Michael Caine on his new movie Youth with Rachel Weisz and Madalina Diana Ghenea

Vibrant and sharp as a tack with a career that stretches 60 years, the 82-year-old has so many anecdotes that you could spend days pressing him for celeb gossip and still only scratch the surface. Like the time he was chain-smoking at a party and fellow actor Tony Curtis, whom he didn’t know, chucked his cigarettes into the fire and told him he’d die if he didn’t quit. And he did, for a year at least. “I always think Tony Curtis saved my life.”

Or the time he met John Wayne at the check-in desk of a Beverly Hills hotel shortly after he’d arrived in Hollywood for the first time. Wayne recognised him from his starring role in Alfie. “He said, ‘Take a little advice, kid. Talk slow, talk low and don’t say too f****** much.’” He also told him never to wear suede shoes – in case he encountered an over-excited fan in a public urinal. Caine became firm friends with Wayne, even visiting him in the hospital when he was dying.

We could go on – and Caine does. He has the ability to make a cobweb-strewn story feel like it’s never been told before. If the word iconic is overused in talking about film stars, it almost feels like understatement for the man born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite. A knighthood, a CBE, a Bafta, three Golden Globes, six Oscar nominations and two wins – for Hannah and Her Sisters and The Cider House Rules – still feels like scant reward for a career as monumental as his.

Quiz: How well do you know your Michael Caine movies? 

Yet even Caine has gaps. We meet during Cannes, where his new film Youth premiered. He hasn’t been here for 50 years, since Alfie was unveiled in 1966. “It got the Special Jury Prize,” he informs me. “I didn’t get anything!” It almost beggars belief that an actor who has worked with esteemed directors ranging from John Huston and Joseph Mankiewicz to Christopher Nolan and Woody Allen has somehow missed out on the world’s most prestigious film festival for five decades.

Michael Caine with Shakira, his wife of 43 years

Of course, Caine hasn’t always had it his own way. He was never afraid to take a schlock film if there was an exotic shoot or a healthy pay-cheque involved. As he famously said about 1987’s risible Jaws: The Revenge, “I have never seen the film, but by all accounts it was terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.” By the early 1990s, though, his star was on the wane as he suffered the ignominy of playing opposite Steven Seagal and the Muppets (thankfully, not in the same film).

It was a long way from his pomp in the late 1960s and early 1970s in films such as Get Carter, The Italian Job and The Ipcress File. By his own admission, Caine had a hard time adjusting when his leading man days came to an end. He remembers being sent a script by a producer. “I sent it back with a message saying, ‘The part is too small.’ He sent me a message back, saying, ‘I didn’t want you to read the lover – I wanted you to read the father.’ So I knew my days as a movie star were over.”

The movies “retire you”, he says. “Nobody wants you; only desperate people send you terrible scripts. Or there’s no money and it’s not worth getting up in the morning – and you just say, ‘OK, I’m done.’” He wasn’t upset when this began to happen. “I wasn’t saying, ‘I’m never going to work again.’ I was quite happy.” Back then, with homes in Miami and England, he had “a few quid stashed away” and a share in Langan’s, the Mayfair restaurant he co-founded in 1976.

Based in Miami, Caine was more than happy living out his days with Shakira in the sunshine. Until, that is, his good friend Jack Nicholson asked if he fancied co-starring in Bob Rafelson’s noir Blood and Wine. “It brought me back into the business.” He followed it by playing a cynical showbiz promoter in Little Voice, a kindly doctor in The Cider House Rules, winning his second Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, and a war correspondent in The Quiet American – another Oscar nomination.

“I had a whole new career again,” he says. This time it wasn’t B-movies either – but rather roles in massive blockbusters like Chris Nolan’s Batman trilogy (as Alfred the butler) and his science-fiction hits Inception and Interstellar. “What I’ve been doing is smaller parts that interest me,” he says. “I don’t want to do leading roles. I’m too lazy. I don’t want to get up at six o’clock in the morning for 10 weeks and learn 10 pages of dialogue a day.”

