Caine 'asked doctor to help father die'

Michael Caine has revealed how he asked a doctor to help his terminally ill father to die.

Maurice Micklewhite, a Billingsgate fish market porter, died in hospital at the age of 56 in 1955 after suffering from liver cancer.

Caine told the UK's Classic FM: “My father had cancer of the liver and I was in such anguish over the pain he was in, that I said to this doctor, I said: 'Isn’t there anything else you could, just give him an overdose and end this', because I wanted him to go and he said: 'Oh no, no, no, we couldn’t do that'.

“Then, as I was leaving, he said: 'Come back at midnight.' I came back at midnight and my father died at five past 12. So he’d done it...”

Caine said his father had been given just three to four days to live when he asked the doctor to perform the mercy killing.

But he kept the request secret from his mother, Ellen, a cook and a cleaner, who died in 1989.

Asked if he agreed with voluntary euthanasia, Caine, 77, said: “Oh I think so, yeah. I think if you’re in a state to where life is no longer bearable, if you want to go. I’m not saying that anyone else should make the decision, but I made the request, but my father was semi-conscious.”

Assisted suicide is an offence under the 1961 Suicide Act.

But earlier this year Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, issued guidelines which stated that a person was unlikely to face prosecution if they acted out of compassion.

:: The interview will be broadcast in an interview with Nick Ferrari on Classic FM today.