Michael Caine's tale of how he found wife of 52 years is ‘greatest love story ever told’
People think Michael Caine's story of how he found his wife Shakira is the 'greatest love story ever told'.
They've been married since 1973, and later that year the couple welcomed their daughter, Natasha, but it all started a few years before that when the actor was watching TV.
As Caine tells it, he and his friend decided to give the disco a swerve one night and stayed in to watch TV instead, at which point the actor laid eyes on his future wife.
"I saw this lady on the television in a commercial and fell in love instantly. It was a commercial for her for coffee in Brazil and everything, 'awful lot of coffee in Brazil' was the tune," he said on The Jonathan Ross Show.
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"I just watched her and I thought 'that's the woman for me' and I said to my mate I said 'we're going to Brazil in the morning and we're gonna find her'."
Later that night, he did eventually head down to the disco when a friend came up to Caine and his mates and said 'you three, no girls, what's going on'.
The actor explained that he'd seen 'a beautiful girl on the television' and declared 'and I'm going to Brazil in the morning to find her'.
His friend told him 'I've been watching television all evening, I never saw any beautiful girls', at which point Caine explained that he was talking about one of the women in the adverts.
As luck would have it, he was speaking to someone who worked for the company that made the advert and could point him in the right direction.
It was at this point that Caine was told 'Michael, she's not Brazilian, she's Indian and she lives on Fulham Road' and the proverbial apple of his eye turned out to be much closer to home.
His friend passed along her number and Caine explained in a Wired interview in 2017 that his plan to seduce Shakira hit a snag as 'she wouldn't go out with me', but he decided to be persisted as he 'phoned her for 10 days and she wouldn't go out with me'.
"But on the last day she did and we've never left each other since, and that's how I met my wife," Caine explained, and the rest is 52 years of marriage.
His story has people declaring they believe in 'love at first sight', while others joked that with the rise of social media 'he would fall in love every other day nowadays'.
A few others even shared their own similar love stories where they thought someone they were interested in 'could be my future wife' and decided to go for it.
Topics: Celebrity, Sex and Relationships
Joe Harker