This article originally appeared in the December 1966 issue of Esquire. It contains outdated and potentially offensive descriptions of homosexuality, gender, and class. To read every Esquire story ever published, upgrade to All Access.
One of the more agreeable aspects of the recent British renaissance has been the emergence of the Englishman as a symbol of masculine sexual virility. For this, they can thank the rise of a youthful proletariat who, as everyone knows, are now setting styles—in fashion, speech, pop music, dancing, films, plays, painting, general behavior. It’s dead chic today to be working-class English.
The old concept of the Englishman—tea, butlers, stiff upper lip, and dressing for dinner in the jungle—was also frequently tinged with effeminacy, but the present impact of young, what-the-bloody-hell, non-U trend setters is changing the picture. You do not as a rule find a high incidence of swish among truck drivers, longshoremen and similar laborers. Their sexual mores are on a boy-meets-girl basis, and it is this happy leaven that is altering the old epicene image. From this proletarian background have come actors like Sean Connery, Tom Courtenay, Albert Finney, Peter O’Toole, Terence Stamp and now Michael Caine, as well as most of the pop-music groups and those writers following in the wake of John Osborne, who is himself of working-class origin (his mother was a barmaid) and who first signaled to the rest of the world the coming revolutionary changes in the national physiognomy when he wrote Look Back in Anger ten years ago.
No one exemplifies this transformation better than Caine. In his first starring film, The Ipcress File, last year—and this year in Alfie—he established his reputation not only as an actor but as an emblem of the new Britain. He is the coolest of them all and currently the most fashionable example of the crumbling of old class prejudice.
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