Radio Times Interview with Malcolm McDowell for Our Friends in the North 2/96

'Who Wants those Boring Parts that Kevin Costner Does?'

by Andrew Duncan
     It took 'Our Friends in the North' to lure Malcolm McDowell back to British TV for the first time in 25 years. And as a Soho porn king he's doing what he does best - playing the baddie.
     A victim of too much success too soon, an alcoholic, former cocaine abuser, yet another "finest actor of his generation", he should be the disinterred warning to every reprobate thespian. He is in fact a fit 52, with thinning white hair and a gorgeous third wife almost half his age ("I'm the sort of man who marries all his girlfriends"), a decent bloke unfazed by the Sibylline shenanigans of his chosen profession. He sits in a Santa Monica restaurant in Los Angeles, having driven along the Pacific Coast highway from the home further north where he has lived since leaving England in1978, happily ingesting low cholesterol Californian health food with a bottle of mineral water, and explains: "I've got used to this weather and the soft life."
     So much for the menacing icon of disaffected youth who made three stunning films in the five years that those with rose-tinted memories call "golden". First, he was teenage anarchist Mick Travers in Lindsay Anderson's 1968 satire on British public schools, if..., followed in1971 by sadistic punk progenitor Alex (codpiece, bulging eyes, bowler hat and swagger stick) in Stanley Kubrick's violent adaptation of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, followed by Anderson's O Lucky Man! in 1973. He became a world star, typecast as a baddie. "if... is probably the best film I made and after it Lindsay said, 'Well, Malcolm, it's downhill from here.' I told him I was young and would do much better work. 'I doubt it,' he said. Maybe he was right. Who knows? I didn't have time to be disappointed. When you're living through those things you think it's all going to continue, but very soon afterwards the British film industry collapsed. Lindsay Anderson was too good.
     "Perhaps A Clockwork Orange was too good, too. For years I resented the impact it had on my life, but I don't anymore. Baddies are usually interesting. Who wants those boring parts that Kevin Costner does? He's brilliant at them, but I'd be bored stiff playing upright, walking clichés. I don't think I've ever done anything where I tried to be liked by the audience. You've got to have the courage to be hated. I'm just a working actor and if I want to do something interesting and literate I return to the stage. I'm not disillusioned. How many great films can you do in a lifetime? Even Paul Newman hasn't done that many. I had three great ones that will live forever. I'd have preferred them to be made every 15 years, rather than one after the other, but I went off and did other stuff. Loads of it is crap, but some is nearly great, like Assassin of the Tsar, a Russian film I made two years ago that hasn't even been seen."
     Another film, Exquisite Tenderness, in which he played a surgeon strung up in his operating theatre by a mad scientist, was released in Britain last year. "I was paid $100,000 for a week's work. I never saw the film." Then he was the evil Soran, killer of Captain Kirk in Star Trek: Generations. Such is the fanaticism of "Trekkies" that he received death threats. "I couldn't understand the attraction of Star Trek. 'Boring old formula,' I said to my agent, but Generations was better than most and I had a ball doing it - and lots of giggles with William Shatner. You can be perfectly professional without taking it seriously and they can't take away your thoughts. I'm still baffled by the whole thing - it made $100 million - but I've never been a follower and never understood people who want to join clubs. I say to Trekkies, or whatever they call themselves, 'Get a life.' They have the same mentality as trainspotters.
     "You do as well as you can, but actors have very little say in how it will turn out. I've had my performance completely changed when they swap scenes around, but they don't give a damn. If you have half a brain you know what it is when you start, so I learn my lines, turn up on time, do my best and cash the check at the end of the week, which is what a professional actor should do. Those who say, 'I won't do this,' are very lucky to be in a position not to have to pay child support or a mortgage. I wouldn't like to be in that situation. It's just a business and if you manage to find a film occasionally that is both an artistic and commercial success you've done brilliantly. But the great movies I did in the late sixties and seventies don't exist any more. Where is the new Lindsay Anderson? The English don't really like people who rock the boat and he was so brilliantly articulate he got up their noses. Ken Branagh is talented, but he doesn't have a point of view. He's not an auteur."
     McDowell returned to England to work with Anderson on Britannia Hospital ("a complete disaster at the box office, but that doesn't mean it was no good as a film. I liked it a lot"), and in memory of the director, who died in 1994 aged 71, he is trying to develop his last project, The Monster Butler, based on a true story about a British butler who suddenly, at 50, turns into a confidence trickster and psychotic killer. "Typecasting, you might say," he suggests with a grin. "I like the charm of confidence tricksters and acting is really a con trick anyway. I remember being with a heavyweight boxer in a film and he said, 'I like this acting stuff. All you do is stand up and lie.' ' No,' I replied. 'It's standing up there and telling the truth.' But, whatever it is, I always try to have fun."
