Whatever happened to the likely lad?
Sunday Herald 7/25/04
    Malcolm McDowell became the face of anti-establishment Britain with iconic roles in if.... and A Clockwork Orange, but his career collapsed amid drink and drug addiction. Ahead of a unique appearance in Edinburgh, he tells Chris Lee about his rise and fall, and why 2004 represents a new beginning.
    Can it really be the end of the road for Malcolm McDowell? Approaching the actor's secluded compound, a 100-acre citrus plantation situated atop rolling hills in a picturesque Californian valley, a diamond-shaped sign looms up out of the shrubbery: END COUNTY ROAD. But for McDowell, who is 61, the sign marks the only ending of any kind at this point in his life. This place of relentless sunshine and verdant growth is where he has chosen to begin anew. He lives here, nestled above a coastal savannah, two hours north of Los Angeles, with his wife of 13 years and six-month-old son.
Since making his 1968 debut as a public schoolboy with authority problems and a massive machine gun in Lindsay Anderson's If, McDowell has never slowed his output. Throughout a wildly varied, if not downright scattershot career, he has appeared in some amazing productions; Anderson's O Lucky Man! being one notable standout. But more often than not, McDowell has lent his talent to films that are better off forgotten. Cyborg 3: The Recycler, anyone?
    Now well into his fourth decade as an actor, the Leeds native has hundreds of film, television and stage credits to his name; the man who slashed his way across moviegoer's consciousness as Alex in Stanley Kubrick's ultra-violent 1972 masterpiece A Clockwork Orange has nothing left to prove, and yet he maintains a carthorse workload: four films in the can this year and six more set for release through 2006.
    "I'm starting all over again," he says, settling into a plush sofa in his antiques-filled ranch-house living room. "I'm still working steadily and I'm as happy as I've ever been. My family is the most important thing in my life. In this case, O Lucky Man! is absolutely apt."
    While F Scott Fitzgerald may have famously proclaimed there are no second acts in American lives, McDowell, a transplant here since the early Eighties, finds steady employment these days. His youthful charisma and cruel good looks have matured into a kind of steely menace, lending gravitas to the hard men and evil masterminds he has played in recent films such as Gangster No. 1 and Mike Hodges' I'll Sleep When I'm Dead.
    To hear McDowell tell it, he is absolutely content to be a journeyman actor instead of a movie star. "Listen, I do the best I can," he says, still sounding every bit the pragmatic Yorkshireman. "Being a professional is the highest compliment you can give an actor - being able to do whatever is required. I'm not complaining. I have survived some horrendous movies. My whole thing is to work."
    It is the ethic of someone who has known both the blush of leading man stardom and the sting of drug addiction in middle age; a guy who has ridden out middling career doldrums but ultimately hung on to become a grandee by keeping his long-term goals in perspective. McDowell credits his outlook in large part to his professional relationship with the pioneering Scottish auteur, Lindsay Anderson.
    "Lindsay gave me the tools to really be a much more complete actor, and one that would work through the generations and not just through the initial burst of youth," he says. "The great thing about him was he had enormous respect for me as an actor - even though I didn't deserve it."
    A towering figure in British film throughout the Sixties and Seventies, the director became virtually synonymous with McDowell as a result of their collaboration on a number of films, including a radical trilogy in which the actor plays a character named Michael 'Mick' Travis, all of which won the Palme d'Or (only if… won - Alex) at the Cannes Film Festival. These were 1968's if…. (an attack on the British public school system), 1973's O Lucky Man!, (an impressionistic odyssey about a traveling salesman adrift amid the changing political currents of Seventies Britain), and 1982's Britannia Hospital, (for which it is perhaps enough to explain McDowell donned a prosthetic horse head and penis).
    In tribute to his mentor, a sometimes bullying yet brilliant fixture of the Royal Court Theatre who passed away ten years ago next month, McDowell appears in Edinburgh to perform a one-man show comprised of his remembrances of Anderson and the director's personal writings. "I'm going to make it a very loose evening," McDowell says. "I want to give my recollections of a man that meant so much to me as a father, brother, mentor - whatever you want to call him - while keeping it as amusing and insightful as I can. It's not going to be an academic type thing, me reading Lindsay's criticism of British film."
