In the four decades he has been starring in movies, Caine has managed to go from generating amazement that he held his own next to Laurence Olivier in 1972's "Sleuth" (a backhanded compliment -- the material is worthy of neither of them) to recognition as a master actor. Because Caine has literally dozens of films to his credit, some of the best have slipped through the cracks. I urge you to check out "The Whistle Blower"; Jan Egleson's crafty, malicious thriller "A Shock to the System"; and the tense, workmanlike political thriller "The Wilby Conspiracy," in which Caine plays an English businessman who, during a vacation in South Africa, gets involved with saving the life of an escaped political prisoner, played by Sidney Poitier. This past spring, hours before he won his second Oscar for "The Cider House Rules" (he won his first for a skillful but not terribly flattering performance in "Hannah and Her Sisters": There's not much pleasure in watching Woody Allen foisting his neuroses on as grounded an actor as Caine), he was asked what two movies of his entire career he would keep. He answered "Cider House" and "Educating Rita." Good choices.

Caine may never have gone deeper than he does in "Educating Rita," which was directed by "Alfie's" Lewis Gilbert from Willy Russell's play. As Frank, a perpetually sozzled Oxford prof and stymied poet, Caine delivers perhaps the gentlest portrait of self-loathing ever in the movies. Frank is disgusted with himself for not producing any more poetry, disgusted with the poems he did produce, disgusted with the way he goes through the motions for students who regard him as an academic freak show, a souse who's better for a laugh than a seminar. Frank may be faking, but he's no fraud. The soul hasn't burned out of the man, just gone into weary retreat. "Educating Rita" is about how he finds his way back with the help of a working-class hairdresser (Julie Walters) he tutors in an adult-ed program.

You can see Frank's anguish in Caine's watery eyes, his bloated gut and the curly hair and beard he seems to be doing his best to hide behind. He looks like a boozy, overgrown rabbit, and there's something soft, almost caressing, about Caine's performance. Without diminishing any of Frank's waste or weariness, Caine portrays the dilemma of an unmoored man heading for oblivion as delicately as a solitary balloon mounting mournfully skyward. And he tries to deflect Frank's caught-in-the-headlights terror at not knowing where to jump next by masquerading as a man calmly contemplating his next move. We register the calm, but we feel the panic underneath. It's a portrait of lost (and reclaimed) human potential that bestows the greatest gift the movies can: a heightened, expansive sense of what it means to be human.

As Dr. Wilbur Larch in "The Cider House Rules," Caine might be taking everything he has learned about acting and distilling it down to its essence. The whole performance is one of an actor defying the minefields of sentimentality to achieve purified and thorny emotion. Caine manages the tricky feat of making sternness equal love without going soft or becoming a lovable old codger. The exasperation he directs toward his protégé, Homer Wells (wonderful Tobey Maguire), manages to make Larch's heartbreak at the prospect of losing Homer clear without ever becoming explicit. Caine's utterly straightforward performance is an exquisite piece of transparent misdirection, a portrait of a man who makes his feelings obvious by what he doesn't say.

Any actor, if he or she is good enough, begins, over the course of a career, to suggest links between the actor's characters, not just by familiar inflections or gestures but in the way some characters seem to be living out alternate versions of other characters' lives, confronting the same demons, winning or losing, or at least figuring out how to keep body and soul together. Wilbur Larch has won the battle that the disillusioned patriot Caine played in "The Whistle Blower" may wind up losing. He has accepted life as it is and not as it should ideally be. Larch's central speech, his justification for performing abortions, is an argument for the possibility of decency and honor amid ugly choices. Ministering to a 12-year-old girl who has attempted to abort her fetus with a crochet hook, Larch says to Homer, "This is what doing nothing gets you ... It means that someone else is going to do the job -- some moron who doesn't know how!" Caine delivers those lines with the sort of unimpeachable authority that only a few actors are ever lucky enough to achieve. Larch is a small-time, small-town country doctor, and his escapes into ether dreams notwithstanding, he has the immense stature, the cant-free moral authority of the movie characters who embody heroic decency.

Caine has said that he now looks at the quality of a part rather than its size. But he has reached the place where the roles that come his way are going to have to measure up to him. Caine slips effortlessly into Larch's sensible, battered brown shoes and finds, after 36 years of movie stardom, that they are a perfect fit. Though Prime Minister Tony Blair recently made him Sir Michael Caine, his aristocracy seems to derive from another source: He's the type of actor who is elevated to the status of movie aristocrat by the sheer love of his audience. He is that irresistible combination of an actor who feels both close to us and larger than us. Maurice Joseph Mickelwhite is no longer the man who would be a movie king. He's the only kind of aristocrat whom people take to their hearts. One of ours.

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