If he could see me now
Malcolm McDowell is paying homage to his mentor Lindsay Anderson - and their
seminal Sixties film
By Sarah Jones | 8/13/04 | Independent
When British director Lindsay Anderson had a massive heart
attack 10 years ago by a remote lakeside in the Dordogne, Malcolm McDowell lost
one of his closest friends and his mentor of 28 years. Their working
relationship peaked with the 1969 public school-set, state of the nation satire if....
and playing Mick Travis got McDowell his signature part in Kubrick's A Clockwork
Orange.
McDowell has spent the past few months rifling through other
people's letters and stealing their anecdotes about Anderson. Not that he needed
to do much of the latter ("I'm in most people's stories about him
anyway," he smiles). Later this month, McDowell will use them to present a
one-man show about the director at the Edinburgh Festival.
"All that stupid Thatcherite jingoism about the
Falklands War" is what did it for Anderson's cult satirical trilogy of
films, says McDowell. If...., O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital, scripted by
David Sherwin, all starred McDowell as Mick Travis. None of the films received
UK industry backing in Anderson's lifetime, but they are now receiving renewed
attention. If.... was re-released in 2002, and O Lucky Man! will play at
Edinburgh in August.
Born in Leeds and raised in Liverpool, McDowell came to
London in his early twenties to seek his acting fortune, not, as in the
self-scripted loosely autobiographical O Lucky Man! in a bus full of traveling
musicians, but because he asked for a work transfer while working as a salesman,
taking acting classes before joining the RSC.
"At least I had some of the tools when I went for up for
the if.... audition. I wasn't a complete novice, but working with Lindsay was
like being taught by an Oxford don. He'd take me into production meetings and
tell everyone, 'Malcolm can sit in, he's got to learn.' He was constantly
testing me, shocked at my lack of knowledge."
McDowell started out on just £90 per week ("Of course
that turns out to be millions over the years" he admits), but he was broke
after if.... finished filming. Anderson would come up with schemes to keep him
afloat, which included painting his kitchen and bathroom whilst he was away on
holiday. "I hated painting, but he gave me £20, which was loads then.
Lindsay's brother Murray came over and he was a bit of a philosopher and he sat
there and just chatted for a week. When I noticed he'd painted over the windows
in the bathroom, he said 'Don't worry about it, we don't ever open them so we
did all the rest too. Lindsay hit the roof."
Later moving to America, McDowell battled with alcohol and
drug addiction, which came to a head whilst filming Cat People in 1982, and
shortly afterwards he booked himself into a clinic. He hasn't touched alcohol or
drugs for the past 20 years.
McDowell now lives in a ranch in rural California -
"small-town America, a real one-street place, just a coffee shop and a
breakfast place. Everyone knows each other." He bought his 1,000 acres of
"virgin land" in the early Nineties, some time after the break-up of
his second marriage to actress Mary Steenburgen, staying in America "to
stay close to my children".
McDowell overcame the possible difficulties of assimilation
by whipping out a pencil and drawing the "perfect house" for himself
and new wife, artist Kelley Kuhr: a vast timber-framed ranch.
"When you're given carte blanche to build something on
virgin land, it's scary because it's easy to screw up," he says. It's as
though he's mapped out the American Dream, finding his own patch of land and
building a new life, complete with basement cinema, panoramic views and garage
for his collection of vintage cars. "I suppose it is," he says,
"but actually, it's just the dream of a lad from Liverpool. It's my
dream."
Thirteen years down the line and the McDowell family,
including six month old Beckett, no longer look out on desert, but a vast
orchard of avocado trees, through which the family wander with McDowell's rather
British pitbull terriers. He might not have started farming avocadoes, he says -
rather unconvincingly - had he not had to fight off a huge bush fire a few years
ago, which cleared his land and nearly burnt down the house.
His American retreat sounds like paradise but it only remains
so because he gets away, says McDowell. "If I had to stay in one place all
the time I'd go nuts. It's been a part of my career, meeting new people, going
to strange places - I love it". His latest excursion was to Moscow, filming
Mirror Wars at an airfield, the former Soviet strike command HQ, with Rutger
Hauer.
Lindsay Anderson stayed on McDowell's ranch just before he
died, and McDowell remembers, softly, how he looked rather old. But it was, he
says, like old times. When he heard of his friend and mentor's death, he
immediately rushed to France to see him at the mortuary, which was a horrifying
experience. After the service, McDowell went for a swim in the same lake with
Jocelyn Herberts, a "dear friend", and the designer who'd worked on O
Lucky Man! with Anderson and McDowell, "to say our goodbyes".
It's perhaps these feelings of remembrance that make it hard
to let go of the last project Anderson bequeathed to him, a film based on the
life of Glasgow murderer Roy Fontaine called Monster Butler. "It's just
lying there like a ghost" says McDowell, a little tiredly. "It's a
part of me. It's emotional rather than anything else." Anderson had plans
too for a sequel to if...., set 25 years down the
line. "I think that was a bit of a fantasy of Lindsay's, after Britannia
Hospital flopped, but at the time I didn't quite believe in it and I don't think
Lindsay did either. It's hard for a director to face rejection in the way that
he did."
McDowell says he once asked Anderson what Mick Travis would
be doing 25 years down the line. "'I think he'd be a bank manager, don't
you?' he said. I thought he'd be an insurance salesman or something."
Neither of them even thought of avocadoes. 'Lindsay Anderson: A Personal Remembrance' shows at the Traverse Theatre,
Edinburgh (0131-228 1404) on 23 August
© 2004 Independant
Archived w/o permission 2004-08 by Alex D. Thrawn for www.MalcolmMcDowell.net