Until recently, the best kept secret in the movie industry was that one of the
few authentically great actors of our generation is a quiet, private,
publicity-shy and unactorish English gentleman of 28 named Malcolm McDowell.
If you've never heard of him, that's understandable. His first
film - Lindsay
Anderson's if.... - was a recognized masterpiece but a less-than-smashing box
office success in America. His second, Joseph Losey's tauntingly ambiguous
Figures in a Landscape, was shelved for a year, finally given a trial run in New
York City, yanked after 5 days, and consigned to oblivion.
Then, in October, Bryan Forbes' Long Ago Tomorrow (entitled The Raging Moon
in England) was released in the U.S. and immediately had New York's super snide
critics and audiences spinning cartwheels around both the movie and its
astoundingly empathic male lead. In addition, McDowell plays the focal role in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, the most fanatically anticipated movie of this or any year.
"He's not really handsome, is he?" squawked a voice in the lobby
after a packed Friday night showing of Long Ago Tomorrow. He isn't, actually.
But he owns the most striking facial geography and engaging personality of any
actor around. Piercing eyes the color of blue shadows on midnight snow. A
prominent spread-out nose. A shag-cut crop of light brown hair. Elastic lips
that curl either upwards into a warming smile or downwards into a defiant glare.
A droll sense of humor. Abrasive intelligence. Courtly manners, in an era when
common courtesy is no longer common.
During a brief stay in New York to promote his new films, McDowell moves
around his hotel room like a polite, penned-up fox, taking long thoughtful draws
on British cigarettes and implying an instinctive wariness of the press.
"It's very difficult to talk about your own performance," he says.
"There's really nothing to say. It's up there, and either you like it or
you don't. It's actually quite difficult to do publicity. The interview is only
good as the interviewer. If you get a good reporter, it's very pleasant, but
most of the time you get some dumb woman who wants to know if you like blondes
or brunettes. It's curious, I met an actor in the lobby who was on the phone
with his girlfriend, and he slammed up and ran over and said: 'I saw your movie
five times, and I've been studying acting for four years. Now, can you give me
any advice?' Of course, I couldn't. He said; 'Well, what kind of method do you
use?' I said: Method? I don't know. I just do it. There's no method.' It's
really weird, American actors are very into all these classes, methods and
theories, which would really confuse me, would totally destroy anything that I
have. I'm sure. I think it destroys a lot of them."
But McDowell doesn't go along with the maxim that British actors are superior
to Americans. "I think that Jon Voight is a brilliant actor, he's really a
star. I didn't particularly like Midnight Cowboy, but his performance was
remarkable. Jon has a problem in knowing what parts to choose, which we all
have. It's 50% of the job. I haven't worked for a year because there's nothing
that I want to do. In the end, it got so bad that the next movie I'm going to
do---it's with Lindsay Anderson again---I wrote it myself because there's
nothing around. You've got to go out and find the people you want to work with
because they're not necessarily going to come to you."
Staring through the 19th floor window at an autumnal view of Central Park,
McDowell shucks off his meet-the-press jacket and, looking considerably more
comfortable in a white-dotted dark shirt tucked into brown bell-bottoms, relaxes
in an easy chair and dryly recounts how Kubrick nudged him into A Clockwork
Orange two years ago.
"I'd just changed my agent, and Kubrick was trying to get hold of me for
a week. He finally did and said, "Gee, Malc, your agent nearly blew the
job.' Apparently, my ex-agent was saying, 'Yes, we do handle him but he's out of
the country at the moment and as soon as he gets back . . .' Anyway, Stanley
asked me to come and see him, which I did, and he gave me this little book to
read. He never mentioned the film, he just said, 'By the way, would you like to
read this book?' I read the book three times, phoned him back and said: 'I
thought the book was brilliant." And he said: 'Oh, I'm very pleased to hear
it, I think it's brilliant as well.' And I said, 'Can we talk about it again?'
He never asked me if I'd like to do it, so I really didn't know what to say.
Finally, I said, 'Can you come to my house tomorrow to talk about it?', not
knowing, of course, that Kubrick never leaves his house for anybody! It was pure
innocence on my part. Anyway, he turned up, I saw him walking up the street.
Apparently, he parked his car way down the block because he couldn't find my
house, so he decided to walk. He arrived, we started talking about the book, and
I said to him, 'Are you offering me the role, Stanley?' He answered, 'Oh,
gee...well...I wouldn't be wasting my time if I wasn't offering you the role.'
So I said: 'Okay, I accept!'
