In a sideline to making movies, Michael Caine is a prominent restaurateur. But he might have been an expert vintner — for he knows how to wait for good things to ripen. His career, for instance. For nine years he played in British rep theater before getting a meaty film role, in Zulu, at 30; the credit read, "Introducing Michael Caine." He starred in 80 or so movies, good, bad and awful, then in his late 60s hit a gold streak of mature roles and quality films. One of these, The Quiet American, contains his boldest, subtlest work; but the events of Sept. 11 delayed the film's release for a year. Again, Caine waited and was rewarded. Last week he was nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award. On March 23, nine days after his 70th birthday, he'll have an aisle seat at the Oscars.

The honor is nothing new for a craftsman who, in 40 busy film years, has embodied the phrase "working actor." Caine has been nominated three times before as Best Actor (for Alfie, Sleuth and Educating Rita), without a victory, and won twice as Sup-porting Actor (Hannah and Her Sisters, The Cider House Rules). But the Quiet American citation is richly earned. Even Caine might think he deserves, if not an Oscar, a medal of honor for doing justice to Graham Greene's 1955 novel and tunneling into the murky life of its protagonist, the Englishman Thomas Fowler. "The role had an extreme degree of difficulty," he says, "like in the Olympics. It was putting across all sides of a character without going outside to hit on it, just with looks and pauses." He speaks of the part with a drama student's zeal: "It's every actor's dream to get something like this." Another role worth waiting for.

Sir Maurice Micklewhite — Caine never bothered legally changing his name, so he was knighted in 2000 with the name he got at birth from his fishmonger father — believes there is a season for every purpose, and vice versa. Growing up Cockney, in the Rotherhithe section of London, taught him to observe life in the raw: to retain those images and that accent, which, along with the spectacles, became his trademark. Doing rep gave him lessons in the star's gift of getting noticed, and the actor's craft of hiding in plain sight. "In rep it's a different play each week," he says. "You'd be the butler one week, the lord the next, the Cockney handyman the week after. And in some of the companies, the mistress of the house!"

When The Ipcress File and Alfie made Caine a star in the mid-'60s, he could have coasted in one film genre, one consistent, marketable personality. Instead, he says, "I treated movies as a kind of repertory. I try to do a different part every time. I've done heroes, reprobates, gangsters, adventurers. Lots of spies. Lovers, fathers, opium addicts, I've played them all. 'Cause the way I see it, I am not a movie star per se. I'm a movie actor. And the difference between the two is, when a movie star gets a script he says, 'How can I change this script to suit me?' When a movie actor gets a script he says, 'How can I change me to suit it?'"

That comment is both modest and myopic. Caine became famous after a string of grimy Northerners (Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay, Alan Bates) had smashed the crockery of English gentility and given glamour to a generation of rebels without a Cambridge degree. "We were throwing off the shackles of class distinction and the dreariness of the the postwar years," Caine says. "To me the '50s were in black-and-white, and suddenly the '60s were in Technicolor."

Caine was working class, all right, but unlike his dour predecessors, he was in Technicolor: blond hair, sultry eyelashes, a mouth that found the ribald humor in misery and double-dealing. As the cad Alfie, he was borderline gorgeous, and his intimate smile as he confides his amoral technique to the audience made this rotter an irresistible poster boy for Swinging London.

In short, a movie star. But like many screen idols, Caine thinks of himself as a character actor lucky enough to get leads. "Movie stars are supposed to be perfect and handsome, with great bodies," Caine says. "And I come along with glasses. 'He's shortsighted.' Well, I'm just like you in the audience: I have failings." Ah, but his lovely trick was to make his characters' failings sexy, by ignoring them. He was perfectly imperfect, the rogue hero. Somehow, after a decade of professional anonymity, Caine carried himself with the assurance of a man at ease with his star quality, as if he always knew he'd find the mass audience's favor, if only it could find him. That assurance has sustained his marquee value ever since.

He had a fine time, making lots of money and keeping some of it (he was for years a "taxile" from Britain), making movies in exotic locations and finding a beautiful wife (Shakira Baksh, the former Miss Guyana — they celebrated their 30th anniversary last month). But the films didn't always measure up. One in five might be worthy: Get Carter, Sleuth, The Man Who Would Be King, California Suite, Hannah and Her Sisters, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Others were high-calorie filler that kept neighborhood theaters and The Late Show alive in the '70s and '80s. And then there were the stinkers: The Swarm, Jaws: The Revenge, elephantine projects that could have made an all-time Golden Turkey list, if only they'd had some personality.

Caine speaks genially of these catastrophes, perhaps because his natural likability kept the crud from sticking to him. "You don't pick a script and say, 'Oh, this is a piece of junk. Let's do it.' But I made any picture that came along. That's how I made so much crap. I didn't think anybody was ever going to give me another movie." He kept at it for the work, for the pretty places where films are sometimes shot and, often, for the money. "I came from a very, very, very poor family," he notes. "And I had to buy everybody a house. Well, they've all got houses now, and they're worth a fortune. I should have leased them!"

In the mid-'90s Caine took two years off to travel and relax, but he wasn't ready to sink into retirement. Jack Nicholson called with a co-starring role in the dark gangster film Blood and Wine, and Caine's golden years kicked in. He galloped from the sleazissimo agent in Little Voice to the kindly abortionist in Cider House, from the beauty-pageant Svengali in Miss Congeniality to a dead Cockney remembered by his friends in Last Orders — winners all. (He also survived Mike Myers' idolatry of Caine's swinging-spy phase in Austin Powers in Goldmember.) Then came Fowler.

He is a Times of London correspondent in Saigon at the time the French are retreating from Vietnam and the Americans are coming in, full of bravado and a species of idealism. Fowler, with his Vietnamese mistress (Do Thi Hai Yen) and his fondness for opium, is the resident sage and cynic. The subversive tactics of an American friend (Brendan Fraser) stir him to make a fatal decision for reasons both noble and venal.

Caine lends Fowler the weariness and wariness of an old lion reminding itself how to roar, and the pathos of a lover driven to humiliate his mistress and himself. "I knew Graham Greene," he says, "and I knew he had a Vietnamese girlfriend. So I used his accent and his attitudes — very upper middle class — for Fowler. I was playing an alter ego of Graham's: his Mr. Hyde to his Dr. Jekyll." As Fowler's shadings turn darker, Caine paints him with stronger strokes. It was an exhausting process. "Every Friday night I'd have dinner with my wife, and I'd say, 'I've got nothing left. I'm empty.' I had disappeared into the part."

That, by Caine's own definition, is film acting. And the happy ending is that this is not the end: more good scripts will come his way, more terrific Caine performances will come ours. "I don't have to work for money anymore," he says, "but I do have to work for myself — if it's an offer I can't refuse. It's got to be really great for me to turn out."

Michael Caine will find a great offer he can't refuse. Just you wait.

• RICHARD CORLISS