June 8, 2000. Pg. 7 by Beverley D'Silva
A hot, smoky basement in Lisle Street, in London's Chinatown. A
gambling scene ensues. Enter a character called Gangster 55. His dinner suit's
impeccable. His face is tortured, pugnacious, threatening. The
temperature drops. Gangster finds his quarry, a jittery low-rent thief, corners
him and turns on that menace. It's nasty. Really nasty and it's the
latest in a series of monstrous characters played by Malcolm McDowell.
When the scene had wrapped, McDowell ambles over. "All right, darling?
How was that?" he grins, cheerful as your Uncle Charlie.
It's almost 30 years since McDowell delivered Alex de Large in Stanley
Kubrick's A
Clockwork Orange and made the world sit up and take notice.
And today he can still turn the menace on and off like a tap. "I am a
chameleon," he says. "If I'm given great dialogue, I can terrify,
because I'll believe it. As soon as they say 'Cut', I'll say 'Give us a cup
of tea'." Without the penguin suit McDowell looks younger than 57. His
hair is cropped short and silver. The skin is tan, crosshatched with
lines. Hemingwayed after 20 years of life outdoors in the Californian sun
and sea. The eyes remain the same: wide, blue and capable of a blazing
intensity to cause extreme discomfort in women and men. Anyone who's
seen A Clockwork Orange cannot forget his stare of horror, pulled open by
wire clamps so that deterrent images of naked women and violence may be
stamped on the retina.
"I knew Clockwork Orange would be a great film, but I didn't know that
we'd still be talking about it 30 years later. That's a great mark to
Kubrick and to the writer Anthony Burgess," he says modestly.
It is a peculiarity of McDowell's career that in his first five years
he starred in not just one, but three of cinema's most controversial,
exciting and ground-breaking films: Lindsay Anderson's if... (1968), A
Clockwork Orange (1971), and O Lucky Man (1973) again with Anderson.
McDowell's own upbringing was "lower middle". He was born in Leeds
and
raised in Bridlington, Yorkshire, where his father became a publican
after the war, in which he'd flown Halifax bombers in the RAF. His
parents stretched themselves to send young Malc to Cannock House, a minor
public school in Eltham, south London.
"They (the school) proceeded to beat the (Northern) accent out of me...
I hated the place and loved it," he says. "I was reactionary. My
headmaster was smart and used this. He made me head boy."
So when McDowell read for Anderson, who was searching for his public-
school anarchist Mick Travis, in If..., the director felt touched by the
hand of some casting god. Working with heavyweights Anderson and
Kubrick at this formative stage, McDowell's memories are marked by specific
personal highs - and lows. Kubrick was renowned for being tough on his
actors - Shelley Duvall still claims mental scars from working on The
Shining - sometimes putting actors through 100 takes.
"Stanley never did that to me. There were times we did 20 takes, but
that was rare. What used to irritate him - and he was the control freak
of all time - was if an actor was having a bad day, there wasn't a lot
the genius of Mr. Kubrick could do about it. That used to piss him off.
So he was careful about who he cast. And it was always with an eye to
commercialism. He was a pragmatist in that respect."
A residual bitterness hangs over one clash he had with
Kubrick, when
the director made him sign a waiver to remove his name from first billing
on A Clockwork Orange. "He said he wanted to go straight into the film
with no one's name out front. I thought great, I'll go with that. When
I see the film, his name is up there five times before anyone else's.
So it was a lie."
Their intense relationship ended with the film's release. "I could not
be a friend to Stanley. I did love him, of course, but in a different
way to Lindsay, who was really a friend. Lindsay was a human, caring
man. He didn't know as much about techniques of lighting and so on as
Stanley did, but he understood the human condition. Humanity wasn't one of
Stanley's strong points. His films were never about human feelings. He
was a satirical film-maker."
