Now well into his fourth decade as an actor, the Leeds native has hundreds of
film, television and stage credits to his name; the man who slashed his way across
moviegoer's consciousness as Alex in Stanley Kubrick's ultra-violent 1972 masterpiece
A Clockwork Orange has nothing left to prove, and yet he maintains a carthorse
workload: four films in the can this year and six more set for release through
2006.
"I'm starting all over again," he says, settling into
a plush sofa in his antiques-filled ranch-house living room. "I'm still working
steadily and I'm as happy as I've ever been. My family is the most important thing
in my life. In this case, O Lucky Man! is absolutely apt."
While F Scott Fitzgerald may have famously proclaimed there are no second acts
in American lives, McDowell, a transplant here since the early Eighties, finds
steady employment these days. His youthful charisma and cruel good looks have
matured into a kind of steely menace, lending gravitas to the hard men and evil
masterminds he has played in recent films such as Gangster No. 1 and Mike Hodges'
I'll Sleep When I'm Dead.
To hear McDowell tell it, he is
absolutely content to be a journeyman actor instead of a movie star. "Listen,
I do the best I can," he says, still sounding every bit the pragmatic Yorkshireman.
"Being a professional is the highest compliment you can give an actor - being
able to do whatever is required. I'm not complaining. I have survived some horrendous
movies. My whole thing is to work."
It is the ethic of someone
who has known both the blush of leading man stardom and the sting of drug addiction
in middle age; a guy who has ridden out middling career doldrums but ultimately
hung on to become a grandee by keeping his long-term goals in perspective. McDowell
credits his outlook in large part to his professional relationship with the pioneering
Scottish auteur, Lindsay Anderson.
"Lindsay gave me the
tools to really be a much more complete actor, and one that would work through
the generations and not just through the initial burst of youth," he says. "The
great thing about him was he had enormous respect for me as an actor - even though
I didn't deserve it."
A towering figure in British film
throughout the Sixties and Seventies, the director became virtually synonymous
with McDowell as a result of their collaboration on a number of films, including
a radical trilogy in which the actor plays a character named Michael 'Mick' Travis,
all of which won the Palme d'Or (only if… won - Alex) at the Cannes Film Festival.
These were 1968's if…. (an attack on the British public school system), 1973's
O Lucky Man!, (an impressionistic odyssey about a traveling salesman adrift amid
the changing political currents of Seventies Britain), and 1982's Britannia Hospital,
(for which it is perhaps enough to explain McDowell donned a prosthetic horse
head and penis).
In tribute to his mentor, a sometimes bullying
yet brilliant fixture of the Royal Court Theatre who passed away ten years ago
next month, McDowell appears in Edinburgh to perform a one-man show comprised
of his remembrances of Anderson and the director's personal writings. "I'm going
to make it a very loose evening," McDowell says. "I want to give my recollections
of a man that meant so much to me as a father, brother, mentor - whatever you
want to call him - while keeping it as amusing and insightful as I can. It's not
going to be an academic type thing, me reading Lindsay's criticism of British
film."
Coming up with rich material about Anderson should
not be a problem for McDowell if the frequency with which the director's name
pops up during our conversation is any indication. "Most people that met him were
in fear of him - he was an intimidating person," McDowell says. "But he had a
tremendous intellect and an extraordinary way of cutting through bullshit. I would
have done anything for him."
His movie debut in If led to
McDowell's career-defining part in A Clockwork Orange. "Stanley Kubrick cast me
directly from If‚ I didn't have an audition," he remembers. "I said, 'Can you
tell me about this character?' He said, 'No. You did it for him‚' meaning Lindsay,
'now do it for me.'"
Attired in a black bowler and false
eyelashes, a codpiece and jackboots, McDowell's casually caustic murderer-rapist
Alex merrily belts out Singin' In The Rain while kicking one of his victims to
death. He became the poster-boy for youth culture run amok in the Age of Aquarius.
