The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (278 page)

She appeared in
Last Night
(04), a short taken from a James Salter story—hardly seen. She was in
Aeon Flux
(05, Karyn Kusama);
North Country
(05, Nicki Caro);
Friends with Money
(06, Nicole Holofcener); very funny in
Burn After Reading
(08, Coen).

Roddy
(Roderick Andrew Anthony Jude)
McDowall
(1928–99), b. London, England
Roddy McDowall made many films as child and adult. He had several notable performances to his credit. But that is not quite the point. To try to say what is, let me offer a few words of criticism. McDowall published several photographic books, pictures of the stars (his friends). These were not the most penetrating pictures. They had an overall aura of fondness, of stargazing respect, enough to suggest that there was always a fan and a teenager in McDowall. But what went with that was an absolute trust: he was self-effacing, a great listener, a loyal friend, and that rare thing, a person Hollywood people could open their hearts to without any fear of betrayal. A more sharply intelligent or adult man might have lacked his patience with so many self-centered neurotics. McDowall knew a lot and never breathed an unfair or improper word. Which is not to say that he was anything less than immensely helpful to biographers or researchers who wanted to do honest work on Hollywood people. “What Roddy knew,” if it had ever become a title, would have sold millions and blown the city apart. But what he knew died with him. You could make a plausible argument that his death marked official closure on old Hollywood.

He began in English movies:
Scruffy
(38, Randall Faye);
Murder in the Family
(38, Albert Parker);
Hey! Hey! USA
(38, Marcel Varnel);
Poison Pen
(39, Paul L. Stein);
The Outsider
(39, Stein);
Dead Man’s Shoes
(39, Thomas Bentley);
Just William
(39, Graham Cutts);
Saloon Bar
(40, Walter Forde);
This England
(41, David MacDonald).

It was in 1940, because of the Blitz, that he was evacuated to America and a great run of films as boy and teenager:
Man Hunt
(41, Fritz Lang); hugely appealing in
How Green Was My Valley
(41, John Ford);
Confirm or Deny
(41, Archie Mayo);
Son of Fury
(42, John Cromwell);
The Pied Piper
(42, Irving Pichel); with a horse in
My Friend Flicka
(43, Harold Schuster); with dog, and Elizabeth Taylor—a close friend—in
Lassie Come Home
(43, Fred M. Wilcox);
The White Cliffs of Dover
(44, Clarence Brown); as the young Gregory Peck in
The Keys of the Kingdom
(44, John M. Stahl);
Thunderhead, Son of Flicka
(45, Louis King);
Molly and Me
(45, Lewis Seiler);
Holiday in Mexico
(46, George Sidney); good as Malcolm in
Macbeth
(48, Orson Welles); as David Balfour in
Kidnapped
(48, William Beaudine);
Tuna Clipper
(49, Beaudine), which he helped produce;
Black Midnight
(49, Budd Boetticher);
Killer Shark
(50, Boetticher);
The Steel Fist
(52, Wesley Barry).

Those last few films were adventure stories in which McDowall looked a little frail. So he went into theatre and television for several years and came back to film only with
The Subterraneans
(60, Ranald MacDougall);
Midnight Lace
(60, David Miller);
The Longest Day
(62, Ken Annakin); as Octavian in
Cleopatra
(63, Joseph L. Mankiewicz); as a murderer in
Shock Treatment
(64, Denis Sanders); Matthew in
The Greatest Story Ever Told
(65, George Stevens);
The Loved One
(65, Tony Richardson);
That Darn Cat!
(65, Robert Stevenson);
Inside Daisy Clover
(66, Robert Mulligan);
Lord Love a Duck
(66, George Axelrod);
The Defector
(66, Raoul Levy); as the butler in
The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin
(67, James Neilson);
The Cool Ones
(67, Gene Nelson);
It!
(67, Herbert J. Leder).

He then had the strange luck to fall into a kind of simian franchise:
Planet of the Apes
(68, Franklin J. Schaffner);
Escape from the Planet of…
(71, Don Taylor);
Conquest of the Planet of…
(72, J. Lee Thompson), and
Battle for the Planet of…
(73, Thompson).

Without the makeup, he did
5 Card Stud
(68, Henry Hathaway);
Hello Down There
(69, Jack Arnold);
Midas Run
(69, Alf Kjellin);
Angel, Angel, Down We Go
(69, Robert Thom). He then directed
Tam Lin
(71), an uneasy balance of horror and positivism that starred Ava Gardner and came from a Robert Burns poem.

