Michael Caine, pictured in the 1971 crime classic Get Carter, is one of the cinema's hardest-working actors. (Warner Home Video)

Among living film legends, Michael Caine is the any-job man. He may have won two Oscars and been knighted by the Queen, but the movies' most famous cockney has never turned his nose up at a part, no matter how small or silly or schlocky. He's played the villain in a lowbrow Steven Seagal action flick and shared the screen with a cast of Victorian Muppets. He's tangled with killer bees (The Swarm), low-budget sharks (Jaws: The Revenge) and even oversexed teenage girls (Blame It on Rio).

A year seldom goes by without Michael Caine appearing in one, two and often three or four movies. Even now, in his 70s, he shows no sign of slowing down.

The funny thing is, no matter how excremental the movie, Caine's appeal never diminishes. To borrow that old description of Ronald Reagan, Caine is the Teflon actor — none of the crap sticks to him. Then, just when we've forgotten exactly why he's a major star, he turns up in a first-rate role in a film like Is Anybody There?, which opens May 15.

"I have a definite standard by which I choose films," Caine explained in his cheerfully candid 1992 memoir, What's It All About? "I choose the best one available at the time I need one." Happily, in the twilight of his career, the choices available have been less on the order of The Swarm and more like Is Anybody There?

In the latter, an engaging black comedy-cum-tearjerker, Caine plays an irascible old magician struggling with Alzheimer's who forms an unlikely friendship with a death-obsessed 10-year-old boy (Son of Rambow's Bill Milner). It's Caine's foray into the crabbed-age-and-youth genre. And like 2006's Venus with Peter O'Toole, Is Anybody There? gains added poignancy from the fact that its elderly star has spent more than half a lifetime aging before our eyes.

We watch this creaky old geezer with the watery blue eyes and can't help but remember that this is the same man who set teenage hearts aflutter as the rakish young Alfie, or flirted with midlife infidelity in Hannah and Her Sisters. Considering that Caine has acted in more than 100 films of all kinds, from art-house fare to Austin Powers, there are few moviegoers who haven't come to know him well over the years.

Michael Caine, left, and Bill Milner star in the black comedy Is Anybody There? (E1 Media)

You don't have to look hard to see where Caine's work ethic comes from. Born in East London in 1933 to a charwoman and a porter at the Billingsgate Fish Market, Caine – christened Maurice Joseph Micklewhite – struggled hard to leave his working-class roots and make it as an actor. He spent a long, hungry decade doing regional theatre and playing small parts in television and film, along the way acquiring a new name inspired by the Humphrey Bogart film The Caine Mutiny. The slog finally paid off in the 1960s, when Canadian-born producer Harry Saltzman (of James Bond fame) plucked him out of obscurity and gave him his first starring role, in the spy thriller The Ipcress File.

However, it was Caine's next picture, Alfie, that catapulted him to international stardom. His performance as the pretty-boy heartbreaker of the title landed him an Oscar nomination and took him to Hollywood. Since then, a year seldom goes by without Caine appearing in one, two and often three or four movies. Even today, in his 70s, he shows no sign of slowing down. His ubiquity may be part of his appeal: now, when he pops up as, say, the old hippie renegade in Children of Men, or as a wryly paternal Alfred the butler in the new Batman blockbusters, he bathes the screen in warm familiarity. We're reminded of all the times we've enjoyed his acting in the past.

Here is a sampling of 10 of Michael Caine's best performances:

The Ipcress File (1965)

As British secret agent Harry Palmer, a bespectacled, mild-looking Caine is the antithesis of James Bond – the dude even goes grocery shopping. When it's time for action, however, he's as sleek and cool as they come. This hot serving of Cold War intrigue was so popular that Caine reprised Palmer twice more in the '60s, in Funeral in Berlin and Billion Dollar Brain. His character was also an inspiration for Mike Myers's Austin Powers, a connection that Caine confirmed by playing Austin's dad in Goldmember. (Watch the original trailer, which introduced the world to Michael Caine.)