It’s what makes his appearance in Youth – in the lead – so fascinating. “This one was different,” he says. “I’d have done anything to do this. So I got up at six o’clock in the morning for eight weeks and did it.” Written and directed by the acclaimed Italian Paolo Sorrentino, who won an Oscar for 2013’s dazzling The Great Beauty, Caine was immediately taken with the script. He told his agent he’d do it, regardless of the money on offer. “Don’t tell ’em,” he whispers, “but I would’ve done it for nothing.”

Winning him Best Actor at last year’s European Film Awards, Caine plays retired composer Fred Ballinger, an embittered, emotionally stagnant widower with a strained relationship with his daughter (Rachel Weisz). When the film opens, he’s met by an emissary from the Queen, who wants him to perform his most famous piece at a birthday concert for Prince Philip. He refuses the request, preferring to see out his time in a luxurious Swiss spa resort, alongside his friend, Harvey Keitel’s has-been film director.

“I never saw any other actor being able to play the role,” claims Sorrentino, who wrote the character specifically for Caine. But as the actor points out, his only similarity to Ballinger is his age. “He’s completely apathetic about his work and I’m completely the opposite. I never stopped working and I never gave up. I have a happy family life and he has an unhappy, invisible family life. He’s a very smart musician, very posh, very clever; he’s the opposite to me in every way you think.”

You can understand why Caine was desperate to play the role; exploring characters “farther and farther away from who I really am” is what keeps him interested. He’s never been a chameleon as an actor; like Woody Allen, the voice and those trademark glasses are part of the package. “I’m from a very working-class background, a very poor background,” he says. “And for me to play a classical music conductor ... If you think in terms of class and accent that was one of the hardest things I’ve done and I figured I carried it off.”

Full of visual flourishes, Youth isn’t without moments of humour – not least the sequence when Caine and Keitel are confronted by the beautiful Romanian model Madalina Diana Ghenea, who arrives in the spa’s swimming pool naked. Caine remembers the day they shot it. “Paolo said, ‘You’ll see this beautiful girl – it’s youth, something you can no longer have, a prize you can’t get.’ But he forgot to tell us that she didn’t have a bathing suit on!” The look on their faces – used for the film’s promotional poster – is priceless.

If lithe supermodels may be out of reach, I ask what compensations there are for growing old. “You don’t have to go to discos,” Caine retorts, snappily. “I used to live in discos. They used to call me Disco Mike. I used to disco dance all the time. Now I wouldn’t want to.” He’s on a roll now. “My best summation of old age comes from [the late] George Burns, the American comedian, a friend of mine. We were talking about death and he said, ‘What I do – I never get out of bed until I’ve read the paper. I look at the obituaries. If I’m not in them, I get up!’”

These days sporting a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles, rather than his trademark black-edged ones, Caine is healthily in denial about his age. “I stopped feeling old when I was 38,” he says. “I got married and that’s when I stopped feeling old.” (His memory might be failing him; after his seven-year marriage to actress Patricia Haines came to an end in 1962, he married the Guyanese actor/model Shakira Baksh in January 1973, the same year their daughter Natasha was born, with Caine just months away from turning 40.) He looks up to where Shakira is sitting, patiently. “I’m talking about you, darling! You can tell she’s listening to every word I say! She was being interviewed once in the other room in my flat and I was listening in. The man said to her, ‘What first attracted you to Michael?’ And she said, ‘The way he treated his mother.’ And it was true – I had great respect for my mother and women like that. She didn’t say, ‘He was handsome, he was rich …’ It was just, ‘The way he treated his mother.’”