    Coming up with rich material about Anderson should not be a problem for McDowell if the frequency with which the director's name pops up during our conversation is any indication. "Most people that met him were in fear of him - he was an intimidating person," McDowell says. "But he had a tremendous intellect and an extraordinary way of cutting through bullshit. I would have done anything for him."
    His movie debut in If led to McDowell's career-defining part in A Clockwork Orange. "Stanley Kubrick cast me directly from If‚ I didn't have an audition," he remembers. "I said, 'Can you tell me about this character?' He said, 'No. You did it for him‚' meaning Lindsay, 'now do it for me.'"
    Attired in a black bowler and false eyelashes, a codpiece and jackboots, McDowell's casually caustic murderer-rapist Alex merrily belts out Singin' In The Rain while kicking one of his victims to death. He became the poster-boy for youth culture run amok in the Age of Aquarius. But if not for another key insight from Anderson, the characterization might never have been.
    "I really didn't know how to play the part and suddenly got cold feet," McDowell recalls. "I went to Linds and said, 'How do I play the part, because I haven't got a clue'. He read the script and said, 'Malcolm, there's a close-up in If when you're coming into the gymnasium to be beaten. They want to do nothing but hurt you - and you smile at them. That's the way you play this part.'" McDowell snaps his fingers loudly at the memory. "That was a great piece of direction!"
    Within three years, the actor had morphed from a virtual unknown to cultural flashpoint - A Clockwork Orange was banned and censored in a multitude of countries - to bona fide leading man. McDowell's career prospects seemed set in stone. Then, just as quickly as fame had come into his life, the rug was pulled out from under him. "There was an oil embargo in 1973 and all the American producers that were living in England doing all of these interesting films up and left," he remembers. "That was the end of the British film industry as I knew it. It was over.
    "I remember saying to my agent, 'I've been in a few hits - what's happened?' He said, 'I'm sending you a script called The Passage - it's the only thing being made out of England this year - about a Nazi chasing Anthony Quinn and James Mason over the Pyrenees.' I went, 'Oh, f**king hell! This is horrendous!'"
    But with that, McDowell's attitude underwent significant adjustment. He made the choice to work rather than pursue the temporal vainglory of movie stardom. "If you're an actor, you're not going to do classic movies every time out. So suddenly I thought, 'You're not an auteur. Get on out there and work.' So in The Passage‚ you see James Mason playing his part, hiding behind every boulder with his hat down, like he wasn't even in the movie. And I was out there as the full SS Colonel, stomping around. I just went for it."
    Disillusionment with the movie biz - but never bitterness, McDowell will point out - had begun to take hold in 1979. He accepted a role as HG Wells in Time After Time, shooting in Hollywood. An on-set romance with co-star Mary Steenburgen prompted him to relocate to America, and also marked the end of his first marriage to Margot Bennett, whom he had wed in 1975. "I fell in love with the leading lady, we married, we had children, I wasn't going to go back," McDowell says of Steenburgen. "My career was set, hers was just starting and she wasn't going to work in England. But then it all went south."
    This is an oblique reference to the battle with alcoholism and drug abuse that ultimately cost him his marriage. Although McDowell says he never hit what the 12-steppers call "rock bottom", he remained a functioning alcoholic for years. Not that he realised it at the time." I would drink wine at lunch and I would hate to not have a bottle of good wine," he remembers. "I would say, 'The only good thing about being a so-called movie star is that you can order the best damn bottle of wine on the menu.' So that's what I did. I would order a $100 bottle, which in the Seventies was like what a $1000 bottle is now. People would go, 'Wow!' I'd say, 'I want a Premier Cru. Do you have a Chateau de la Tour? Let's have it! What year? Let's open it!'
    "It was fun but it was all bullshit, just smokescreen. What it was was my body craving the alcohol. It just happened to be a very expensive bottle. But at the time, I loved it."
    By the time cocaine entered the picture, McDowell's relationship to the drug was somewhat normalized by freewheeling Eighties attitudes. "This is going to sound very weird, but at the time, cocaine was considered a non-addictive drug," he says. "I remember I went to a story meeting at one of the studios and out came a bowl of cocaine. Everybody - including a lawyer there - took a few lines. The meeting went on for another hour with a lot of people talking at the same time. That was completely normal. And because I was an alcoholic already, but didn't know it, I got addicted."
