Job centres on an English criminal (Caine) who enlists a group of like-minded crooks to steal a truck full of gold being transported through Turin in an armoured vehicle. More importantly, it features a lot of driving. It’s basically just a glorified car commercial. In 2019, Caine explained that the whole licence thing didn’t stop him from performing his actorly duties.
“There’s a special thing about this film, personally, because I didn’t have a licence and I couldn’t drive,” the actor said. “But we had such big areas for the Minis to move, you didn’t need a licence because they were closed to ordinary traffic. So for me it was incredible because I learned to drive on the movie.”
In his 2018 memoir, Blowing the Bloody Doors Off, which was named after one of his lines from the film, the actor revealed that he decided to get his driver’s licence when he moved with his family to Los Angeles. Not surprisingly, given that he’d learned to drive 15 years before, he passed with flying colours, giving him yet another reason not to use public transport.
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