When O Lucky Man was a commercial failure, McDowell was wounded (he'd
written the story outline). "After that I knew that the game was up in
England. There was nothing for me." This feeling was exacerbated by the
catastrophic Caligula, the notorious Roman-porn spectacular of 1979
which featured McDowell in the lead and was rubbished by censors and
film-makers alike. It all proved too much for McDowell. He fled to the US to
make his first Hollywood movie, Time After Time. He fell for his
co-star Mary Steenburgen, a vision of Little Rock Arkansas niceness. They
married and had two children (Lilly, now 19, and Charlie, 16). When I
interviewed Steenburgen, they were divorced and she'd married Ted Danson,
she clearly held McDowell in great affection and called him "a sweet,
sweet guy". He remains protective in as much as he will not discuss her.
Having moved to America, McDowell found the first 10 years difficult.
"It was hard finding work that wasn't absolute shit. Then you have to
work, to pay the bills. I had to take a lot of things I probably would
never have done here. Even so, I like to think I did the best I could
with what I was offered. It's easier to be good in a great film than to
be good in a bad one."
He's certainly had a few to practice on. Aces High, Blue Thunder, some
sci-fi light relief, such as Star Trek - for which he received death
threats for killing-off Captain Kirk. "Someone had to do it," he said
at
the time.
"A lot of what I've done (since emigrating) is very forgettable,"
he
says now. "I've never thought - will this be good for my career? I think
that's pathetic. I've turned down so much stuff - all crap. If I'm
going to do crap I'd rather be paid top dollar and do crap in America. It
takes an awful lot to get me to leave my homes and my kids."
He alleviates the "crap" by working to critical acclaim on Broadway
and
in roles such as the ruthless porn baron Bennie Barratt in the BBC2
series Our Friends in the North. But does the legacy of those first three
films continue still to haunt him? "I'm glad I started with such huge
movies," he says defiantly. "I've had a phenomenal early career.
Played
some of the great parts an actor could wish to do in his lifetime. You
can't keep that up unless you're one of the select few and those are
mainly American. Although, Michael Caine's done all right. But I think
that right now is maybe my time again."
And so to Gangster No 1. Adapted by Johnny Ferguson from the
stage play
by Louis Mellis and David Scinto, the film is a searing study of greed,
hatred and red-raw psychosis set in a London gangland in 1968 and the
present day. It has been called "the last honest British gangster
movie"
(Sight and Sound). The part was a gift for McDowell to play - a
gangster who's been calcified by years of hatred and jealousy, who murders
without remorse. Your classic psycho?
"I feel no character I've played has been psychotic," he says.
Er,
what
about Alex, and Caligula, and even Captain Kirk's executioner? "I
wouldn't know how to play psychotic. Although Gangster is monstrous, of
course."
McDowell opens and shuts the film and provides the voice-over narration
- "the music to the piece. The attracttion for me was the script, the
best writing I've seen in years. It's not Lock Stock, it's not a gangster
movie. It's way past that, which makes it so fascinating. It's like a
Shakespearean tragedy.
Gangster No 1 is another step towards his British comeback. The theatre
could do the rest. He ponders the possibility of re-staging the play of
Gangster No 1 in London (it was originally on at the Royal Court). Live
theatre suits his restless energy, he says. "I like to intuitively see
how it goes on the day. Sometimes I barely know my lines. I want to be
like an empty page. Totally on the edge. Dying sometimes."
I think the States will always hold him though. His children and his
second wife, the artist Kelly Kuhr, are there. He met Kuhr five years
ago. She is now 29. "She updated me," he says. "The first thing
to go was
my Beatle haircut. I've got a lot to thank her for." After the
interview, he introduces me to Khur. She is very pretty - and soft as Bambi.
And so, in his own way, is McDowell.
"I've always had to live down A Clockwork Orange because ever since,
with the exception of O Lucky Man, I've been cast as the heavy. It used
to irritate me and then I just got bored with it. I wanted to get on,
maybe make a few comedies, but there was Alex..." He shrugs, then
continues unconvincingly, "I don't take the work very seriously any more. I
enjoy what I do, then I walk away from it." And then he asks for a cup of
tea. 'Gangster No 1' (certificate 18) opens tomorrow
©2000 Newspaper Publishing PLC.
The Independent (London)
Archived 2003-08 Alex D. Thrawn for www.MalcolmMcDowell.net