What if.... Guardian Weekend with Malcolm McDowell 4/24/04

What if ...
…you're Malcolm McDowell, and you had a dazzling debut in films 30-odd years ago, you've been working ever since (albeit often in some pretty ropey movies), you're living amid your own citrus groves in California, you've an established happy marriage, a new baby and, at last, two or three good roles are cropping up? Would you count yourself a lucky man? Suzie Mackenzie finds out. Portrait: Patrick Fraser

The Guardian Weekend 4/24/04
MM sitting outside in Ojai

I half believed, before I met him, the brief valedictory sketch of Malcolm McDowell given by David Thomson in his Biographical Dictionary Of Film. What a "strange thwarted career", he writes, what potential wasted. In the late 60s and early 70s, in the film classics - Lindsay Anderson's If ... and Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange - McDowell had provided a new kind of hero for our times, the callow, callous and indefatigable juvenile delinquent, sexy and urgent with it, who takes on the establishment and wins. As Mick Travis (if.…) and Alex (A Clockwork Orange), a pair of smug, pugnacious little bastards, he was as unforgettable as he was unlikable. Just one of his seriocomic looks could charm and disarm an audience, and there was always an effortless grace about him - he was, and in fact remains, one of the best movers in the business. Take the notorious rape sequence in A Clockwork Orange. "We had tried for days to crack this scene. On about the fifth day, Stanley suddenly said to me: 'Can you dance?' " Sure, said McDowell ... "I'm singing in the rain (kick), Just singing in the rain (kick)." Kubrick rushed off and bought the rights to the song. "That's how we ended up with that." That being one of the most indelible images of gratuitous violence ever to reach the screen.
    So Thomson has a point: to go from this to the hundred or so television and Hollywood B-movies that he has made since moving to California 20-odd years ago could look like a waste. In between, there have been some excellent small films - mostly European, such as Assassin of The Tsar (1991) and Chain of Desire (1993) - but there have been others of such ineffable banality, you wince to name them: Caligula (1979) or the aptly titled Can of Worms (1999). Could it be that Hollywood, that most arid and conformist of establishments - a place where no one smokes, they all drink iced tea - finally has our pugilist beat?
    There is one answer to this in 1992's The Player, Robert Altman's affectionate satire of the Hollywood system. McDowell was drafted in to deliver a line as himself - ie, he got to write his own line. In the film he walks with languid elegance up to some producer in a hotel lobby and, without wiping the smile off his face, because everyone in Hollywood has the same rictus smile, says in a manner mild but pungent, "If you've got something to say about me, say it to my face, not behind my back." No one talks like that in Hollywood, and certainly not to a producer. Of the many "real-life" cameos Altman shot for his film, this was one of the few that didn't end up on the cutting-room floor. "That's because most actors are not very good at playing themselves," Altman tells me.
    Stephen Frears, a friend who has known McDowell since their If ... days (Frears was an assistant director on the film), says something similar. "Malcolm is an original, he's not like anyone else, and he's become more original as he's got older. I know he lives in California and he is happy there, but he has not become a complete Californian. He maintains one foot in and one foot outside. That way, he can do whatever he wants to do, which is very smart of him."
    And it is, very smart. In a place, an institution, really, where everyone takes themselves at someone else's estimate, where you are only as good as your last film, McDowell has maintained his distance and his freedom. Of course, you could say he'd hardly want to be judged on his last film, since his last film is as likely as not crap. As in: "I have done a lot of crap, but crap is what you tend to be offered as a working actor ... And I like to keep working. I love it more now than I did when I was getting better parts. So, I don't get as good parts, so? It doesn't really matter. All I ever wanted was to be as good as you can be. I never wanted to be a star." Because to be a star is to play by the rules of the system and the system will always win. Success, as someone has said, is only failure delayed.
    But if you adapt the rules, play your own game, take what you want - the bit parts, the money - and leave what you don't, well, then, it seems, among other things, you are admired for it. Walking down the street with him, I was struck by how many people said hello. "That's because of Clockwork Orange," he said, a bit mournfully. "Every university in America teaches Clockwork Orange. I get fed up with it." And in the restaurant where we had lunch, a man at the next table sent him a glass of champagne. "That's because of Gangster No 1," he said. There is a scene in Paul McGuigan's excellent and underrated gangland epic where McDowell, the gangster, naturally, puts down his glass next to a urinal and inadvertently pisses in it. "Don't piss in it," the guy at the next table mouthed at McDowell. "Do you know that guy?" Malcolm asked me, and, witheringly, "Is he a producer?"
