Arts: He's acted in 100 movies and allows nobody to stop him enjoying his work - even directors, Malcolm McDowell tells Michael Dwyer
Enthusiastically discussing his prolific output in a film career now in its fifth decade, Malcolm McDowell notes that he could hardly have had a worst start, when his debut role, a minor part in Ken Loach's 1967 drama, Poor Cow, ended up on the cutting-room floor. Shortly afterwards, Lindsay Anderson cast him as Mick Travis, the anarchic leader of the schoolboy rebels in If, and he never looked back.
"I think I've done over 100 movies at this stage," McDowell, who turns 61 this month, says with a mock sigh. "I don't really keep score. To be honest, most of them are crap. But there are some good ones here and there."
Where, I wondered, did St Patrick the Irish Legend, which he made four years ago, rank on his top 100?
"Jaysus!" he exclaims at the mention of it. "I never saw it. I think it was made for television. All I remember about it is that I wore a cassock, because I played an archbishop, and it was the most wonderful job, I thought, because I could wear jeans and a T-shirt, or anything I liked underneath, and then just whip off the cassock when my scene was finished and get straight out the door. Patrick Bergin plays St Patrick in it. He's a nice guy, a good actor."
Early in McDowell's career, there were many plum roles, most famously when Stanley Kubrick cast him in the iconic role of Alex, leader of the Droogs, in A Clockwork Orange (1971). He is bemused to learn that censorship delayed the release of the film in Ireland for 25 years.
"Oh my God, 25 years!" he says. "I hope they put out a nice new print. Actually, it's amazing how well that film stands up after all that time. It could have been made today."
He reunited with Lindsay Anderson to play the Mick Travis character in O Lucky Man! (1973), partly inspired by McDowell's own youthful experiences as a coffee salesman in his native Leeds, and again for the caustic social satire, Brittania Hospital (1982). In 1979 he engagingly played H.G. Wells in the entertaining time-travel adventure, Time After Time, during which he met his second wife, Mary Steenburgen, and in the same year he played the title role in Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione's notorious production, Caligula, based on a Gore Vidal screenplay and featuring hardcore footage added at Guccione's insistence.
Of his recent work, McDowell says he is pleased with The Company, the new Robert Altman film, in which he plays the artistic director of a US ballet company.
"I'd been to the ballet in my youth," McDowell says. "When I was with the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych in London, we shared the same pub with the Royal Ballet, and I was always very excited going into that pub because there was always the half-chance of meeting a ballerina or two. We actors stood quite a reasonable chance of getting a date because a lot of the male dancers were gay. However, I did go to see Nureyev and Fonteyn performing, and I admired them.
I live in California now, where, of course, there are no ballet companies. When Bob Altman asked me to do this film, it could have been about dairy farming in Chile and I would have done it because it's a Bob Altman film. I worked with him on The Player and we've been great friends for a long time. We've had lots of fun times together through the years and whenever we're in the same city, we also meet up for dinner and gossiping. We've got mutual friends whom we tease terribly. I do love him and his wife, Kathryn."
What, in McDowell's view, is so special about Altman as a film-maker?
"Oh God," he says. "What can I say? There are so many great things about him. He's been doing it for so long and he just has the confidence to do whatever he wants to do. It's like picking up a clarinet in a jazz riff and going off on a toot, and you just go with it. There's no linear story in this film. As they say, nobody gets killed in this one. It's more like choreography, in fact, like doing a dance. He is very into the movement within the frame, and you can see that in all his movies, as well as all those soundtracks going on all at the same time."
Making The Company was an unusual experience for McDowell given that the only other professional actors in the movie are Neve Campbell and James Franco, with the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago providing the rest of the cast.
"They're athletes, and it was strange not to have more actors on the set every day," McDowell says. "Bob did a very good job in getting them relaxed about making the film and they did pretty well, I think. My character is a god to these dancers. One suggestion from him and they could be playing the lead in the next ballet, and that's huge power."
Watching the film, it feels as though McDowell's portrayal had been inspired by the late Lindsay Anderson, a brilliant and benign mentor in his own right.