He continued to act:
Pretty Maids All in a Row
(71, Roger Vadim);
Bedknobs and Broomsticks
(71, Stevenson);
The Poseidon Adventure
(72, Ronald Neame);
The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean
(72, John Huston);
The Legend of Hell House
(73, John Hough);
Arnold
(73, Greg Fenady);
Dirty Mary Crazy Larry
(74, Hough);
Funny Lady
(75, Herbert Ross);
Mean Johnny Barrows
(76, Fred Williamson);
Embryo
(76, Ralph Nelson);
Laserblast
(78, Mitchell Raye);
The Cat from Outer Space
(78, Norman Tokar);
Circle of Iron
(79, Robert Moore);
Scavenger Hunt
(79, Michael Schultz);
Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen
(81, Clive Donner);
Evil Under the Sun
(82, Guy Hamilton);
Class of 1984
(82, Mark L. Lester);
Fright Night
(85, Tom Holland);
Dead of Winter
(87, Arthur Penn);
Overboard
(87, Garry Marshall), on which he was also executive producer;
Fright Night: Part 2
(89, Tommy Lee Wallace);
Last Summer in the Hamptons
(95, Henry Jaglom);
The Grass Harp
(96, Charles Matthau);
It’s My Party
(96, Randal Kleiser);
Rudyard Kipling’s Second Jungle Book: Mowgli & Baloo
(97, Duncan McLachlan); a voice in
A Bug’s Life
(98, John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton).

Malcolm McDowell
(Taylor), b. Leeds, England, 1943
This is a strange, thwarted career if one recollects McDowell’s emotionally greedy look in the late sixties, to say nothing of his being one of the classic images of film history—the elaborately made-up eyes gazing up at the camera with all the loaded essence of charm, insolence, and trickery. I’m talking about Alex in
A Clockwork Orange
(71, Stanley Kubrick), the credit and the look that mark McDowell, and many of us, forever. He seemed then less an actor than a life force, but someone who could have made twins of Ariel and Caliban. The potential was enormous. But it has led in so many forlorn directions.

He worked in British theatre for a while and he had a scene cut from
Poor Cow
(67, Ken Loach) before he got the role of the rebel schoolboy in
If…
(68, Lindsay Anderson). He was in
Figures in a Landscape
(70, Joseph Losey); as a paraplegic in love (with Nanette Newman) in
The Raging Moon
(70, Bryan Forbes). Then, after
Clockwork Orange
, he was reunited with Lindsay Anderson for
O Lucky Man!
(73).

He was the lead in the swashbuckling
Royal Flash
(75, Richard Lester);
Voyage of the Damned
(76, Stuart Rosenberg);
Aces High
(76, Jack Gold); very overdone as a Nazi in
The Passage
(79, J. Lee Thompson); as H. G. Wells in
Time After Time
(79, Nicholas Meyer), playing with Mary Steenburgen, who would be his second wife (1980–90); the title role in
Caligula
(80, Tinto Brass); the feral brother in
Cat People
(82, Paul Schrader);
Britannia Hospital
(82, Anderson);
Cross Creek
(83, Martin Ritt), playing Max Perkins to Steenburgen’s Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings; Mick Jaggerish in
Get Crazy
(83, Allan Arkush); the villain in
Blue Thunder
(83, John Badham).

That’s when things seemed to fall apart: for TV in
Gulag
(85, Roger Young);
Sunset
(88, Blake Edwards);
Buy & Cell
(89, Robert Boris);
The Caller
(89, Arthur Allan Seidelman);
Class of 1999
(90, Mark L. Lester); the lead in
Schweitzer
(90, Gray Hofmeyr); very funny in
Disturbed
(91, Henry Winkler);
Moon 44
(91, Roland Emmerich); a rather humiliating cameo in
The Player
(91, Robert Altman); the awful
Chain of Desire
(92, Temístocles López);
Bopha!
(93, Morgan Freeman);
Milk Money
(94, Richard Benjamin);
Star Trek: Generations
(94, David Carson);
Tank Girl
(95, Rachel Talalay);
Hugo Pool
(97, Robert Downey Sr.);
The First 9/2 Weeks
(98, Alex Wright);
My Life So Far
(99, Hugh Hudson); on TV as Jack Cassidy in
The David Cassidy Story
(00, Jack Bender); the spirit of underworld malice in
Gangster No. 1
(00, Paul McGuigan).