    Dennis Hopper came over to say hi. And he'd liked the new film. This is interesting because I think it may be one of McDowell's rules: he doesn't go to people, they come to him. (Even Kubrick, a legendary recluse, he made come to his home in Notting Hill when Kubrick telephoned him, in 1970, to discuss the part in Clockwork Orange. "I remember Stanley rang and, though I knew his name, I wasn't a film buff. He talked for about 45 minutes and eventually I said to him, 'Stanley, do you have something specific in mind?' He said there was a book, but he wanted to keep it quiet. I wasn't to tell anybody about it. I said, in that case, Stanley, you'd better come to my house. He arrived with a convoy of Land-Rovers and Stanley in his Mercedes. They blocked the road for hours.")
    Anyway, McDowell and Hopper chatted away about golf; they are both enthusiasts and often play together, and there was a lot of talk about a particular swing of McDowell's in their last game. When Hopper left 15 minutes later, looking a bit downcast, McDowell burst out laughing. "Ha ha, that really wound him up. I told him I'd hit it with a seven iron, when really it was a five iron .. . Did you hear him, 'A seven iron, really, that far?' That got him going. Ha ha." So he's not above a bit of macho competitiveness.
    The next day I drove out to his home in the hills, just above Santa Barbara, about two hours north of Los Angeles. Here, McDowell is lord of all he surveys. He owns the 100 acres of lemon and orange grove that surround the beautiful and immense log cabin that he designed himself and had built about 12 years ago. He lives with Kelly, his wife of 13 years, a photographer, and their baby son, Beckett, barely two months old. "They are the light of my life. And he is just so delicious, like a rebirth for me." Birds sing in the trees that he planted. In the basement is his cinema - he now has an encyclopedic knowledge of any film you care to name. When he feels like it, he will drive one of the five vintage cars he owns - three convertible Jags, an Austin Healey and a Morgan - to his apartment in Venice Beach, which he has had for 17 years. You have to laugh, it's like some mini empire. And, clearly, he loves it.
    When the house was threatened by a brush fire a few years ago, he ignored the evacuation order and went up on the roof and hosed the fire himself - an image reminiscent of the apocalyptic/fantasy ending of If ... where Mick Travis and his accomplices hose with machine-gun fire the school governors and the whole system that tormented them. Except here it was for real. McDowell succeeded in licking the fire; a lot of the trees were lost, but they have all grown again. "That's one of the reasons I'm still here. The weather."
    When he came to Los Angeles in 1978, then aged 35 but looking not much over 25, McDowell had no intention of staying. He thought he'd make the film Time After Time, in which he plays HG Wells pursuing Jack the Ripper into the future, and go home. He still had his Notting Hill flat, in which he ensconced his beloved Aunt Vera. "She'd just been evicted from her home, so I said, stay here, we'll sort something out when I get back." His first marriage, after five years, was pretty much over. And he had just made Caligula, also starring Peter O'Toole, John Gielgud and Helen Mirren. The script was by Gore Vidal. "I did it because of Gore. He is so witty, funny, acerbic, treacherous. Just the sort of person I love." But he hadn't reckoned on the film's producer, Bob Guccione, publisher of Penthouse. "How stupid can you be." Guccione turned the film into a hard-core cartoon romp.
    There were disagreements on set - "I remember saying to Guccione, 'You may be paying me whatever it is [a reputed half-million dollars plus], but you are only paying for my talent. I can walk when I want" - and a lot of haggling about the sex scenes. "There is one scene where Caligula has to fuck a bride and groom. I wouldn't do the buggery - this was the 70s. Are you kidding? So we compromised on a fist-fucking scene."
    He has fond memories of Gielgud sitting around the set in his panama hat doing the crossword and lifting his head periodically to observe, "I think this is a frightfully good film", but, overall, McDowell says it was a disaster for him. "In retrospect, I shouldn't have done it. I think it did damage me." It is interesting the things that damage you, he says, and the things that benefit; you can never predict. "For example, Star Trek. I didn't want to do it, I'm not a fan, I can't watch it, actually, but my agent implored me to do it." And even now, he says, he gets rung by casting directors on the strength of it. So what does he conclude? "Agents are always right."
    On the set of Time After Time, he met his second wife, the actor Mary Steenburgen - they married in 1980 and have two children, Lily and Charlie, now 20 and 23. Around this time, he did still think of returning to England. "But Mary's career was just taking off, I couldn't ask her to leave, she would never have worked again." So he stayed and in 1982 he made Cat People, directed by Paul Schrader - another sort of nadir for him.
