Michael Caine: “a Cockney accent”

Excerpt from Michael Caine’s awesome book Michael Caine – Acting in Film: An Actor’s Take on Movie Making .

It has always annoyed me that people think a Cockney accent is the whole performance. I played three entirely different kinds of Cockney in Alfie, The Ipcress File, and Get Carter — totally different characters — but everyone said, “Here’s his old Cockney performance again.” No one says, “Here’s Laurence Olivier’s old Shakespearean king again.”