It seemed a lot of people knew in advance that British veteran Michael Caine had won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor at the 72nd Academy Awards, after the Wall Street Journal published an exit poll of the voters.

Michael Caine poses with the Oscar he won as best actor in a supporting role for The Cider House Rules

Caine's gong for The Cider House Rules was one of five British successes at last night's ceremony at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, but York actress Janet McTeer lost out to Hilary Swank in the Best Actress category.

First-time director Sam Mendes's Best Director award was among five for the night's big winner, American Beauty, whose victory roll also included Best Picture and Best Actor for Kevin Spacey.

Further British triumphs went to Phil Collins for Best Original Song, for You'll Be In My Heart, from Disney's Tarzan, and Topsy-Turvy, Mike Leigh's meticulously detailed study of the life and light opera times of Gilbert and Sullivan, for Costume and Make-up.

Caine, 67 earlier this month, received the second Oscar of a 44-year screen career which has brought him five nominations. He first won in 1986, playing a loathsome adulterer in Woody Allen's Hannah And Her Sisters, and many felt he was unlucky not even to be nominated last year for his Golden Globe-winning portrait of a flash, heavy-drinking impresario in the last-chance saloon in York writer-director Mark Herman's Little Voice.

However, he now wins for "the nicest character" he has ever played, employing his first American accent to boot. The famous London accent made way, under three months of voice coaching, for his portrait of a kindly, unconventional doctor in The Cider House Rules.

Sam Mendes, speaking at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences ceremony, described himself as "a bloke from English theatre making a film about American suburbia". Now 34, the cricket-loving Cambridge scholar from Oxfordshire, was in charge of the Donmar Warehouse in London at 27, then furthered his reputation at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and famously directed Nicole Kidman, alias Mrs Tom Cruise, in The Blue Room in the West End in 1998.

He was hand-picked by DreamWorks supremo Steven Spielberg to helm American Beauty - the story of a burnt-out advertising man with a dysfunctional suburban family, re-discovering sex and drugs and rock'n'roll - after Spielberg saw Mendes' production of Oliver!

Like Mendes, Janet McTeer was a first-time nominee. Like Caine, she acquired an American accent, to play eccentric, wayward Mother Mary Jo in Tumbleweeds. However, she could not repeat her Golden Globe success of earlier this year.

see also 'A star is born'

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