Sir Michael Caine has dished on how he chased and wooed his wife Shakira. Photo / Getty Images.
Sir Michael Caine has dished on how he chased and wooed his wife Shakira. Photo / Getty Images.
Some couples have amazing "how we met" stories, and Sir Michael Caine and his wife are one of them.
The legendary actor opened up to Andrew Denton on Australia's Channel 7's Interview about the moment he first laid eyes on Shakira, the woman he has now been married to for 46 years.
"I was at home with my best friend, a male friend, and this commercial came on in one of the shows for Maxwell House Coffee," Caine recalled.
The ad was set in Brazil, and Caine was mesmerised by the woman in the commercial.
Shakira Caine, wife of Sir Michael Caine. Photo / NZ Herald.
"I had plenty of money. I said to my mate, 'We're going to Brazil tomorrow. I gotta find her'."
Filled with excitement about his spur-of-the moment decision, Caine and his mate went to a bar to have a drink.
"Another guy came in and said, 'What are you doing?' Caine told Denton. "I said, 'Well, I was watching television, and I saw this girl in an advert, and I'm going to Brazil in the morning to find her.' He said, 'Really? What commercial?' I said, 'Maxwell House Coffee'. He said, 'We make that commercial … She's not in Brazil, she's in Fulham Road'."
It turns out the woman lived less than two kilometres from Caine, and he quickly tracked down her phone number to ask her out.
"I phoned her 11 times, 10 of which she wouldn't go out with me," Caine said.
"The last one she decided to go out with me … We went out and fell in love instantly and have never parted since."
Shakira, a model and actress who was born in Guyana, married Caine in Las Vegas in 1973, and they have a daughter together called Natasha.
Sir Michael Caine and wife Shakira Caine pose after he received his Knighthood from the Queen. Photo / Getty Images.
The story of how he met his wife was just one of the memorable anecdotes from Caine's interview with Denton.
The two-time Oscar winner also opened up about the day he discovered he had a secret half-brother.
"I was quite old, 40 or 50 or something," Caine said. "I was filming in this hospital and a guy said, 'You're Michael Caine … We get your mum here every Monday'. I said, 'What?' He said, 'Your mother comes here every Monday'. I said, 'What for?' He said, 'To visit her son'.
I said, 'Her son? What son?'"
Caine knew he had a younger brother named Stanley, but his mum, who had passed away by this time, never told him she had another son.
"He said, 'Would you like to meet him?' I said, 'Yeah'," Caine told Denton. "He took me to a bed and there was this man, older than me, in a bed with a mental impairment.
"He was her son," Caine said. "She had kept it secret from us all those years. Every Monday she had gone to the hospital to take him food and stuff. None of us ever knew."
