Sir Michael Caine saw Shakira Baksh in an advertisement for the first time and decided to fly to Brazil to meet her.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published on December 3, 2021. It has since been updated.
Despite being married for 50 years now, Sir Michael Caine doesn't let the romance between him and wife, Shakira Baksh, dim. The long-term couple has one of the most successful marriages in Hollywood! In February 2020, Michael and Shakira, who are 90 and 76 respectively, made sure to spend special time together as they were spotted holding hands for a pre-Valentine's Day dinner, per Daily Mail.
However, quality time is not the only secret behind their successful marriage. The Dark Knight actor, who married the Guyanese actress in 1973, revealed that the key to a happy married life is to have a specific separate space in the house.
In an interview, the Inception actor said, "I have been married for 43 years. I take a line from Groucho Marx, who said: 'It feels just like yesterday, and you know what an awful day yesterday was.' It was not like that with me. My marriage is fabulous."
And what makes his marriage fabulous? "The secret of a good marriage is two bathrooms. You never want to share a bathroom with a woman or you end up with a little corner for your shaving things and stuff. I am older than she is and I need more space," he said, as per Daily Mail.
The couple met after Caine saw Shakira in an ad on TV for the first time. By then, his first marriage to Patricia Haines had fallen apart. He had been single for years until he found love again in Shakira.
"I was at home and this commercial came on, for Maxwell House coffee. And there was this beautiful Brazilian girl," he told Andrew Denton's Interview. "I said to my mate 'we're going to Brazil tomorrow - I have plenty of money, we're going to find her.'" Then, to his surprise, he found out that she lived near his home in London. "I got all excited and said let's go down to the tavern to have a drink and this other guy comes in. He said 'we made that commercial - she's not in Brazil, she's on the Fulham Road' which is about a mile away from me," he said.
Even after he found her number, it was not easy to convince her to go out with him. He had to call 11 times before she said yes. He has been honest about how much he is attracted to her many times. "I was always doing love scenes with very beautiful women. You can go on the set and there’ll be one of the most beautiful women in the world and the director will say, ‘Take your clothes off and get into bed.’ That could be a great temptation so I decided that I would never marry a woman who wasn’t as beautiful as the women I was working with. And I married a woman who, in actual fact, is more beautiful than most women I have worked with, so all the temptation was at home, not at work," he said, as per Mirror UK.
Throughout his career, Baksh has traveled with him whenever he was shooting away from home. "If you go away on location for three months and your wife stays at home, you’ve made a whole new load of friends and she’s made a whole new load of friends and you get home and you’re kind of strangers," he explained. "My wife comes with me on all the movies, but she is not an appendage to a film star or anything like that. She is a completely intertwined partner. She is the other half of me. Also, we’re still very much in love with each other. We always have been, we always will be."
The actor also said that being home is what makes him happy. "I love the house. I’m very happy there and I’m a real family man. I just love to go home, no matter where I am, the most luxurious hotel suite in the world, I love to go home. People ask me, 'Where do you go for your holidays?' I say, 'I go home'," he said.
References:
https://7plus.com.au/andrew-dentons-interview?episode-id=IVEW02-008
https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/michael-caine-interview-my-wife-is-more-376348
Source: Getty Images | Photo by (L) Hulton Archive; (R) Alberto E. Rodriguez