"Yes, there are elements of Lindsay in the way I play the character," McDowell says. "I didn't copy his delivery. But that is a very shrewd observation because Lindsay was very like this character. He had amazing dignity, a total love of what he did whether it was for stage or film, and a love of actors. Of all the directors I've worked with, I know of no other director, besides Bob, in fact, who loved actors. To tell the truth, most directors don't."
I suggest that it must be difficult to spend months working on a movie with a director who does not respect actors.
"It is," he replies. "But I'm a total professional and I just get on with it. I enjoy it anyway and I won't let anybody stop me from enjoying it. I always have fun, regardless of the circumstances."
McDowell admits that he had an ulterior motive in accepting a role in the new movie, Bobby Jones - Stroke of Genius, which stars Jim Caviezel as the eponymous golfer.
"I was in St Andrews in Scotland and I played the old course, and then went on to Atlanta, Georgia for a month," he says. "I love my golf and, to be honest, that's the only reason I took the job. The director knows the truth. It's not a very large role, but I play a very nice man, this famous writer, O.B. Keeler, who wrote for the Atlanta Journal and was the mentor to Bobby Jones. Jim Caviezel is a good actor, lovely to work with. The strange thing is he doesn't play golf but he was hitting great shots all the time."
Throughout his career, McDowell has always been most interesting when playing unsympathetic characters, most recently in the new movie from Get Carter director Mike Hodges, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, in which he plays Boad, a brutal, epicene villain who rapes a young man played by Irish actor Jonathan Rhys-Meyers. When the victim commits suicide afterwards, his older brother (Clive Owen) sets out to exact revenge on Boad. Despite picking up some rave reviews at the Edinburgh Film Festival last year, the film has been passed over for cinema release here.
"Mike Hodges has come into his own once again with this film. I've known him for years, " McDowell says. "Jonathan is a wonderful young actor to work with, and the final confrontation I have with Clive is a magnificent scene. He's a good lad, Clive, and he's also a supporter of Liverpool, which I am, too. He amazed me because he had a beeper that went off every time Liverpool scored. When it didn't go off, we knew we were into bad news."
McDowell promptly reels off soccer statistics, noting with a smile how well the Irish team fared without Roy Keane.
"Isn't the Internet great?" he says. "And do you know, I see more live games in California than I would if I still lived in England? I get the whole package - the English Premiership, internationals, the lot - on satellite. I'm often up at six in the morning watching football and then I'm Tivoing at 4.30 in the afternoon. My wife thinks I'm crazy. She's American. She's pretty forgiving."
Another recent movie, a Russian production, Evilenko, made by Italian director David Grieco, presented McDowell with one of the most evil characters of his entire career. It is basedon the true story of a serial killer who murdered and ate 50 children and was known as the Monster of Rostov.
"Of course, I play the serial killer," he says. "It's a very strange film, but I think it's going to be amazing. It's one of the best performances I've ever done in my life. It's an incredible story."
He is also happy with "a little Irish movie" in which he stars, Red Roses and Petrol, directed by Tamar Simon Hoffs, who adapted it for the screen from Joe O'Connor's play. The executive producer is the director's daughter, former Bangles singer Susanna Hoffs. In this story of a dysfunctional Dublin family, McDowell heads a cast that includes Olivia Tracey, Susan Lynch and Max Beesley.
"I'm very proud of it," McDowell says. "It was made on a very, very modest budget, but it's such beautiful writing. Joe O'Connor is such a fine writer. I'm full of admiration for him and I would love to work on something else written by him.
"In the film, I play the father of the family, Enda Doyle, who dies, and then there is the wake and all these skeletons come tumbling out of cupboards. You see me in flashback on a video my character has left. He's a poet and it seems he had this wonderful loving marriage. Then it emerges that there was an illegitimate child, and there are other revelations to follow. It's amazing.
"It's set in Dublin, but unfortunately the Irish tax benefit was withdrawn at the last minute, so we shot it in Los Angeles, which is amazing, although it didn't really matter in the end. It's such a good story and we have a wonderful cast. It's like the little train that could. The Hoffs family basically paid for the film themselves and the actors did it for nearly nothing because we loved Joe O'Connor's words and Tammy wrote a really nice screenplay."
• The Company opens next Friday