The older brother Michael Caine never knew he had
The story of Michael Caine rising from a working-class family in the East End of London to the top of Hollywood stardom has always captured the imagination of the British public. After all, Caine speaks fondly of his childhood and is extremely proud of his humble roots. His father, Maurice, died in 1955 of liver cancer, but his mother, Ellen, lived until 1989, experiencing every bit of success her son enjoyed. Imagine Caine’s shock, then, when he discovered after she died that his beloved mum had kept a secret from him for 50 years – the older brother he never knew he had.
Caine was devastated when his mother passed away at the age of 89. He had always been honest about how she was proud of him for his accomplishments. However, she was a working-class woman through and through, and the idea of her son paying her way simply never computed. For example, when he told her he earned one million pounds per film, he had to stress, “It means you don’t have to do anything, mum, work for anything, or want for anything ever, ever again. So no taking crafty cleaning jobs to be with your mates, or I’ll get into trouble with the papers.”
Two years after Ellen died, though, Caine was floored when he found out she’d lied to him for his whole life. He was contacted by a newspaper doing an article about mental health facilities in England because it wanted his comment on a claim someone had made. A female patient at the Cane Hill Mental Hospital in London’s Croydon area had claimed Caine’s older brother David Burchell was her boyfriend – and he was also a patient at the institution.
The newspaper told Caine that the story would be published that weekend, so he went to the hospital to find out if it was true. To his shock, not only was it true, but he was also told that his mother had visited David every Monday for nearly five decades.
In 2002, Caine told Michael Parkinson that his mother insisted to everyone at the institution that Caine could never know about his brother. He revealed the hospital’s matron told him, “Your mother used to bring a Bible, and every new nurse had to swear on the Bible that this was not your brother.'” She gave David a picture of Caine from Zulu, though, so he knew he had a famous brother, even if Caine had no idea.
It turned out that Ellen had given birth to David six years before she met Caine’s father. The boy had epilepsy, and a hip injury suffered in childbirth confined him to a wheelchair. He spent most of his childhood in and out of various institutions before landing permanently at Cane Hill when he was 17. A shell-shocked Caine told Parkinson, “In those days, they used to lock him in the cellar, with a stone floor. And, of course, he’s bouncing about on that, and he was probably quite intelligent, but he’d bashed himself into a bloody brain abnormality.”
David never learned to read or write, and his speech was difficult to comprehend, but Caine could still converse with the brother he never knew through a nurse. At the time, Caine told the New York Daily News, “I am going to do whatever I can for him. I have the money to take care of him.” Sadly, David died only 18 months after Caine met him for the first time, but he was grateful to spend some time with him before the end.
The whole situation left Caine amazed that his mum had successfully pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes for so long. After all, he insisted his father and brother Stanley never knew about David, either. It did make some aspects of his life click into place, though. He told the Daily News, “I remember my mother telling me when I was a teenager that she was going to visit a cousin there. But even then, she did a really good coverup. She told me it was a woman cousin who was mentally ill and that she had to go and see.”
Caine also told Parkinson that a driver would take her home after his mother visited him. One day, the driver told him, “She always gets out at the bus stop on Streatham High Road.” Only after finding out about David did Caine realise that the bus stop was “around the corner” from Cane Hill. He marvelled, “She’d…pick up chocolates, candy, cake and ice cream, but when I’d go and see her, there was never anything in the fridge, and I used to think, ‘Where’s she putting all this stuff?’ She was giving it to him. It’s amazing.”
Ultimately, Caine must have felt betrayed by his mother’s secret, but he also theorised that a sense of guilt surrounding it may encouraged her to be a great mum to him. In his memoir, he wrote, “There was nothing Ma wouldn’t do for her boys – but perhaps that was also because there was one boy she hadn’t been able to do much for.”
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