Malcolm McDowell: ‘I had a lot of fun as a young bachelor in London – but I never did anything illegal’

I was a movie star when I was very young,” says Malcolm McDowell, leaning forward in his chair. “I had a lot of fun as a young bachelor in London. So absolutely I was taking advantage of that situation, but I didn’t rape anybody! I never did anything illegal.”

That the r-word comes up unbidden probably relates to the fact that historical abuse allegations are sadly now part of the Hollywood landscape. McDowell knew both Roman Polanski and Harvey Weinstein, of which more later, and first came to fame during a time of unprecedented sexual freedom. Back then, McDowell was the physical embodiment of a glamorous, new, radical age of British film: the British new wave, as it has since become known. I meet him in a London hotel, where he is promoting his new movie, She Will, which showed at the London Film Festival. But inevitably our conversation turns to his back catalogue, and to one still memorable moment.

It is one of the most chilling images in the history of British film. There in the opening frames of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange is the 27-year-old McDowell as the “ultraviolent” thug Alex, dressed, as he will tell the viewer, “in the height of fashion” – a white dress shirt, white dress trousers, thick braces, black derby hat and black boots, with vivid eye make-up, holding a walking cane. His startlingly handsome face has a menacing, yet disturbingly alluring, grin.

Fifty years on, I am unsurprisingly faced with a very different Malcolm McDowell. Now 78, the man we still think of as a quintessentially British actor speaks with a distinct California twang after decades of living there. He sports silvery facial hair and a receding hairline, but the blue eyes still twinkle and, just occasionally, that same mischievous grin appears and one is transported back to when the mischief became malevolence.

McDowell was already a new-wave star by the time he appeared in A Clockwork Orange in 1971. His breakthrough role came as a public schoolboy leading an armed insurrection at a British boarding school in Lindsay Anderson’s if.... (1968). This was the performance that attracted the attention of Kubrick. McDowell would go on to play the same character, Mick Travis, in Anderson’s O Lucky Man! (1973) and Britannia Hospital, which completed the trilogy, in 1982.

It could all, of course, have been very different. McDowell tells me that around the time that Kubrick got the rights to Anthony Burgess’s novel, there was a plan afoot by others to have The Rolling Stones play the vicious “droogs”, with Mick Jagger as Alex. I’d say it all worked out for the best.

His latest role is in She Will, the first feature by Franco-British multimedia artist Charlotte Colbert. It is a dark and often fantastical feminist drama, with McDowell playing Eric Hathbourne, a film director who once, it is implied, abused the 13-year-old star of one of his movies. Decades later, she is bent on revenge. “You’re a sick woman,” he says to the actor – played by Alice Krige – when she finally confronts him. “No one is better placed to know why,” she retorts. Hathbourne himself tells a chat show: “It was a completely different era. We had a special bond.”

It was in part the subject matter – abuse by a powerful movie mogul – that attracted him to being in the film. For McDowell, it is all uncomfortably close to home, because of his past acquaintance with both Polanski, who was charged with raping a minor, and Weinstein, who was convicted of serial abuses. “I liked what the film had to say about the idea of abuse and the grooming that went on. I thought of people like Polanski. I knew him, and actually I liked him.”

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I ask him if he’d ever witnessed the sort of abuse and harassment that we now know was prevalent in the industry. “Of course,” he responds, “I did three films with Harvey [Weinstein]. With the character I’m playing, there is some doubt over whether he crossed the line. With Harvey, it really was abuse. I witnessed him being with young women in Cannes and they knew what was expected of them.”

We talk about if...., which sent shock waves through the public school system at the time. As I mention it, McDowell leans across the table and makes a stabbing motion towards his stomach: “It was a dagger in their guts,” he says.

O Lucky Man! – a very English road film about a coffee salesman – sprang from an idea that McDowell wrote for Anderson about his own pre-acting job: “Yes,” he recalls, “I wrote the synopsis of a guy on the make,” adding laconically of his own experience, “I was a coffee salesman in Yorkshire, where they only drink tea.”

He remains intrigued by Anderson, the golden boy of the British new wave, and by the late director’s radicalism. “I said to him, ‘Lindsay, you’re not Conservative, you’re not Labour. What are you?’ He said: ‘I’m an anarchist. I want to rip it all up!’ And he would make me go on all these marches. He’d say, ‘It’s Aldermaston [nuclear disarmament march] tomorrow.’ I’d say ‘Do I have to?’ He’d say ‘YES!’”