Alfie (1966)

Michael Caine and Shirley Anne Field in a bedroom scene from Alfie. (Larry Ellis/Express/Getty Images)

"I am what is called a free agent," says Alfie Elkins, explaining his bed-hopping philosophy to his latest "bird" in this still-potent Swinging '60s classic. Like other films from that period (Blowup, Georgy Girl ), its carefree attitude to sex hides a moral core. As Alfie bounces between a series of lovers, from naïve hitchhikers (Jane Asher) to game cougars (Shelley Winters), he begins to question his own smug self-justifications. Caine's laddish antihero, confiding to the camera like a mate in a pub, evolves visibly from a glib cad to a confused young man.

Get Carter (1971)

Caine found his heavy-lidded look, a sexy asset in films like Alfie, could just as easily suggest a cold-blooded villain. Here, he's the bad guy as good guy: Jack Carter, a relentless London gangster who tears up Newcastle-upon-Tyne in his search to find out who killed his brother. Caine is brutal yet empathetic in Mike Hodges' grimy gem of a crime thriller, which looks as though the Newcastle coal dust had seeped into the celluloid.

Sleuth (1972)

Caine more than held his own against the formidable Laurence Olivier in this fiendishly clever murder mystery, adapted from Anthony Shaffer's play. Olivier plays an effete crime novelist who sets out to chastise his wife's studly young lover (Caine) via an elaborate hoax – only to find his rival is more than a match for him. (Avoid the misfired remake, with Caine in the Olivier role.)

The Man Who Would Be King (1975)

Michael Caine, right, and Sean Connery star in The Man Who Would Be King. (Warner Home Video)

John Huston's film of the classic Rudyard Kipling story teamed Caine and Sean Connery as a couple of Raj-era British army vets who scheme to set themselves up as gods in a remote Central Asian land. Part fable of colonial hubris, part ripping-good adventure, it's also a masterpiece of macho camaraderie – Caine's high-spirited cockney rogue finds the ideal complement in Connery's gruff Scottish chancer.

Educating Rita (1983)

Caine gained 30 pounds and grew a scruffy beard to star in this tender comedy, based on the play by Willy Russell and directed by Alfie's Lewis Gilbert. In a variation on the Pygmalion theme, Caine plays a burnt-out boozer of an English professor who rekindles his purpose while teaching an eager but unlettered Liverpool hairdresser (Julie Walters). Reviewing the film, the great critic Pauline Kael gave Caine the highest praise any actor could ask for: "You don't observe his acting; you just experience the character's emotions."

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

Caine won his first Oscar for his part in Woody Allen's warm-hearted ensemble comedy about familial and romantic love. Caine is gentle Elliott, the poetry-loving financial adviser married to Mia Farrow's too-perfect Hannah, who becomes helplessly infatuated with her unhappy sister Lee (Barbara Hershey). Swinging from giddy joy ("I have my answer!") to agonizing guilt, Caine gives one of his sweetest, most vulnerable performances. (Watch this charming scene, in which Elliott contrives to "accidentally" bump into Lee.)

The Cider House Rules (1999)

Lasse Hallström's sentimental film of the John Irving novel nabbed Caine his second supporting-actor Oscar. Given the Academy's fondness for showy acting, Caine's rare attempt at a foreign accent may have had something to do with it. But if his New England cadences are dodgy, his grandly quirky portrayal of Dr. Wilbur Larch, the pragmatic but compassionate head of a maternity hospital/orphanage in 1940's Maine, perfectly captures the Dickensian flavour of Irving's book.

Michael Caine in The Quiet American. (Universal/Alliance)

The Quiet American (2002)

Although Canadian Brendan Fraser plays the American of the title, it's Caine who is the quiet one in this low-key but gripping adaptation of Graham Greene's novel. Caine stars as Thomas Fowler, a passive British journalist in 1950's French-occupied Vietnam, who finds both his political neutrality and his romance with a Vietnamese dancer (Do Thi Hai Yen) challenged by Fraser's handsome, devious CIA agent. Few actors could make us feel sorry for an older man afraid of losing his young mistress, but Caine does it – the scene in which he finally breaks down in despair in the privacy of a bathroom stall is devastating.

Is Anybody There? (2009)

Caine's wife, Shakira, reportedly wept uncontrollably when she watched her husband in his latest film. You can see why she was so upset. As Clarence, the retired prestidigitator, the actor conveys with understated pathos the quiet tragedy of a descent into dementia. The consolation is that Caine himself, at 75, shows he is still at the height of his acting powers.

Is Anybody There? opens in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver on May 15.

Do you have a favourite Michael Caine movie? Comment below.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.