Michael at home in Beverly Hills. The Caines moved there from England in 1979.
The veteran of more than 130 films.
In 1979 you were making mega-movies and living with your family (wife Shakira and daughter Natasha) in a lovely home. Why leave that idyllic set-up?
I was in the super-tax bracket, and it was starting to become ridiculous. Some of my fellow actors had already moved to other countries – Sean Connery, Richard Harris, Roger Moore, Richard Burton, and many others. Eventually, my accountants told me that I basically had to scale back my costs drastically or move overseas. I was a family man by this point, so I didn’t want to cut back on the lifestyle I’d worked hard to provide for my wife and daughter.
So we decided to move to Los Angeles, which we both knew fairly well. We both had friends there already. We sold the house to Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin and off we went. It was sad to leave England, but here was a chance to turn a problem into an opportunity.
In what way?
You have to bear in mind – I wasn’t an actor starting out, going to Hollywood to become a movie star. I was already 46 by then, I’d been in big movies, people knew
