Michael Caine got some Oscar buzz a few months ago when he premiered the film Youth, directed by Paolo Sorrentino. While Caine enjoyed some great critical buzz, his performance didn’t garner many awards or nominations. Still, Caine seems happy enough to still be working with some kind of consistency. At the age of 82, he’s semi-retired and he no longer feels the need to work on back-to-back projects and say “yes” to everything he’s offered. But that’s how he used to be – Michael Caine in his youth (and even in his middle age) was a workaholic and quite the bad-boy. While promoting Youth this week, Caine admitted that in his younger days, he was “a bit of piss artist” and he “used to drink a bottle of vodka a day.” These are the definitions of “piss artist”: “Someone who is frequently drunk (pissed). Someone who claims knowledge or understanding that he does not possess.”

Michael Caine has revealed that he drank a bottle of vodka a day early in his career. The Oscar-winning actor spoke about his problems with alcohol during his early career in an interview with Radio Times.

“I was a bit of a piss artist when I was younger,” he said. “I used to drink a bottle of vodka a day and I was smoking several packs a day.”

Caine claimed his job led him to extremes. “I wasn’t unhappy, but it was stress,” he said. “You know, ‘Am I going to get another picture? How am I going to do this part? How am I going to remember all those lines? I’ve got to get up at six in the morning and I hope the alarm works.’”

He believed that his second wife, Shakira, saved him from death after they were married in 1973, saying she “calmed him” down. “Without her, I would have been dead long ago,” he said. “I would have probably drunk myself to death.”

In an interview with the Telegraph last week, Caine said now he only drinks wine with dinner.

[From The Guardian]

I understand how really young people (like, 22-year-olds) can drink that much and still be able to function at some level. But to drink that much consistently, every day, for like two decades? HOW? That’s when Michael married Shakira, his second wife – he was 40 years old. And I believe that he probably cleaned up his act for Shakira. But his 20s and 30s are probably a haze of booze, cigarettes and shenanigans. They just don’t make ‘em like that anymore, the Peter O’Tooles and Richard Burtons and such, the hard-drinking working-class actors who are tough as nails and ready for a fight. Sigh…

Photos courtesy of WENN.