Anderson could certainly be contrary. McDowell waged a long campaign before the shooting of O Lucky Man! for Anderson to cast the young Helen Mirren opposite him. “I gave Helen the script to read, and she loved it. So I said to Lindsay, ‘You have to cast her, it’s a no-brainer.’ It took a long time for him to agree; he mentioned Vanessa Redgrave, then he auditioned other actresses. Eventually he said to me, ‘Ok, then. But you can tell her.’”

Many are the stories that this thoughtful and deliciously gossipy man has in his locker. There was the time after A Clockwork Orange, in which he had committed his worst atrocity while crooning “Singin’ in the Rain”, that he came across the song’s creator in Hollywood.

“I was asked if I would like to meet Gene Kelly, and I said I would be honoured to say hello. He looked at me like I’d come out from under a rock and then walked off. It was 40 years later that I told this story at an Academy dinner, and Kelly’s widow came up to me afterwards and said: ‘It wasn’t you Gene was pissed with. He was pissed with Stanley.’ Stanley hadn’t paid him.”

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McDowell was a pioneer, not just in the radicalism of British cinema of the late Sixties and early Seventies, but of male nudity on screen. “In fact, I was the first actor to do a nude scene with a woman. It was in if.... Christine Noonan and I rolled around on a café floor off the A3. I suggested it to her. I sidled up to her and asked if she would do it. And she said [he puts on a cockney accent], ‘Yeah, alright.’”

McDowell’s memorable performances stretch over the decades, but yes, there have been turkeys too. I mention the 1979 film Caligula, which was produced by Bob Guccione, the owner of pornographic magazine Penthouse. McDowell lets out an involuntary laugh. “It was a mess, really. But look, I was called up by Gore Vidal [who wrote the original screenplay], one of the best writers America had, so it was a no-brainer for me. Then I discovered that a pornographer was the producer…”

And then there was 1993’s so-called thriller Night Train to Venice, which his co-star Hugh Grant once described as “the greatest stinker of all time”, explaining that it was “directed by an insane German, with me and Raquel Welch’s daughter starring [in it]”. A louder laugh from McDowell this time. “That was shocking! Hugh turned up with a Scottish accent, a pipe and a limp. But he’s a great actor. Did you see his Jeremy Thorpe?” (Incidentally, Night Train’s director Carlo U Quinterio was actually Italian; Tahnee Welch would go on to play Viva in I Shot Andy Warhol.)

TV series in America account for much of McDowell’s professional work these days, but I bring him back to A Clockwork Orange. He likes to talk about the look of the film and how it influenced so many – including Madonna and Jean Paul Gaultier – though he agrees that it could never be made now with its graphic, if stylised, violence. He remains proud and triumphantly upbeat about the film, but I bring him down slightly when I remind him that only one name was above the title and it wasn’t his. “Contractually, I had first billing. But when I saw the film, there was Stanley’s name above the title.” Is that a moment of what would be very untypical bitterness? It seems not, for he is quick to add: “It was an amazing film.”

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McDowell chats about how London has changed since his day. “It’s so nice to be back. But it’s so different now. There’s masses and masses of money. When I was here in the Sixties and Seventies there was still a post-war malaise.”

His return to the UK is a brief one. His home, and his third wife – the painter and photographer Kelley Kuhr – along with his five children and three grandchildren, are all in Santa Barbara, and his youngest child is only 12. But he is keen to stress that he does not live in Hollywood. Any arthouse credentials remain firmly intact. “I’m not part of the Hollywood scene,” he says. “Actually, Hollywood people still think I live in England.” His hint of disaffection with Hollywood is part of a wider detachment from the current movie industry. “They are not making the kind of movies I liked and was in. How many Marvel movies do you want to see?”

I suggest there is one thing about Britain he must miss: his beloved Liverpool FC. When he was a boy, his family moved from Yorkshire to Liverpool, and young Malcolm was on the terraces at Anfield for all the home games.

“I don’t miss it at all,” he grins, “because I see every game. They’re all shown live in California. Once I got so excited I screamed out loud, and my neighbours knocked on my door they were so worried. And I can tell you the houses aren’t exactly close together. It then turned out they know Liverpool’s American owners, and we’re all coming back to watch Liverpool vs Spurs later in the season. I will be bringing my 12-year-old.”

That should be a wonderful moment for him. Real horrorshow, as Alex would have said.

‘She Will’ will be released next year