He now works furiously, and is actually reestablishing himself as a kind of angry Terence Stamp:
Island of the Dead
(00, Tim Southam);
The Barber
(01, Michael Bafaro);
Firestalker 2: Rekindled
(02, Robert Iscove);
I Spy
(02, Betty Thomas);
I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead
(03, Mike Hodges); a cockney Balanchine in
The Company
(03, Altman);
Hidalgo
(04, Joe Johnston).

But the list gets grimmer:
Evilenko
(04, David Grieco);
Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius
(04, Rowdy Herrington);
In Good Company
(04, Paul Weitz); to Russia for
Mirror Wars: Reflection One
(05, Vasili Chiginsky);
The Curse of King Tut’s Tomb
(06, Russell Mulcahy);
The List
(07, Gary Wheeler);
Halloween
(07, Rob Zombie);
War and Peace
(07, Robert Dornhelm);
Red Roses and Petrol
(08, Tamar Simon Hoffs);
Doomsday
(08, Neil Marshall);
Coco Chanel
(08, Christian Duguay);
Halloween II
(09, Zombie).

Patrick McGoohan
(1928–2009), b. New York
Every now and then, over the years, one might see a picture in which Patrick McGoohan played a decent supporting part with the wit, relish, and astonishing baritone talent that were his to give—think of his rascal king in
Braveheart
(95, Mel Gibson), which is plainly in the honored tradition of Basil Rathbone and Claude Rains. So, one wondered, why didn’t McGoohan do this a couple of times a year? To which I should add that, in London, at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1959, McGoohan gave one of the greatest stage performances I have ever seen—as Ibsen’s
Brand
. Moreover, it was apparent, at the age of thirty or so, he was one of the most handsome, eloquent actors anywhere. Surely that is what Orson Welles had thought, a few years earlier, when he put McGoohan in his London production of
Moby Dick Rehearsed
. McGoohan told me himself that it had been one of the formative experiences of his life—and McGoohan, it is clear, did a lot to try to bring that project to life on film.

So was it the influence of Welles that made for self-destructiveness, or fatalism, or flat-out disbelief in most “important” things? But how can we thus dismiss a man who won two Emmys for supporting parts in
Columbo
, and who then apparently declined to take over that lead role because he and Peter Falk were such good friends? Rumor adds that McGoohan also turned down the roles of Gandalf and Dumbledore—but agreed to play in
Mary, Queen of Scots
(71, Charles Jarrott)—as Vanessa Redgrave’s brother, not one of her lovers!

Born in New York and dying in Santa Monica, he was raised largely in Ireland by his parents—and yet, after he had become an international celebrity on television in the 1960s, he retreated to Los Angeles to blend in with the minestrone of fame in that city. Or because he wanted to do nothing? And that really seems to have been the case, for after the impact of
The Prisoner
(which finished in 1969), he must have been in a position to launch further television series that might have been in the same class as that classic show. Were there such plans? We will need a biography to answer that, but don’t be amazed or dismayed if there are days and years of doing very little. It may just be that he was unlike other actors, There was a time when he worked hard, though—not only stage and television, but movies:
I Am a Camera
(55, Henry Cornelius);
Zarak
(56, Terence Young);
High Tide at Noon
(57, Philip Leacock); drawing attention as the heavy in
Hell Drivers
(57, Cy Endfield);
Nor the Moon by Night
(58, Ken Annakin); with Melina Mercouri in
The Gypsy and the Gentleman
(58, Joseph Losey); the Iago figure in
All Night Long
(62, Basil Dearden);
Life for Ruth
(62, Dearden);
The Quare Fellow
(62, Arthur Dreifuss).

This is when television took over with
Danger Man/Secret Agent
and
The Prisoner
(an increasingly cerebral or absurdist treatment of a kind of 007 figure—and McGoohan, it seemed, had been offered the role of James Bond). He was seriously involved as writer and director all the way along, but especially so on
The Prisoner
—it follows that he earned enough money in that decade (and from syndication) to be relaxed thereafter. But there were other films:
Ice Station Zebra
(68, John Sturges);
The Moonshine War
(70, Richard Quine);
Catch My Soul
(74), another version of
Othello
, which he directed himself;
Brass Target
(78, John Hough); the warden in
Escape from Alcatraz
(79, Clint Eastwood);
Kings and Desperate Men
(81, Alexis Kanner); as George Bernard Shaw in
The Best of Friends
(91, Alvin Rakoff);
The Phantom
(96, Simon Wincer); the judge in
A Time to Kill
(96, Joel Schumacher).