    McDowell has never hidden the fact that in the early 80s he was an alcoholic and addicted to cocaine; 1982 was a bad drug year for Hollywood generally, "a blizzard of coke" is how Peter Biskind describes it in his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. It was the year John Belushi died of an overdose in Bungalow 3 of the Chateau Marmont. It was the same year Dennis Hopper hauled himself out of a plane and on to its wing, refusing to come down until the men in white coats arrived. Schrader himself was fiendishly addicted to cocaine. Plus, the film was execrable. It is reputed that Ned Tanen, then head of Universal, was heard shouting at Schrader, "Paul, if I have to sit through this piece of shit, you do, too. You're the one who made it." All in all, the set of Cat People was not a good place for someone battling addiction to be. Soon after, McDowell admitted himself to a clinic. "I had come to drugs quite late really - my early 30s - and suddenly I found myself unable to do anything. I think I believed what people said, that it's non-addictive, when of course it is highly addictive." It is now over 20 years since he has had a cigarette, a drink or taken a drug. "When you give up, you have to give up everything. There is no point in arguing. This is your life."
    His marriage to Steenburgen ended "amicably" in 1990. "We had got to the point where, with her career and my career, we never met. In the end, I just said, I'll move out. When you get back, I'll be gone." By this time, it was too late to think of returning to England. "I had my kids here, I would never have seen them." And, as he says, what would he return to England for? "I'm not sentimental about it. It's always home and I draw on that. But I don't want to live there. London is not the London I knew in the 70s. It was electric then. Now it's full of fucking hoorays, the vibrancy has gone. Soon there will be no kids because they can't afford it, only old people."
    He came from Yorkshire; his mum and aunt ran a small hotel in Bridlington. His father, "an extraordinary man", and an alcoholic, died at the age of 69. "A life wasted, I suppose, for him." When he was 11, McDowell, "starved of attention," he says, and "a little terror, to put it mildly", was sent away to a minor public school. He rebelled at first, but was won over by the headmaster, Mr. Baker, "a remarkable man". By his early 20s, he was still based at home and working as the sales representative for a coffee company, selling coffee, instant potatoes and lemon meringue pie. "That was a bit of luck ,really. Usually it takes years to become a salesman, but their guy from the north-east had just been arrested for trafficking in stolen goods and they needed an immediate replacement. So they gave me a little car and off I went. I was meant to be a stopgap but obviously I was brilliant compared with the stolen goods guy. I was particularly brilliant at whipping up the instant mash. I trebled their sales overnight."
    He was 24 when he first saw Albert Finney in Saturday Night And Sunday Morning. "I remember thinking, if he can do it, so can I." He immediately requested that the coffee company transfer him to London. "I told them I'd leave otherwise and they bought it." And that is how he ended up at the Royal Court Theatre, that bastion of establishment opposition, just in time to attend Lindsay Anderson's audition for If ... and to play the character who still, probably, he resembles most, Mick Travis - a rebel, yes, but not really a radical. He says himself that his impulse was not to subvert the system but to find a way of making it work for him. He'd always thought of himself as working class until Anderson corrected him: "You are lower middle class, Malcolm."
    He says that David Sherwin, who wrote if..., gave him the best entrance on to film of any actor ever. Scarf pulled up over his nose, hat pulled down to reveal those staring blue eyes - dapper, spruce and brimming with malign intent.
    There's no sentimentality in McDowell, but a strong vein of nostalgia. What he misses most, he says, is English actors: "They are so professional." And, of course, his friends. Though many of these are gone now. Anderson. Jocelyn Herbert. Rachel Roberts. Jill Bennett. David Hemmings. Alan Bates.
    He loves to talk about what he calls "the old days" and "the old place". In particular about Anderson, first his mentor and then his friend, and Sherwin, who also wrote the screenplays for O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital - with If ... Anderson's trilogy of films about Britain in which McDowell starred - and whose book Going Mad In Hollywood is a hysterical testament to those times. They all met first at the audition for If ... in January 1968, where McDowell arrived having not read the script and, as Sherwin recalls, "in a suit, and looking much too smooth for the part". The scene they had to act was the Missa Luba scene in the cafe where Mick Travis and the girl engage in a sexual fight.
    Reading from a script with only his lines, McDowell had no idea what the girl would do. "I remember the stage direction said, 'He kisses her passionately.' And so I did. Our mouths banged together and split her lips. Apparently the next line directed, 'She slaps him'. She hit me so hard, I don't think I have ever been hit that hard in the face by a man or a woman. And then she threw me to the floor. I remember at the end of the scene Lindsay going, 'Um, OK, cut.' And David jumping up and saying, 'God, I wish we'd filmed that.' " And that was it. Both McDowell and Christine Noonan were hired.
