Sir Michael Caine requested doctor to end father’s life

LONDON - Sir Michael Caine has confessed that he asked a doctor to help end his father’s suffering when he was dying in hospital from liver cancer.

Sir Michael’s father Maurice Micklewhite, who shared his son’s name, was a Billingsgate fish market porter who died aged 56 in 1955.

In a radio interview with presenter Nick Ferrari of Classic FM, the actor, 77, said that he asked a doctor to help his gravely ill father die.

And although the doctor told him he could not hasten his death, Michael said he honoured his request and discreetly gave his father an overdose.

“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 [do], 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,’” the Daily Mail quoted him as saying.

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

The veteran actor said Micklewhite had been given just three to four days to live when he asked the doctor to perform a mercy killing.

However, he kept the request secret from his mother Ellen, a cook and a cleaner, who died in 1989. (ANI)