Malcolm McDowell leans forward in his armchair with all
the poise of a consummate storyteller. He's recalling a day spent with a beloved
aunt when he was performing in Torquay Rep in the mid-1960s. "We were
walking around the harbor and she said" - at this point, his booming voice
takes on a fey quality - "Ooh, Malcolm! You're so lucky! You're a lucky
man. I know it. I can feel it.'"
He was no revolutionary. "I was a young actor trying to
get a career going," he says now. O Lucky Man!
is, according to McDowell,
"the most personal of the films I ever did". While Travis's time as a
traveling coffee vendor was "very different from anything I
experienced", McDowell still used his own existence as a template.
"Even the ending - I kept saying to Lindsay, How the hell am I going to end
this?' And he said, well, just do what happened to you. You became a movie star
- so that's the way we'll end it.'"
>
As smiles go, this was not the cocky smirk of Alex at the
beginning of A Clockwork Orange, as he raises his glass in the Korova Milk Bar.
This was, as McDowell puts it, "a Zen moment".
When I ask McDowell how he survived his bleak period, he
throws his head back and lets out a raucous guffaw. "Well because I'm still
here. The thing is, I'm a working actor. I'm not a movie star. I'm really not
responsible for the quality. I can only be responsible for myself. I read the
scripts and I go, God, that's a pile of crap!' But they're offering me so much
money, it looks after my mortgage for the year. What am I going to do? Sit and
wait for something special? There's only one Lindsay Anderson. There's only one
Stanley Kubrick. And you only work with people like that once or twice in a
lifetime - if you're lucky enough to work with any of the greats. And I've been
very, very lucky."
But did it ever bother him that his career hit the skids?
"No, no. Listen - I've been at this game for so long. I know what the story
is. You'd better not let the highs get too high or the lows get too low. You'd
better just find a nice place in the middle and get back out on the golf
course."
While starring in Paul Schrader's misjudged horror remake Cat
People, he found himself embroiled in the notorious LA party scene and heavily
addicted to cocaine. "I had come to drugs quite late really - my early 30s
- and suddenly I found myself unable to do aanything. I think I believed what
people said, that it's non-addictive, when of course it is highly
addictive."
After swiftly entering a rehab clinic, he emerged intact -
though it was around then that his film roles began to nose-dive. Yet, of late,
McDowell has managed to defy venerable critic David Thomson's assessment that
his is a "strange, thwarted career". While he is not immune to the odd
howler, such as Rob Zombie's recent Halloween remake, roles in what he calls
"hot and youth-orientated" US TV shows Entourage and Heroes have seen
him reborn.
Directed by Neil Marshall, new movie Doomsday also has a
strong Scottish connection. He says he sees Kane as "a King Lear kind of
character", lending this action movie a sense of undeserved profundity.
Though much of the film was shot in Cape Town, McDowell's scenes were all filmed
at Blackness Castle on the Firth of Forth. "I love Scotland," he
smiles. "To be near all those great golf courses." As well as allowing
him to work on his handicap, Doomsday reunited him with old chum Bob Hoskins.
"I haven't seen Bob in 30 years," he muses, noting that they briefly
appeared together in Royal Flash. "He was extremely good as a cop who raids
a bordello." Even before that, McDowell recalls watching Hoskins play in an
improvised show upstairs at the Royal Court Theatre in London. "I said to
Bob, Do you remember?' He went, Oh, yeah! We used to say, Oh God! He's in
again!''"
At the time, McDowell had come down to London to seek his
fortune as an actor. Earning money as a messenger boy for a firm of solicitors,
he spent two years playing extras with the Royal Shakespeare Company, but
realized theatre was not his thing. "I wanted to try and get into film if I
possibly could. I just felt an affinity with it, even then, before I'd even been
in one. I wasn't getting these jobs - I kept thinking, I could play that', but I
hadn't figured out how to audition."
Within a year, however, his luck changed. The moment he was
cast by Anderson in if…. is "still the most earth-shattering in my
life", he says. "It made everything possible." He and Anderson
were shooting the final scene at the time the riots were going on. "Lindsay
held up a copy of The Times with a picture of a student on the top of the
Sorbonne with a machine gun in his hand. And he went, well, there you are. They
can't say we're not topical. This is like a still from the film.' And we just
looked it at agog!" In truth, though, McDowell knows that it's his role as
the ultra-violent gang leader Alex in A Clockwork Orange that sustained his cult
appeal over the years. "I can't tell you how many people write to me about
it, or invite me to go talk about it." He recalls the first time he ever
saw people dressed like Alex. "I was driving around, under the Hammersmith
flyover, and I passed the tube station and out came four boys in the white
boiler suits with the bowlers and cod-pieces, and I'm driving past and I put the
window down and looked out, but of course they were oblivious. I was hooting
with laughter."
His enthusiasm for the business remains untainted even now,
not least because he seems busier than ever. He's filming Barry Munday, a Juno-esque
comedy about pregnancy "from the male perspective", co-starring Cybill
Shepherd and Chloë Sevigny. Then he returns to reprise his Heroes character,
Mr. Linderman (never mind that he actually died in the first series; such is the
enduring power of McDowell, "they got so many emails, they brought me
back"). Finally, he's reuniting with Mike Hodges for a version of Thomas
Mann's Mario And The Magician, based on a long-gestating script written by late
Hollywood veteran Abraham Polonsky.
It seems that his only worry is that his oldest child is
planning to follow in his footsteps. Lily, 27, wants to be an actress. "I
think that's extremely difficult," he sighs. "She'll just have to take
her chances like everyone else. She knows it's tough. When she told me, I said,
Oh my God! What do you want to do that for?' And she said, well, it's your
fault, Dad - you and Mum!' So I couldn't really complain."
Useless info edited 2008 Alex D. Thrawn for www.MalcolmMcDowell.net