With a puckish beam, he continues: "That was in January, 1970. From
January to the shooting date in September, I worked with Stanley on costumes and
makeup, we played ping-pong, I got to know him. Then we shot the film, which we
finished last March. It was an experience. I don't think the making of any film
is a 'good' experience, especially when you're actually doing it. In retrospect,
I suppose it was a great experience. I've seen the whole film twice. It's
interesting," he smiles, enigmatically.
Since McDowell projects on film an unlikely blend of primeval arrogance and
youthful compassion, as if Heathcliff had met and melded with Peter Pan, the
role of Alex (the savage teen-aged leader of a futuristic revolt who is seized
and lobotomized into a piteous robot) seems tailor-made. But, in the past,
nearly every actor appearing in a Kubrick movie has been eclipsed by the
mystique surrounding the legendary director. When the whole world reverently
awaits The New Kubrick Film, nobody much notices the actors.
"That's true," he admits, "but it's different this time. I'll
tell you why: It's a different kind of role than the spaceman in 2001 or,
indeed, the 4 or 5 roles that Peter Sellers did in Strangelove. It's a different
kind of film for Stanley to do in that it relies totally on the central
character. That is why I think he was very concerned with the actor-director
relationship. It's an incredible part. I doubt if I'll ever play a role quite
like it again...I do think film is totally a director's medium. The actor can bring a
lot to it. But, initially, it's the director's film, it's his conception, and
you have to work with good directors. I don't mean to say I wouldn't work with
an unknown director, but I've never yet met one whom I found interesting enough
or believed in enough."
One extremely "known" director McDowell would never work with is
Ken Russell. "To be honest, I really don't like Ken Russell's movies,
though I loved his television work. His Isadora Duncan was much better than the
movie. Let me put it this way: if he sent me a script, I'd read it but I know
I'd be, maybe wrongly, biased when I read it. I don't think he'd ask me to work
with him anyway, because I'm not his kind of actor. He doesn't particularly like
actors, and he uses them like machinery or like props, bits of furniture, which
is not interesting to me. In Sunday, Bloody Sunday Glenda Jackson is a much
better actress than she could ever show with Russell."
In Long Ago Tomorrow, a love story for people who hated Love Story. McDowell
portrays a surly, snotty, loudmouthed lad who, suddenly struck down by
paralysis, lands in a home for cripples where his love for another resident
named Jill (played by Nanette Newman, Bryan Forbes' wife) transforms him into a
tough, tender, torn-apart but invincible young man. It's a nearly impossible
part for an actor to bring off, and would-be actors who want to know what
acting's all about would be well-advised to stop fidgeting over methods and
simply study the next-to-last scene, where McDowell, driven back to the home
after learning that Jill has died in a hospital, blurts out to a sympathetic
nurse (Georgia Brown) that "I've pissed myself."
"I didn't know how to play that scene," he admits. "It just...happened. It's quite a line to do. Fortunately, everything seemed to work in
that scene because Georgia, who is remarkably good in it, started to cry, which
was marvelous for me. I wanted to laugh, I just wanted to get hysterical. Then I
thought, no, maybe I shouldn't do that. But I felt in a way that I should laugh
because of the horribly ridiculous situation I was in. The whole thing about the
movie for me was to play down, to give it a kind of vitality but in a hidden
sense, not to overdo it in any way, but to keep it going against the norm. It
would have been very easy to cry, it would have been moving for me to have
cried, but I didn't want to cry. In the end shot where I'm playing table tennis,
I wanted to smash that ball, smash it anywhere, SMASH it out of the room. That's
what I insisted should happen. There was no other ending for me.
"I really loved the character. I thought he had something to say that I
would like to do. I found meeting paraplegics in hospitals and homes very
depressing. To be quite honest, I didn't do the role because I wanted to bring
the cause of the paraplegic to the public notice. It was a good part, and I
wanted to play it. The reason, mainly, was because it was virile, young, ballsy
kind of character who meets a disaster in his life and becomes very withdrawn,
very bitter, and then finds, through love, a way to live. That appealed to me a
lot, because when the character meets the girl in the home, he really finds
something---a level of relationship---that he would never have found had he not
been struck down by paralysis. It's strange, but only in becoming disabled does
he become emotionally whole. I can't pretend that I did it because it was a film
about paraplegics and that I was fighting a cause for them although,
incidentally, I do believe the film does that because it shows them as real
people, how they can be depressed and cynical and funny.
"Bryan did a very, very remarkable job in the film. He did it with
taste. Also, there was no sentimentality, the character was certainly not
sentimental, he was hard as nails. And what I especially liked was that even at
the end, when Jill dies, you know that this guy is saved, he's going to make it
anyway, whatever happens. They could knock his head off, and he'd still come
back as a fighter.
