Seventeen Magazine with Malcolm McDowell for if.... 7/69

Mark this man! by Edwin Miller
(Earliest known Malcolm Interview - Alex.)

     Malcolm McDowell gives an electrifying performance in the explosive English movie if.... as a student who rebels against the hypocrisy and brutality of the English public school system (the kind we call private in the United States). Here for the New York opening, he makes a striking impression with his narrow, gnomish features lit up by light blue eyes, his taste in clothes: navy blue shirt and scarf, navy blue jacket, black cowboy hat of shaggy felt, overcoat with lots of straps and buttons. Malcolm enjoys talking. When he warms up, he delivers himself at a level that can carry two or three tables away.
     "When an actor becomes successful, he grows a set of horns," Malcolm observes. "It's nothing you can control; it just happens to you. Probably will to me too, I suppose. It's just that you've got to toughen up a bit and protect yourself. I'm enjoying success. An actor out of work is nobody at all, but when you're working in a hit, everybody's your friend. Here in New York, the phone hasn't stopped ringing. People I've never met call to say they enjoyed the movie, that they want to meet me. The autograph hunters with their cameras in little paper bags wait to get three autographs of mine they can trade for one of Cary Grant's. New York is a terribly exciting city. It's marvelous to be here. Americans are very helpful; they're not uptight like the average Englishman. He couldn't care less, but the American wants to be liked. With money though, England is a much easier place to live than here. The pace is much more relaxed.
     "Making if .... was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. I've got a rubber face, and I have to be very careful of my expressions, otherwise it gets out of hand. The most difficult thing of all for me was not to go up too high, to blow it all up out of proportion. I went to the rushes every day to check on what I was doing.
     "I'm in almost every shot of the picture, but I gained weight! Standing about all day, you keep snacking, eating between scenes, eating out of nervousness maybe. But it was great! Lindsay Anderson, the director, is a wonderful man, and the relationships between the cast and crew, the men around the set, were absolutely marvelous. I don't think I'll ever have the chance at being part of such an ideal situation again.
     "They're all afraid of Anderson in England. The Establishment knows he's dead against them, what they stand for. I don't think any film can ever change the world, but everything shown in the picture about the public school system is true. It's even worse than the things they show, the beatings, the hypocrisy, the sadism. The fellow who wrote the script told me about one fat boy at his school: they chased him around the grounds and broke both his legs. I worked out a lot of the things I did in the movie myself, like the darts - whom to shoot at. I deliberately avoided popping one at the Queen since I thought everyone would be expecting me to do that! While we were making it, some thought the ending pretty wild; then the French students rebelled and we saw pictures of them with machine guns at the Sorbonne! There was a parliamentary commission investigating the public school system, and one of the things I think they've recommended is coeducation. But I never liked the idea of going to school with girls. There's a sense of comradeship in a boys' school that is very satisfying.
     "I went to Tunbridge, a minor public school - minor is the kind of term someone from a school like Eton would use. It's a school that costs less. I had a terrible time at first. I was set against going, but my dad sent me. He is a snob, and wanted me to have the best education he could afford. I'm adaptable. I can adjust to any situation I find myself in, but at first I resisted Tunbridge. I fought whatever they wanted of me and every Monday night I'd be beaten. Gradually, I gave way and accepted the situation, even got to like it, in fact. In my senior year I became head of the student body! I majored in economics. In England that's the thing you specialize in when you don't have the slightest idea of what you want to work at after you get out of school. I had my own tutor. Go up to his room and out would come the slippers and cigarettes - you weren't supposed to smoke, of course, but that didn't mean anything - and you would work your head off. You get a tremendous education in public schools. You know Latin and Greek, everything, by the time you finish. I used to play a lot of rugger - that's rougher than American football. There's absolutely no padding used, and you really end up with broken bones. I didn't care to play particularly, but there was no help for it. If you refused, it would be equivalent to somebody standing up in the United States and saying, 'I won't go to Vietnam, I don't want to shoot anyone.' A great deal of the public school system is based on athletics, playing between the schools and all that sort of thing.
