by Andrea Chambers
They were strangers when they met in July 1978.
Arkansas-born Mary Steenburgen had never ever seen Malcolm McDowell of Liverpool
on a movie screen, not even in if... or O Lucky Man! or as Alex
the droog in the celebrated A
Clockwork Orange.
McDowell had missed Steenburgen's movie debut as Jack
Nicholson's co-star in Goin' South. By September, Mary and Malcolm were
in love; by January, living together. Today they are looking forward to a
wedding, probably in the next month or two, and a baby, expected in January.
"At first I thought, 'Well, it's not the right time.' " says Mary.
"But when it was definite, I felt tremendous, as if I had been given a
gift."
For some time now she has felt that her luck was running
good. For Goin' South, Nicholson picked her from a crowd of unknown hopefuls,
and her notices were enthusiastic. Then she went into the cast of Time after
Time, and met McDowell, 37. Click.
He was married at the time to actress-publicist Margot Dullea
(Keir's ex), "a woman I respect enormously," but, he says, "I was
frustrated, not a happy human being, I buried myself in my work. With Mary there
was a mystical sense of something rather special." Agrees Steenburgen, 27,
"I never had a soul mate before." The wedding, once McDowell's divorce
is final, will be small and private." I'll wear white," says
Steenburgen. "There's purity in my heart." It will also very likely be
on Monday - McDowell's only day off. Since June, he has been playing Jimmy
Porter, the frustrated candy shop owner in John Osborne's acclaimed Look Back
in Anger, at Manhattan's Roundabout Theatre. "Porter is a ranting,
raving, self-pitying person on paper," says McDowell. "You have to
make him more likeable." Reviewers approved of McDowell's interpretation,
and the run of the play has been extended. He took a similar approach to
Clockwork's Alex - trying to make a vile hoodlum seem human - and director
Stanley Kubrick compared McDowell's onscreen resourcefulness to that of the late
Peter Sellers "at his greatest."
Steenburgen meanwhile has been working on her role as the
little woman. With a Cuisinart and a set of stainless steel pans given her by
Malcolm, she has learned to cook and is now also playing a resourceful
house-wife in the adaptation of E. L. Doctorow's best-seller Ragtime. Her
turn-of-the-century dresses for the movie should hide Steenburgen's expanding
figure. "They adjusted the costumes," she says with a smile.
Steenburgen will also be seen in Melvin and Howard, due out
in December. It is about Howard Hughes and stars Jason Robards; she plays the
wife of Melvin Dummar (Paul LeMat in the movie), a gas station owner who
insisted he was a Hughes heir. When she filmed the role in blistering Las Vegas
last spring, McDowell was at her side. "The most important thing to Mary
and me is to be together," he says. In his rebellious youth, Malcolm might
have hooted at such lovestruck sentiments. His parents, Charles and Edna Taylor,
ran a pub, the Bull and Dog, outside Liverpool. (At the age of 20, he changed
his name to McDowell, his mother's maiden name, because there was another actor
in England named Malcolm Taylor). One of three children, McDowell was sent to
boarding school at 13. "I had been sopping up beer behind the counter with
the locals," he admits. "I found it difficult to adjust to a
disciplined society and became fairly unruly. Every Monday night I was beaten
with a cane or a slipper."
After graduation at 18, he became a traveling coffee salesman
in Yorkshire, beginning an odyssey described in O Lucky Man! (which he
co-scripted). "I had these cards from the chap before me," he recalls.
"They'd say things like: 'Mrs. Smith, catering manageress. Likes Ironside.
Has three kids, Jeanie, Arthur and Philip.' I'd go in and say: 'Did you see
Ironside last week, Mrs. Smith?' ' Oh, and how are Philip's tonsils?' I'd get a
sale that way."
Weekends McDowell went home to the Cavern in Liverpool, a
local dive where the Beatles were making their start. One night he phoned a
girlfriend at the home of her elocution teacher. "You have a marvelous
voice," said the teacher. "Do you want to be an actor?" McDowell
began taking acting lessons from Mrs. Harold Ackley, 82 - "She offered me
cigarettes and sherry at 3 in the afternoon. I thought that was very
civilized." Soon he participated in a national acting competition, which
led to summer theater on the Isle of Wight and two spear-toting seasons with the
Royal Shakespeare Company. "David Warner was playing Hamlet," Malcolm
recalls. "We'd all take his cast-off groupies."
McDowell was doing Twelfth Night in London when he auditioned
for director Lindsay Anderson's if... in 1968. "His acting reflects
his personality in its superficial aggressiveness," says Anderson of
McDowell." His Look Back in Anger character presents a rough face to
the world, but that belies the sardonic wit hiding behind a kind of
vulnerability."
McDowell needed all the psychological armor he could muster
for his role as the crazed emperor in Robert Guccione's X-rated Caligula. During
the filming in 1977, Malcolm's father visited the set. "In one scene, I had
to pee up against a marble pillar and say something like : 'I am Rome, wherever
I am Rome is. Let's go to Cairo.' Dad was bowled over. 'That's what I call
bloody fantastic acting,' he pronounced. 'They say "Action!" and you
pee.' " McDowell otherwise calls Caligula "an outrageous
betrayal". " I was paid handsomely," he adds, "but Guccione
cut 20 minutes of hard-core porno into the film. It looks like we were in a
conspiracy."
Steenburgen has trod a more decorous path. Daughter of a
Missouri Pacific Railroad conductor and a secretary, Mary lived a dreamy youth
in North Little Rock. "I'd read books in trees," she recalls. " I
never heard people call me." By age 16, she was acting in school plays. At
19, she quit Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas to join New York's Neighborhood
Playhouse, and in 1976 she and a few friends founded an improvisational theater
group called Cracked Tokens. She was waitressing at a Manhattan crepe restaurant
in 1977 when she auditioned for Goin' South. "I answered those
voices inside," she recalls. "They said: 'This is yours.' ". When
Nicholson agreed, she made two phone calls, one to her parents, one to the
restaurant "to tell them what they could do with their crepes." One of
her biggest fans is Malcolm's mentor Anderson, who says, "She's one of the
very best young American actresses. She and Malcolm suit each other."
The couple share a Hollywood house decorated with Ozark
quilts and American primitives and an apartment in a Manhattan brownstone. After
the baby is born, they hope to co-star in a movie based on Thomas Mann's
allegorical novella about Italian fascism, Mario and the Magician.
"I'll never give up my career for any man, woman or child," says
Steenburgen. "I don't believe in selflessness." But the baby will be
close by. "Anywhere we go, the kid comes, too," she declares.
A likely destination is England. Since 1976 McDowell has been
investing in forest lands in Sussex; he's already taught Mary to love the copper
beeches, swamp cypress and English oak. "There are deer and cuckoos and
blue-bells," she says. "It's beautiful. We want a house there
someday." She pauses, and sounding like a woman in love, adds, "We'll
call it Magic House."
© People September 1980
Archived 2001-08 Alex D. Thrawn for www.MalcolmMcDowell.net