JOHN NOLTE: Happy 90th Birthday to the Mighty Michael Caine.

Michael Caine turned 90 this week. I can hardly believe it.

Caine was born in 1933, and like his irreplaceable contemporaries — Robert Duvall (Born 1931) and Clint Eastwood (born 1930) — he keeps on keeping on. How fortunate we are for that.

If you read Caine’s superb 1992 autobiography, What’s It All About?, you’ll discover that his true contemporaries were legends like Peter O’Toole and Terence Stamp and that he grew frustrated watching their careers explode while he scraped along…

But he hung in there, and stardom finally arrived at the ripe old age of 31 with Zulu (1964), a supporting role he basically lucked into. Zulu ended up being a box office hit (and is now rightly regarded as a classic), and in it, Caine proved he was something special: a true actor who was also a movie star, a leading man capable of character roles. But, most of all, there is his depth, a bottomless reservoir of Something’s-Going-On-Down-There-And-Something’s-Going-To-Happen. Without opening his mouth, Caine’s mere presence gives his every character a history and emotional life.

Related: Michael Caine at ninety, in his own words. “We might know him as Michael Caine, but he took his knighthood in his real name. He is really Sir Maurice Micklewhite. Sir Maurice takes being Michael Caine very seriously — and he is very good at it — but his diplomacy has limits. When I ask him if the media have been unfair to Woody Allen, the director of Hannah and Her Sisters, who is dogged by allegations of sexual misconduct, he says yes, but adds no more. When I tell him that Zulu is listed on the counter-terror Prevent scheme as a piece of culture that incites the far-right, he says: ‘That is the biggest load of bullshit I have ever heard.’ Again, he adds no more. He pursues happiness. His perfect day is being at home with his grandchildren, and on his birthday, he says, he will dine with his family.”