Caine’s mother Ellen, a former cook and charwoman, lived to the ripe old age of 89. She died more than 26 years ago but Caine tells stories about her as if she were right here in the room with us. Like the time when the 1960s were in full swing. “I remember walking along the King’s Road with my mother. She saw the first mini-skirt she ever saw. I said, ‘What do you think of that, Ma?’ She replied: ‘If it’s not for sale, you shouldn’t put it in the window.’”

Caine's co-star in Youth, Romanian model Madalina Diana Ghenea

Caine was raised by his parents in a two-roomed flat at the top of a terraced Victorian house in London’s Camberwell. His father Maurice was a troubled figure. A fish porter at London’s Billingsgate Market, he was a compulsive gambler who used to fritter away money reserved for bills on his habit. When he died of cancer of the liver, he had just 36p to his name. Nor did he particularly approve of his son's desire to act. “When he died, I was broke, out of work and had just got divorced. He thought I was a bum.”

Before he trod the boards, Caine did his national service, serving as a private in the infantry during the Korean War. He was, by his own admission, “scared shitless” – being on the frontline for a week was like spending a year back home. But he believes it stood him in good stead. “I was always very grateful that I had been in the army. I always felt I belonged, because I actually fought for the country. I had this thing about being an Englishman, and I’ve proved my word in some way.”

Once back on home soil, he answered an advert in The Stage and became an assistant manager in a Horsham rep theatre. From there, he began getting tiny walk-on roles. “I once read in a psychiatric book that you become what you’re afraid of,” he says. “And that’s true of me. I was the shyest little boy. I wasn’t little Jimmy who would get up and sing a song. I would be hiding behind the curtains. I was very shy. For me, to become an actor was extraordinarily painful but I had to put myself through it. I was only ever afraid of failure.”

The first lowly-paid years of his career were brutal, he says. But after switching his surname to Caine, it all changed when he starred in war film Zulu. Soon sharing a flat with actor Terence Stamp and dating Bianca Jagger, he was the toast of Swinging London. Doesn’t he miss those days? “I don’t miss anything about being young, because I got so much from being old,” he replies. “The first thing, I don’t miss the ignorance – I’ve got all that knowledge now. When I was young, I didn’t have a family.”

He became a father in his mid-twenties, his first wife giving birth to their daughter Dominique. But Caine estimates he was too immature to cope – and he separated from Haines not long afterwards. By the time he wed again, he’d changed. He credits Shakira – who, by now, has got bored of listening into our conversation and left – for taming his wilder instincts. “Meeting her calmed me down. I used to drink a lot.” He adds a caveat. “I wasn’t a drunk. I was too much of a control freak to be a drunk. I had to be in control of me first because I was always trying to control everyone else.”

Caine is not one for nostalgia trips. “I always tell my children, ‘Never look back – because you’ll fall over.’” He doesn’t watch his old films, mostly. “Sometimes if I see something by accident … I’m one of those guys always flicking through the programmes and if suddenly I come on, I’ll go, ‘What film is that?’ And I’ll look at it for a few minutes. And if it’s [1988’s con-man comedy] Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, I’ll look at it and have a laugh, because that’s a funny movie. That’s one of my favourites.”

Forever looking forward, refusing steadfastly to face retirement, he’s already shot two films since Youth. In the summer he returns in Now You See Me 2, the sequel to the 2013 hit about a group of magicians who pull off bank heists. He’s back as Arthur Tressler, “the arch villain whose in charge of all the skulduggery and the money they’re trying to rob”. Talking of bank jobs, he’s also just shot Going in Style, a remake of the 1979 comedy starring Caine’s old friend George Burns about three retirees who plan a robbery.

If there’s one thing to lament about getting older, it’s that he rarely sees his old showbusiness friends any more. Roger Moore lives between Switzerland and the south of France, while composer Leslie Bricusse is in Los Angeles. Even Sean Connery – his co-star from John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King – lives in the Bahamas. Youth may not be on their side, but if they ever do manage to get together again, it’s going to be one hell of a party.

Youth (15) opens on January 29. Now You See Me 2 (tbc) opens in June.