I just got a copy of Michael Caine’s second memoir “The Elephant to Hollywood,” and as I leaf through it I think: is there any British or Irish actor who can’t write? Sometimes I think our cousins across the sea are creative artists who happen to be good on camera whereas American performers are models who happen to be able to memorize dialogue. “The difference between a leading movie actor and a movie star (apart from the money and the dressing room) is that when movie stars get a script they want to do, they change it to suit them. A movie star says, ‘I would never do that’ or ‘I would never say that’ and their own writers will add what they would do or say. When leading movie actors get a script they want to do, they change themselves to suit the script. But there’s another difference, and this was a difference I knew I could work with. A lot of movie stars can’t act and so when the big roles dry up they disappear, insisting they won’t play supporting parts.”

There’s not a lot on the Batman movies. Caine says that Christopher Nolan called to offer him the part of Alfred the Butler in “Batman Begins,” then personally drove over to Caine’s house within the hour, script in hand. Caine said thanks and Nolan made it clear he wanted Caine to read it right then, while the director waited. “Chris is a very quiet director,” writes Caine, “but his sense of authority permeates the whole set.” The pair would go on to make “Inception” and “The Prestige” together and now “I’ve been discovered by a whole new set of teenage fans who often stop me in the street. I’ve gone from Alfie to Alfred.”

Caine is most charming when writing about his evident gratitude when he made it big. He took his charlady mum to the “Alfie” premiere though she had declined to attend the party for his previous hit, “Zulu.” “When I look back, I can see that she hadn’t wanted to go to the ‘Zulu’ premiere because she was terrified she might make a mistake and screw up my career at such a delicate stage. I think it was probably a class thing and she was intimidated by the thought of all those people in evening dress.”