    Although naturally effusive, McDowell grows solemn when discussing the damage to his marriage caused by his hard-partying ways. But by then he was beyond the point where he could cut his losses and return home. "There was no question of going back to England because now here were two young children and I wanted to be involved with their lives." McDowell and Steenburgen had two children, Lilly and Charles.
    In 1983, McDowell made the decision to walk away from his decadent lifestyle. "I was one of the first celebs to go to the Betty Ford Clinic," he says, snarling the word celeb into an ironic approximation of American English. "I haven't had a drink since."
    Since becoming sober, McDowell has worked constantly. Some of his appearances - Gangster No. 1, Our Friends In The North -- have been vintage, others, well, corked. "Do I make any apologies to my fans? Absolutely not!" he insists. "Do I feel any responsibility to them? Absolutely not! Every time I work, I invest as much of myself in a piece of crap as I do in a Stanley Kubrick film."
    So you know they're crap when you agree to appear in them? "Of course! I'm not an idiot," he booms. "I'm not idealistic. I'm realistic. I know exactly what I'm doing!"
    The telephone suddenly rings and it's McDowell's agent. Something about a role that will take him to Russia. He is about to agree to take the part, but lays down a few ground rules first: "A car and driver is fine. In Moscow you can't even drive yourself unless you want to be shot. It's going to work out? Beautiful. Buh-bye!" He hangs up the phone.
    McDowell turns back to me. "James Mason once told me there are three criteria for doing a film," McDowell says. "Of course there's the money, and then there's the role - you're always looking for the interesting part. But then there's the location. And if you're happy with at least two out of the three, you take it."
    That said, there has been a perceptible uptick in the kind of projects McDowell has been appearing in recently. The actor is very proud of his work in I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, in which he appears opposite Clive Owen; he rhapsodises over working with Robert Altman on ballet drama The Company; and he recently wrapped Synergy, a film from American Pie director Paul Weitz that also stars Dennis Quaid and Hollywood's current It girl Scarlett Johansson. This last project in particular seems to have brought McDowell back into the consciousness of LA's notoriously fickle casting directors.
    Up among his orange and lemon groves, his avocado trees and oaks, McDowell relates how a pack of senile bears roams the property but never disturbs his equally senile dogs - several pit bulls and a motley black and white he calls "the stupidest animal in the world". By this time we are in the kitchen of the massive A-frame farmhouse he designed himself, and he is mooning over a contact sheet of photographs of his painter-photographer wife, Kelley.
    The two met on the heels of his divorce from Steenburgen; McDowell was living in an apartment above the LA gallery where she was showing her work. The two are seldom apart and their six-month-old son, Beckett - a precocious flirt according to the actor - is a real McDowell Mini-Me. "I'm much more relaxed as a parent, and enjoying it much more this time, says McDowell. "That's not really fair to my grown kids. But the truth any older parent will tell you is it's so much better the second time around."
    In this moment of domestic torpor, McDowell catches himself. The body language changes and he closes off. Turning slowly to face me, a glint of playful menace returns to his eyes. "I am a Californian beyond a shadow of a doubt," he says with an air of finality. "I've had my shot and it was wonderful; I've made some great films. Now I've just hit my 60s and this is another decade where some great parts are going to come down the pike. How many actors can say that at the end of the day?"
    Malcolm McDowell seems genuinely happy here in his Californian hideaway. He may be literally at the end of the road, but his life and career seems to be at more of an interesting fork. And, unlike many actors, he never has to ask what his motivation is.

Malcolm McDowell will present Lindsay Anderson: A Personal Remembrance at the Traverse Theatre, August 23, 3pm & 8pm, £15 (£9 & £4.50), 0131 623 8030 and 0131 228 1404. O Lucky Man! will screen at Filmhouse 1, August 21, 3pm, £7.95 (£5.20). There will be a panel discussion of Lindsay Anderson at Filmhouse 1, August 22, 3.30pm, £7.95 (£5.20). Anderson's The Whales Of August will screen at Filmhouse 1, August 22, 5.30pm, £7.95 (£5.20), 0131 623 8030

© 2004 Sunday Herald
Archived w/o permission 2004-08 by Alex D. Thrawn for www.MalcolmMcDowell.net