     And how. After O Lucky Man! he left England to find work in America and married his first wife, Margot Dullea, the publicist on if... " I was 24, too young, and everyone advised me not to marry, but I guess I got tired after a while and said, 'All right, if it will make you happy.' Big mistake. We're no longer in touch."
     His second wife was Oscar-winning actress Mary Steenburgen and they have two children, Lilly, 15, and Charlie, 13. His present wife, Kelley Kuhr, is a 28-year-old artist. "It's wonderful to be marred to someone younger, although women of my age hate it, of course. The truth is, if it wasn't for the physical thing, you'd swear Kelley is older than me. She is a rather mature person and was I when I met her at 22 - on this very street, at an art gallery opening - there was an immediate connection. Look, I've tried everything, been through the card. It's all a matter of luck. And economics. Some men can't afford to divorce. I'm privileged in that way. It has cost me a lot, which is one reason I have to keep working. But the last six years have been great. I'm still childish in many ways, but that's good for the job. Actors tend to relieve themselves of responsibility for the real world. I let Kelley write all the checks. I'm very trusting."
     He smiles. "Don't forget I've had three wives. I was emotionally stunted at an all-boys English public school, which is why I became an actor I suppose. It's the great English tradition to be stoic and non-emotional, which is incredibly sad. You don't even know how to talk to a woman and it ruins your relationships." I wonder how long it took him to mature. "I don't think I ever made it."
     The years of carousing, almost obligatory to successful actors of his generation, left him relatively unscarred. "The best thing I did was abuse myself when I was younger - I dabbled in everything, cocaine, booze, women - because now I don't have to do it any more. I don't think alcohol helped me at all. It anesthetized me. When Charlie was born I realized I had to be a responsible human being, so I gave up drink and don't miss it. It would be wonderful to have just one glass of wine but I was never that type of drinker. I'd have a very good bottle or two. It catches up on you. You think you're fine but your life is out of control. I went to Alcoholics Anonymous until I kept being offered scripts to read. I was there to save my life, not to look for work. I now go occasionally because it's my responsibility to help others and it's good for me as well. I leave every meeting feeling better. I suppose I'm sick. The definition of alcoholism fits every description of a disease. I think it's hereditary, so I have to be careful with my children. My father drank a bottle of whisky a day and was probably an alcoholic, although we didn't use such terms then."
     Brought up in Bridlington, where his parents ran a pub, he was an obstreperous only child who played truant, ran away from home for the first time at three years old ("I was naughty just to get attention") and was sent, at 11, to boarding school in Eltham, Kent, which he hated at first, but which was where he decided to be an actor. "The head was very keen on theatricals and I played all the Shakespearean parts before I left, which gave me tremendous confidence."
     After a brief stint as a coffee salesman, he joined the Isle of Wight rep and then the RSC, where he was cast in a lot of minor roles and found the protocol stifling. "I don't want to sound ungracious and a lot of it was tremendous fun, but in terms of work it was awful - pretentious, wasteful and unfocused. I was at. bottom of the tree. If I'd been at the top I'm sure it would have been different."
     He's currently to be seen as Soho porn magnate Benny Barratt in writer Peter Flannery's acclaimed epic Our Friends in the North, now in its fourth week on BBC2, which looks at Britain between 1964 and 1995 through the eyes of four Geordies. It is his first British TV appearance for more than 25 years. "I've been asked occasionally but when you live in another country it's a long way go. Film-making facilities are second-rate compared to America but the talent is still there, the great writers - I'd go anywhere on earth to be in a piece by Peter Flannery -- brilliant artists and technicians. I tend to trust British producers more than Americans and the young actors I worked with were brilliant. I don't think I could live in England, but I love it when I return to visit my mother or sister. I know I've been negative in the past, but I don't hate England. I just want to say, like Lindsay did, 'Wake up. Stand up and fight.'
     "Americans are very vocal if things aren't going their way. I don't like to criticize when I'm living abroad and I wasn't in the country for any of Lady Thatcher's years -- the riots, drug culture, gangs on housing estates - but I do feel depressed about what has happened. I never thought when I was growing up that our police were corrupt. I believed you could trust the good old British bobby, but that myth has gone with the dreadful miscarriages of justice we've seen over the years. And it shocks me that politicians are corrupt, too. Here in America it's pretty blatant and part of the scene. It's not called 'corruption'. 'Lobbying' is part of everyday business, but I think they're pretty good at rooting out politicians who take obvious bribes."
     He asks for a decaffeinated cappuccino with non-fat milk and says, "Have what you like. It's your heart. When I first came here I thought they were a lot of poofs, but you get into the whole lifestyle and begin to realize that if you're going to play tennis you can't drink coffee anymore. You may mock me in England." He pauses, grins, and then adds, "But you also die younger."