But if not for another key insight from Anderson, the characterization might never
have been.
"I really didn't know how to play the part and
suddenly got cold feet," McDowell recalls. "I went to Linds and said, 'How do
I play the part, because I haven't got a clue'. He read the script and said, 'Malcolm,
there's a close-up in If when you're coming into the gymnasium to be beaten. They
want to do nothing but hurt you - and you smile at them. That's the way you play
this part.'" McDowell snaps his fingers loudly at the memory. "That was a great
piece of direction!"
Within three years, the actor had morphed
from a virtual unknown to cultural flashpoint - A Clockwork Orange was banned
and censored in a multitude of countries - to bona fide leading man. McDowell's
career prospects seemed set in stone. Then, just as quickly as fame had come into
his life, the rug was pulled out from under him. "There was an oil embargo in
1973 and all the American producers that were living in England doing all of these
interesting films up and left," he remembers. "That was the end of the British
film industry as I knew it. It was over.
"I remember saying
to my agent, 'I've been in a few hits - what's happened?' He said, 'I'm sending
you a script called The Passage - it's the only thing being made out of England
this year - about a Nazi chasing Anthony Quinn and James Mason over the Pyrenees.'
I went, 'Oh, f**king hell! This is horrendous!'"
But with
that, McDowell's attitude underwent significant adjustment. He made the choice
to work rather than pursue the temporal vainglory of movie stardom. "If you're
an actor, you're not going to do classic movies every time out. So suddenly I
thought, 'You're not an auteur. Get on out there and work.' So in The Passage‚
you see James Mason playing his part, hiding behind every boulder with his hat
down, like he wasn't even in the movie. And I was out there as the full SS Colonel,
stomping around. I just went for it."
Disillusionment with
the movie biz - but never bitterness, McDowell will point out - had begun to take
hold in 1979. He accepted a role as HG Wells in Time After Time, shooting in Hollywood.
An on-set romance with co-star Mary Steenburgen prompted him to relocate to America,
and also marked the end of his first marriage to Margot Bennett, whom he had wed
in 1975. "I fell in love with the leading lady, we married, we had children, I
wasn't going to go back," McDowell says of Steenburgen. "My career was set, hers
was just starting and she wasn't going to work in England. But then it all went
south."
This is an oblique reference to the battle with
alcoholism and drug abuse that ultimately cost him his marriage. Although McDowell
says he never hit what the 12-steppers call "rock bottom", he remained a functioning
alcoholic for years. Not that he realised it at the time." I would drink wine
at lunch and I would hate to not have a bottle of good wine," he remembers. "I
would say, 'The only good thing about being a so-called movie star is that you
can order the best damn bottle of wine on the menu.' So that's what I did. I would
order a $100 bottle, which in the Seventies was like what a $1000 bottle is now.
People would go, 'Wow!' I'd say, 'I want a Premier Cru. Do you have a Chateau
de la Tour? Let's have it! What year? Let's open it!'
"It
was fun but it was all bullshit, just smokescreen. What it was was my body craving
the alcohol. It just happened to be a very expensive bottle. But at the time,
I loved it."
By the time cocaine entered the picture, McDowell's
relationship to the drug was somewhat normalized by freewheeling Eighties attitudes.
"This is going to sound very weird, but at the time, cocaine was considered a
non-addictive drug," he says. "I remember I went to a story meeting at one of
the studios and out came a bowl of cocaine. Everybody - including a lawyer there
- took a few lines. The meeting went on for another hour with a lot of people
talking at the same time. That was completely normal. And because I was an alcoholic
already, but didn't know it, I got addicted."
Although naturally
effusive, McDowell grows solemn when discussing the damage to his marriage caused
by his hard-partying ways. But by then he was beyond the point where he could
cut his losses and return home. "There was no question of going back to England
because now here were two young children and I wanted to be involved with their
lives." McDowell and Steenburgen had two children, Lilly and Charles.