    He says now that Anderson taught him everything he knows as an actor. Of course, Anderson was also a potentate. "You didn't cross him, or you'd get what he called 'the iron door'. It was hilarious." But he was generous with everything he knew. It was Anderson who told him how to play A Clockwork Orange. "After the meeting with Stanley, I read Burgess's book and I panicked. I didn't have an idea how to play Alex. Of course, I rang Lindsay and asked him to read it, which is a big thing to ask someone, it's a lot of work." Anderson told him: "There is a close-up of you in If ... coming into the gymnasium for the beating. The way that you look when you open the doors. That's how you play Clockwork Orange." It is a look of defiance and derision. And that is precisely what he did, McDowell says. "That got me through the first day and I never thought about it again."
    Anderson died almost 10 years ago of a massive heart attack in France. McDowell had seen him shortly before. "It was shocking to me. Lindsay was looking for something to hang on to, to make him a player again. It broke my heart for him ... Of course, I was going through a similar thing here." After Anderson's death, McDowell and the designer Jocelyn Herbert (who also worked on if ...) traveled back to the UK for the cremation and then went on to France. "We threw off our clothes and swam in the lake where he had been swimming just before he died. It was a sort of salute to the great man." It is hoped that, to mark the 10th anniversary of Anderson's death, McDowell will come to the Edinburgh Festival this autumn to read from his diaries.
    Kubrick, on the other hand, he feels let him down. "Kubrick was the kind of personality who'd use and dump. He'd squeeze you till the pips squeaked and then, when it was over, it was over. Of course I was hurt by that. I'd left my soul up there on the screen. But that's just the man he was. He wasn't a humanist like Lindsay." Kubrick did give him a dog. He called it Alex.
    Everyone has their time, McDowell says, and sometimes your time comes round again. "It feels a bit like that to me now." Recently, he has consciously avoided doing crap. "I have been waiting for something good to come along." And this month he opens in two new films - as he says, "Small films but good films". In Robert Altman's The Company he plays Alberto Antonelli, the camp and contradictory artistic director of a ballet group. Altman is an old mate. "We used to be quite naughty boys together back in the old days." So working with him was a pleasure. "Just to work with such a great man when I've done all that schlock. And I love all that improvised stuff, I'm very good at it. I can go on in character for hours, which is just as well with Bob." In one scene, after about 90 minutes of improvisation, he finally turned to Altman and the camera: "Bob, I have nothing more to say on this subject." The scene didn't survive. "Bob cuts out all the fuck-ups in the editing." McDowell knows he is good in the film - it's easy to be good in an Altman film, he says. "You try being good in Cyborg 3."
    I'll Sleep When I'm Dead is a British film made by another old pal, Mike Hodges. Like Get Carter and Croupier, which Hodges also directed, it is an incisive anatomy of the narcissism of the male psyche, set in the criminal underworld. It stars Clive Owen in the lead part - a former gangster who emerges from self-imposed isolation to exact revenge for the death of his young brother. McDowell, playing a reptilian bully-boy and ageing gangster, has only two scenes. "I think he did it as a favor to me," Hodges says. But they are pivotal scenes. One is a male rape. "I was prepared to do for Mike what I wouldn't think of doing for Guccione .... Actually they conned me into it ... Well, the truth is, I hadn't read the script."
    But it is the second scene, a death scene, where we see McDowell at his true power. There is a myth, Hodges says, that directors create great performances. "A great performance comes from the actor and from good casting. All you can do as a director is create the right atmosphere." In this scene, what is shown is a bully shriveling before your eyes. Watching it, from his side of the camera, Hodges says he couldn't believe his luck. "He showed the pathetic side of this character, this arrogant bully who, when confronted with his own demise, just dissolves." You can expect a lot from actors, Hodges says, but you can't expect fearlessness. "But then I have known Malcolm a very long time and I've never seen him frightened of anything."
    He sits on his hill, unafraid, and more content than he has been in a long time. "I don't have to worry any more. I've been around so long that I have changed and grown up on film. There's my whole life up there. My 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s. And now I am 60. God it's depressing," and he bursts out laughing. He juggles Beckett in his arms, he answers the phone, which seems to ring a lot. He plays golf. "I think I'll go out and hit a few balls," he said more than once. Though he didn't go. Still a sucker for attention. "Always have been," he says. "That's why I became an actor."