"Nanette was exceptionally good, she's marvelous, it's the best
performance she's ever given in her life. And I'm very pleased because when we
started shooting, everyone was saying, 'Oh, Bryan...nepotism...with his
wife...'But actually she was---well, there's nothing else to say---she was
really terrific. She was also lovely to work with."
As a teenager in the north of England, McDowell never intended to be an
actor, "I really didn't know what I wanted to do. I guess I always would
have wound up being an actor by fair or foul means. I was lucky that it happened
so quickly after I left school."
School was a private academy in Kent. "I didn't enjoy it at first, but
when you begin to get privileges and become a senior boy, it's a pleasant sort
of existence---not much work to do, a little cricket, a little Rugger, everyone
else lackeys around for you. But that was after six years of sheer hell. The
English school systems are psychologically very well planned because you have
six years of hell and one year of absolute bliss, and so you come away
thinking---Wow! My school days were great!"
Upon graduation, he got a job as a coffee salesman in Yorkshire. "I used
to go out and sell these beans to mental homes, nuclear power stations, any
institution that had masses of coffee-drinking people. I worked for an American
company, Chase and Sanborn, and I was pretty successful. I sold a lot of
coffee," he laughs. "I think they just took pity on me because I
looked so young.
"I had a girlfriend in Liverpool who every Friday night used to go to an
elocution class. I went along once to see what was happening and thought it was
very boring. But the woman who ran the class, Mrs. Harold Ackley, who was 82,
said that I was to come to her privately, which I did, and I quite enjoyed it.
We used to do these bits from various plays. She said I should take these acting
examinations, and I did." As a result, McDowell was hired by the manager of
a repertoire theatre on the Isle of Wight. "I did 9 months of that, at 8
pounds a week, and it was just terrifying. I had to play every kind of role,
from 12-year-olds to 45-year olds. We were a company of seven; a leading man, a
leading lady, a male juve (which is what I was), a female juve, and a couple of
extra bodies. From there, I went to another repertoire company in the south of
England in Devon.
"And then," he frowns, "I went to the Royal Shakespeare
Company at Stratford, which was really rock bottom. It's a monstrous place, and
I hated it, hated it, absolutely LOATHED it! It's the worst theatre in the whole
of the world. The standard is really appalling, and it's only because of idiotic
American tourists that they keep the thing going at all. Nobody else would go to
see that crap! It's only because it's at Stratford, and people think it's great
because it's Shakespeare, so they're pulling in these poor souls. It took me two
years to get over that experience. I started out by walking onstage with a
spear, and then I played small roles. I don't really regret it because now I
know what it's like, but I wouldn't advise anybody to go there unless they want
a lot of punishment. I guess, in fact, it did play a very important function in
my life because you were supposed to be overawed by all this great talent. But
after a week you realize it's all crap, so you get a little rebellious and then
get into a lot of trouble, which is what I managed to do. I used to say, 'this
is just crap, why are we doing this?' and I would ask questions, which was
really taken amiss. That wasn't a very polite thing to do. Anyway, I had to
leave... I was out of work for a long time, and then I started to do quite a
lot of television. I was in a series, which was really appalling. It was a thing
called Sat'day While Sunday, a view of young people's lives in the north of
England. A real disaster, but it was a good thing for me to do because I had to
churn out a half-hour's performance in 4 days. I guess that teaches you
something, but I'm not quite sure what."
He also performed at the Royal Court ("which I liked because it's a bit
tatty; I suppose they really care about what they do, although what they do is
terrible, but at least there's no pretension about it, not like
Stratford"), and eventually made his film debut, which wound up on the
cutting room floor. "I did one day in Poor Cow, in which I made love to
Carol White. I had no idea what the role was, I never read the script. It was an
interior scene, and it had been raining, so every time I came into this ruddy
place they drenched me with a watering can. It wasn't great fun. Then they
couldn't match the exterior because they never got any more rain after that, so
they cut it all out. That was the end of my movie career for a few months."
Finally, the casting director for if.... who remembered McDowell from an
appearance on a TV soap opera, summoned him to meet the director, Lindsay
Anderson. "Frankly, I'd never heard of him. We just got on well, and then
he cast me. I got on very well with him during the shooting of the film, and
he's become a very good friend of mine. He doesn't do many films either, simply
because he has to find his subject and nobody really writes what he wants to do.
It has to be his conception. He's a brilliant, remarkable man. He's sort of my
mentor. I never met a good director until I met Lindsay. I didn't even think
they existed. I thought it was all luck. Actually, there are very few good
directors, and very few people you can trust, which is why I don't work very
much."