     "But I had had enough of all that when I got out and went to work. I was born in Leeds, but we moved to Liverpool when I was about three. My father had been in the Royal Air Force; then he bought a pub just out of town with a few rooms for guests, and that's where I grew up with my two sisters. The older one works in fashion in London, the younger one is in college. My father eventually went bankrupt - drank up all the profits. Once when I was about twenty-two, my mother called me and asked me to come home because my father was ill. She's North of England and she'd never let on normally, but I went home and my father was in a padded cell with the DT's. That really did me in. I said to myself, that's it, and got him out of there. He's on the wagon now, working as a driving instructor.
     "I first went to work for a football pool firm - a pool is like a lottery - and while I was there I took a course in time-work study because I thought it would help me get another job. Then through one of my father's drinking mates, I went to work as a coffee salesman. That was fantastic. That year became my drama school! I had all of Yorkshire as my territory, the largest county in England. I used to ride the Yorkshire moors - that's Bronte country, desolate, wild - with my samples of coffee beans. I would go from one cafe- to the next trying to get the proprietor to take my coffee instead of whoever else's he was taking. I became a man of many faces and made out very well If I walked into a high-class restaurant, I'd act very pukka and talk with a fancy accent. If it was a working saloon, I'd talk like one of them. I used to wear a bowler hat - that got a big laugh in Yorkshire - and worked out all sorts of tricks to get everyone interested in buying my coffee. The proprietors of those places are usually very busy and don't want to listen to someone telling them their coffee isn't much good, and besides the majority of them were Cypriot Greeks and could hardly speak English, so it was tough work. I made about twenty-five quid a week though, which was pretty good for a nineteen-year old. I kept at it until one day while I was driving along I said to myself, I've had it, and I quit out of sheer boredom. That's when I decided to become an actor. I always had the idea in the back of my mind that if nothing else seemed to work out, I'd take up acting because it was the easiest thing in the world. That's how naive I was in those days!
     "I was living at a grotty little boarding house in Leeds, the kind of place where they had a myna bird which used to sing at breakfast every morning while everybody would be reading their Yorkshire Post, burying their heads in their papers. No one spoke to anyone else. I was evicted for having a girl in my room for about ten minutes and I was so furious that I slipped down and taught the myna bird the most obscene language I knew. The next morning at breakfast the bird started saying some phrases over and over and gradually the papers all dropped and people began saying, 'What? What!
     "There was a wonderful old lady about eighty-two years old in Liverpool who gave dramatic lessons. She insisted that I go for the medals that LAMDA, the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, awarded once a year. They gave winners bronze, silver and gold medals, charging an entry fee of three pounds for the bronze, five pounds for the silver and eight pounds for the gold. I decided to try for the gold medal since that would include the other two, and went to London for the audition. They sent me some speeches to do about three months in advance, but I never even read the plays they were taken from. One was from a play about the cotton mils, Hindle Wakes, where the famous line, 'Get thee to the mill, Mother!' comes from. In another speech I had to play a producer who comes onstage and looks over the audience. I had the adjudicators laughing all the way through, not because I was so funny but because clearly I didn't seem to know what I was doing. One of the requirements for the audition was to mime something, and I hadn't even remembered that! I excused myself for a moment to read the rules and came back on and mimed putting on my make-up! I don't know how it happened but I got a gold medal; that year, only ten out of fifteen hundred applicants were given medals! It was the greatest thing that ever happened to me; it put me into the business. One of the adjudicators asked me if I wanted to join his provincial repertory company as an ASM. Did that mean acting, I asked him, and he said, 'Yes, of course.' I said sure. It turned out that I was stage manager as well as the juvenile actor, which meant that I had to run around town before each production and find props. What a miserable job! And for all that I was paid seven pounds a week. My room cost me six pounds, so I had all of one pound for food and to entertain myself with. I had saved up a thousand pounds, so I used that to keep going. Highest whack you could make as a leading player was twenty pounds a week.
     "My first part was the juvenile in a play called Woman in a Dressing Gown. I was so naive that I didn't know how to prepare for a role. I watched what the other actors did, how they marked their scripts, and tried to copy them. When we began rehearsing, I didn't put anything into it because I couldn't see the use of wasting all that energy. The first time I actually went onstage, there was a scene in which I was supposed to eat cornflakes. When we really did it in front of an audience, I began spooning the cornflakes into the bowl and then spooning in the sugar, one spoonful after the other. All the old ladies in the audience began to laugh so I kept it up, thinking I was pretty good. The actress who was playing the lead became furious. She really told me off afterward, tore me apart, until I told her she was too young to be playing my mother anyhow. That got her!