In 1983, McDowell made the decision to walk away from his decadent lifestyle.
"I was one of the first celebs to go to the Betty Ford Clinic," he says, snarling
the word celeb into an ironic approximation of American English. "I haven't had
a drink since."
Since becoming sober, McDowell has worked
constantly. Some of his appearances - Gangster No. 1, Our Friends In The Nortth
- have been vintage, others, well, corked. "Do I make any apologies to my fans?
Absolutely not!" he insists. "Do I feel any responsibility to them? Absolutely
not! Every time I work, I invest as much of myself in a piece of crap as I do
in a Stanley Kubrick film."
So you know they're crap when
you agree to appear in them? "Of course! I'm not an idiot," he booms. "I'm not
idealistic. I'm realistic. I know exactly what I'm doing!"
The telephone suddenly rings and it's McDowell's agent. Something about a role
that will take him to Russia. He is about to agree to take the part, but lays
down a few ground rules first: "A car and driver is fine. In Moscow you can't
even drive yourself unless you want to be shot. It's going to work out? Beautiful.
Buh-bye!" He hangs up the phone.
McDowell turns back to
me. "James Mason once told me there are three criteria for doing a film," McDowell
says. "Of course there's the money, and then there's the role - you're always
looking for the interesting part. But then there's the location. And if you're
happy with at least two out of the three, you take it."
That said, there has been a perceptible uptick in the kind of projects McDowell
has been appearing in recently. The actor is very proud of his work in I'll Sleep
When I'm Dead, in which he appears opposite Clive Owen; he rhapsodises over working
with Robert Altman on ballet drama The Company; and he recently wrapped Synergy,
a film from American Pie director Paul Weitz that also stars Dennis Quaid and
Hollywood's current It girl Scarlett Johansson. This last project in particular
seems to have brought McDowell back into the consciousness of LA's notoriously
fickle casting directors.
Up among his orange and lemon
groves, his avocado trees and oaks, McDowell relates how a pack of senile bears
roams the property but never disturbs his equally senile dogs - several pit bulls
and a motley black and white he calls "the stupidest animal in the world". By
this time we are in the kitchen of the massive A-frame farmhouse he designed himself,
and he is mooning over a contact sheet of photographs of his painter-photographer
wife, Kelley.
The two met on the heels of his divorce from
Steenburgen; McDowell was living in an apartment above the LA gallery where she
was showing her work. The two are seldom apart and their six-month-old son, Beckett
- a precocious flirt according to the actor - is a real McDowell Mini-Me. "I'm
much more relaxed as a parent, and enjoying it much more this time, says McDowell.
"That's not really fair to my grown kids. But the truth any older parent will
tell you is it's so much better the second time around."
In this moment of domestic torpor, McDowell catches himself. The body language
changes and he closes off. Turning slowly to face me, a glint of playful menace
returns to his eyes. "I am a Californian beyond a shadow of a doubt," he says
with an air of finality. "I've had my shot and it was wonderful; I've made some
great films. Now I've just hit my 60s and this is another decade where some great
parts are going to come down the pike. How many actors can say that at the end
of the day?"
Malcolm McDowell seems genuinely happy here
in his Californian hideaway. He may be literally at the end of the road, but his
life and career seems to be at more of an interesting fork. And, unlike many actors,
he never has to ask what his motivation is. © 2004 Sunday Herald back More
Reviews of Lindsay Anderson: A Personal Remembrance by Malcolm McDowellThe
Guardian - The Man Who Gave Me A Slap In
The Face - by Malcolm McDowell Evening News - Review
of A Personal Remembrance... - by Thom Dibdin Scotland
On Sunday - Celluloid With A Conscience
- by Allan Hunter The Scotsman - O
Missed Man - by Alastair Mckay Independent - If
He Could See Me Now - by Sarah Jones Sunday Herald - Whatever
Happened To The Likely Lad - by Chris Lee |
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