Sir Michael Caine 'asked doctor to help his cancer-stricken father die'

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

Sir Michael, left, told 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.’

“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...”

Sir Michael 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, Sir Michael, 77, said: “Oh I think so, yeah.”

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