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Topics: Celebrity
Lucy Devine
Topics: Celebrity
Michael Caine was almost 60 years old when he discovered that his family had been hiding a huge secret for decades.
The actor, who is now 90, only found out about what had happened a few years after his mother Ellen Burchell passed away in 1989.
Speaking on Michael Parkinson's chat show, Parkinson, back in 2002, Caine opened up about a secret which his mother had been concealing from him, his younger brother Stanley and his father all of their lives.
Caine explained the truth came out when 'a newspaper was doing an article on the state of mental health establishments in England'.
A reporter had been chatting to residents at a facility, when one of told them that her boyfriend was Michael Caine's brother.
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"You see that man over there, that's Michael Caine's brother," she apparently said.
The press rang Caine immediately, telling him he had a secret brother and warning him that the story would be printed that weekend.
"I went to go see him, to see if he was alright," Caine added.
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It turns out that Caine's mother had had a child out of wedlock six years before she married Caine's father, Maurice Joseph Micklewhite.
She never told anyone about the baby boy.
The child, whose name was David, was given up for foster care and sadly had an accident in early childhood and also suffered from epilepsy.
Due to his condition, he was labelled as mentally unwell and spent his years institutionalised in a hospital facility.
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Every Monday, Caine recalled that he and his brother would visit their auntie's home while their mum went shopping.
But it turned out that Burchell had actually been visiting her son in secret, every week for 50 years.
Wondering how his mother had been able to keep her secret for so long, the actor explained that a matron told him she would bring a Bible during every visit. Any new nurses on the ward had to swear on the Bible that they wouldn't reveal her secret.
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David however did know that he had a famous brother, after his mother gave him a photograph of the actor from the movie Zulu.
"I felt absolute amazement, how she fooled us all for 50 years, every Monday," Caine added.
Sadly, David died about 18 months after he got to know him.
In his autobiography, Caine wrote: "There was nothing Ma wouldn’t do for her boys – but perhaps that was also because there was one boy she hadn’t been able to do much for."