Since if... McDowell has spent a good deal of his time rejecting reams of
scripts with no regrets. "I'm very pleased if the stuff that I've turned
down works out well, and a lot of it has, in fact. But I would never talk about
it - unlike some people I know - because I feel it's really unfair to the actor
who does it and also to the film. I really do get offered a lot of crap,
unbelievable stuff. In fact, I don't think I've actually gotten through a script
that I've been offered in the last year. I haven't even got to the end. You can
just sort of tell.
There are people like Michael Caine, who has done any good movie he can do. I
don't think it's a good idea. I know that I can't do that. Maybe I'd like to
earn a million dollars in a year, but I couldn't physically do three films a
year. It would be impossible for me to do that, because I don't think that a
film starts and ends on the first and last day of shooting. Usually, I find that
a picture is going to take up at least a year---on the preparation, on the
shooting, on the aftermath. I finished Long Ago Tomorrow 18 months ago but I'm
still with it. And certainly, I'm still with A Clockwork Orange and will be for
a long, long time. To be fair, people do make mistakes. They should make
mistakes, and they should be allowed to make mistakes. You've just got to try
and minimize the chances, that's all."
Accordingly, McDowell himself conceived his next film, O Lucky
Man!, which
will begin filming in March and is a collaborative effort with two people he
trusts---Lindsay Anderson and scenarist David Sherwin, who wrote if . . . The
concept stems from McDowell's experiences as a coffee salesman, peddling Chase
and Sanborn "beans" throughout Northern England. To begin with,
"I just wrote scenes, I didn't try to put them together or in any sequence.
Then David read these scenes, and he loved them. I realized that I didn't just
want to write a comedy about a salesman selling coffee. That's why I needed
David and Lindsay to turn it into something else. When David was writing if . .
.which was then called The Crusaders, he was writing about a boy's school. Now
when Lindsay came in on the collaboration of the script, it turned out to be a
film about, well, what was if . . . about? It's not about a boy's school,
anyway, although that's used as a vehicle. It's the same thing with this
film---the coffee salesman is a vehicle. When I showed the bits I'd written to
Lindsay, he thought they were pretty poor, which I expected, and he told me to
go and read Voltaire's 'Candide' and Kafka's 'Amerika', and that was very good
advice. It's impossible to tell you what the film's about, except that it will
be done in an even more epic style than If . . . and the theme is a journey
through life to success."
Stubbing out a cigarette, and sipping a dry vermouth and soda, McDowell seems
anxious to abandon his claustrophobic hotel suite and return home to London,
where "I keep to myself, I never go out, I never 'do the scene.' I don't
think one should expose oneself to the media. A lot of people can take a leaf
out of Stanley Kubrick's book on this question. I don't mean when you come to
sell a film, which is after all why I'm here. I would never do an interview
unless it was to talk about a particular film. I would never do anything for
personal publicity, because I think then people are out to get you. Stanley
really has it buttoned up, because getting an interview with him is like getting
into heaven. It's difficult. Stanley prefers to keep he myth going, which is
really what the President should have done. He should have kicked all the TV
cameras out of the White House, and he would have been better off today. The
people now know he's just an ordinary man who makes mistakes, and that can---and
certainly has---worked against him.
I quite liked people not knowing who I am because when you're a celebrity
like Jack Nicholson, that has its problems. Actually, you're still the same
person, you're still doing the same things, but you've only got the added
pressures. I don't think I'll ever be like Nicholson, because I don't really
want to be. Yes, sure, I do think A Clockwork Orange is going to be a big movie
and probably financially and publicity-wise the biggest I'll ever do. But I'll
come over here, when it opens, for two weeks, and then I'll go home, and that
will be the end of that. Then I'll start working on Lindsay's film, and you
won't hear of me for another two years, which is the way I like it. That suits
me fine, though I do hope it's not another year before I start working after
Lindsay's film. It's been a year, you see, since Clockwork Orange, that I
haven't made a film. But I enjoy doing nothing. I don't feel guilty about it, so
I'm happy. In fact, I'm not really doing nothing, I'm very busy, thinking, so
it's a very useful time. And yet people say, 'You're not working.' But then,
they can say what they like. It doesn't really matter."
Nowadays, when 9 out of 10 actors grab the loot and run, Malcolm McDowell
walks, slowly. Despite his composed tones, it is evident that he cares, agonizes
about his movies. Which is what makes certain movies, and certain movie actors,
matter. "In my way of working, you don't end up by making a lot of money.
But," he adds, with a singular McDowell smile, "you end up reasonably
happy."
© Show Magazine January 1972
Archived 2001-08 Alex D. Thrawn for www.MalcolmMcDowell.net