The actor Michael Caine was already middle aged when he found out a rather dark secret about his family. Every Sunday his mother would “go to church” or “visit a cousin” and she’d always insist on going alone. And it wasn’t until Caine was almost sixty himself that he discovered that his mother had an out-of-wedlock son. The boy, Caine’s half-brother, had been born six years prior to the actor’s birth, when his mother had not yet married his father. His secret older brother suffered an accident in early childhood after which he was institutionalized. He also suffered from epilepsy, causing further damage and resulting in him being labeled mentally ill, even though the poor young man was fully lucid and aware of his surroundings. When his mother died in 1989, Michael Caine found out about his half-brother… he began to visit him, too. And he was surprised to see that his brother had pictures of him as an actor, which his mother had given him — the brother he never knew about, knew about him, and was a devoted fan. David Burchell was his name. And Michael Caine did what he could for him, in his later years, trying to improve his conditions, his standards of living… In 1991, David died and Michael Caine had his ashes buried with those of his mother. He reportedly wasn’t upset about his mother’s secret, later saying he “fully understood it”, being a young unmarried mother with a little disabled boy, she had no choice. Still, it’s crazy to think about her keeping a secret of such magnitude for sixty-plus years.
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Michael Caine And his wife shakira in 1973, and then almost 50 years later. “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”, the actor recalled and added he was mesmerized by the girl in the commercial. “I had plenty of money. I said to my mate, ‘We’re going to Brazil tomorrow. I gotta find her’.” The actor later went to the disco, and there he met a friend, told him where he was traveling, and invited him to go with him. He explained everything to him, and then they realized the incredible coincidence. “Another guy came in and said, ‘What are you doing?’ 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”, Caine explained. He found out her phone number so he can ask her out. “I phoned her 11 times, 10 of which she wouldn’t go out with me. The last one she decided to go out with me … We went out and fell in love instantly and have never parted since”, Caine said.
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'What's really amazed me is that she managed to visit him all those years without anybody knowing,' Caine told the News. But he said with the discovery, some pieces of his childhood fell into place. 'I remember my mother telling me when I was a teenager that she was going to visit a cousin there (Cane Hill mental hospital),' he told the News. 'But even then she did a really good coverup. She told me it was a woman cousin who was mentally ill and that she had to go and see. That must have been my brother.'