Malcolm McDowell: ‘Clockwork Orange’ Star Crashes Showbiz
Like the film’s central character, McDowell himself was once a coffee salesman. And a good one. He knew how to “chat them up.” A firm but deferential handshake and a gauche, respectful smile for the unctuous manager of a four-star hotel. Risque patter and a leer for the blousy canteen supervisor. The public relations woman at the coffee company once told him, “Malcolm, you’ll either end up a duke or a dustman.” He was the sort who could attend a diplomatic reception with holes in his socks and get away with it. Always what you would call ambitious; pushy perhaps, but a charmer as well. Even now it shows in his walk—long, bouncy strides with the rolling shoulders of a sailor.
The job was OK, plenty of time on his own, driving around the countryside making calls. Driving was the best part. McDowell grew up close to the car-racing track near Aintree, on the outskirts of Liverpool, and cars have always been a fascination. The Aintree scene was strong stuff in those days, with an aging Fangio dueling with the up-and-coming Stirling Moss. After McDowell finished his first television series, he pooled his savings in a track-prepared sports car. The drag was his partner, who had put up the bigger bankroll and wasn’t keen on blowing his investment on one glorious if vain race. McDowell persuaded him to enter the Nuremburg 24-hour race. They never finished, the car limping off a clanking mass of blown valves and strained pistons, to be sold for spares, but it was great while it lasted. McDowell still remembers the race. Taking a corner one time and slipping through like a vaselined bee, then being a foot out of line and bucking and twitching to roar through. A peek in the mirror and a missed heartbeat as a blurred shape, another car, tags your tail.
These days he drives a BMW saloon, no longer the boy racer but still handling the wheel with a racer’s flair, mouthing roadsigns as they flash by. “Grit for icy roads,” he would announce rolling the words.
The Liverpool accent only shows ’round the edges now, smoothed out by a public school education. He was sent there by his father who paid the fees from his earnings as a publican. The kids used to piss-take his scouse accent. He learned how to get along: Trust people only after they’ve proven themselves.
His first job was in Liverpool as a junior exec in the time and motions department of a mail order company. The days spent with a clipboard and stopwatch have left their mark, McDowell says, in the way he organizes the mundane details of life. He’ll never make two trips while clearing up a table when careful stacking will save one. “Conservation of energy, knowing when to rest, is very important. It’s no good being alight all the time. It’s that minute in front of the camera that counts. Going for the biggie. But you can’t keep it up the whole time.”
The day before, George Segal was introduced to him over a lunch table. Segal leaned across, shook hands. “Hey, Malcolm,” he said. “I hear you’ve got a great film. Tell me, though….” Segal’s voice was full of concern, “what do you do between films? Don’t you just hate it?”
“Love it. Love every minute. Get up at 10, potter around the garden, have some tea. That’s the life, hey?”
“Americans,” McDowell said later. “They hate not to be working and so they hate turning down films. I reckon since Clockwork I’ve turned down about a million dollar’s worth of filming. I won’t tell which films, that wouldn’t be fair, but between them they’ve collected eight Academy Awards. That’s the way it goes, but I felt that none of them were right for me. You have got to be choosy. I mean it’s your face on the screen. You own it. It’s no use saying afterwards, ‘The director made me do this, made me do that.’ Nobody need make you do anything you don’t want … oh boy, I soon learned what all that was about. You should see my billing contract now, it’s seven pages long. That may seem ridiculous, but I’m serious about this business, even though I’ll send it up most of the time.”