     "The next season I went to a repertory group in another town as leading juvenile. I stayed there for a year until I went to London and auditioned for the Royal Shakespeare Company. I auditioned five times until I finally made it. I began with the Royal Shakespeare Company as the best spear carrier they ever had, and eventually I played bit parts.
     "After about three months I was sitting in a pub one day around five o'clock having a beer, thinking what a waste of time the whole thing was and how I had learned all I needed to know from being with the company, when an assistant stage manager dashed in. They were doing Henry V that performance, and both the regular actor in a bit part and his understudy were out and would I take it on? Sure, I said, and went to the theater studying my lines: 'My sovereign lord, bestow yourself with speed: The French are bravely in their battles set and will with all expedience charge on us!' Before I was to say that, there was a scene where I was lying about onstage in semidarkness. I had to get up and go offstage, grab a flag and run back with it to deliver my lines to Henry. When I came back onstage, I raced up to the king and said, 'My sovereign lord, bestow yourself with speed: The French...' and I couldn't remember anything more. It was terrible! I just stood there and finally said, 'They're coming.' And the actor who played Henry looked at me and said, 'Oh?'
     "I was eventually told off by Peter Hall, one of the directors at the Royal Shakespeare Company, as being a very poor Green Room member. The lady who was in charge of accounts in the lounge had asked me to pay my bill and browned me off. I grabbed her and carried her into the deep freeze and slammed the door on her; then someone called me to go onstage immediately. I ran on and nobody was around to let her out. She was only in about five minutes altogether before I got back, but she was very upset. Finally, I had had it, along with about four of my mates, and we all decided to quit. We went to Hall separately and said we were finished. When I went in, he said, 'Well, if you stay on, you will get better parts next season.' I said no and he said, 'All right, get out.' Later on I found that I was the only one who really quit. The others said, 'All right, I'll stay!' I spent two years with the company, and leaving it was the best thing I ever did.
     "After I left, I didn't work for about two months. I lived in a poor section of London and had a room where everything was on the 'slot.' If you wanted light, gas, television, you had to put a coin in the slot, otherwise you would just sit there and go to bed - that's all you could do. There was a light in the hall that went on for a minute or two when you pressed the button so you could see to make your way, and that's where I used to read, pressing the button every time it went out. I finally put a Band-Aid over the button to keep it on. I became quite an expert at all those things.
     "Things eased up. I got a small part on a TV show, and from that I was auditioned by a producer for an hour-long TV play called Pig Iron Johnny. He didn't want me at first, told me about the big-name actor he could get, how he was taller than I was - I'm five eight and a half - but I said, 'That's nothing, I can stand on a box.' Finally I got it. That was my break. Eric Porter, a marvelous actor, played my father; it was one of those situations where I grow up admiring my old man only to realize later that he's a con man, a fraud. It was a sensational chance. After that I worked steadily in telly for a year and a half, until I really had enough and decided to do something on the stage. I played Sebastian in Twelfth Night at the Royal Court in London and that's where Lindsay Anderson saw me for If.... I was almost in another movie, Poor Cow, but didn't get on with the director and he scrapped my part. He wanted his actors to improvise everything and I didn't care for it. I want a script to work with, not just be caught on film doing something for the first time whether it's right or not."
     "Next I'm going to do Figures in a Landscape with Robert Shaw for Cinema Center Films. It's a marvelous script about two men escaping from a prison camp. When I'm not working I don't do anything at all. I'm totally lazy. I see my friends, who are actors for the most part, or I like to go down to the Old Bailey and sit in on the trials. It's absolutely hilarious, down there, like the time the Queen's Counsel was describing his client's actions in a rape case and said, 'He pulled at the girl's knickers, Judge,' and the judge said, 'I don't want to hear any of that nastiness!'
     "I never read reviews. They don't mean a thing. You do the best you can as an actor and that's it. What can they tell you? Although they should have the great reviews of Ii.... blown up in front of the theater where it's playing. I'll have to go down to the head man at Paramount Pictures and have him get onto the theater manager. I don't really feel comfortable with some of the things one has to do as part of the sausage factory, like dressing up in French clothes for a picture in Vogue. I'm not a model. I don't know anything about French clothes; I can't relate to them. I'm an actor."