When Malcolm McDowell was 28, he was chosen to play the part of 'nadsat' leader Alex in Stanley Kubrick's film version of 'A Clockwork Orange'. The film rightly secured his reputation as one of Britain's best screen actors and assured 'A Clockwork Orange' an honoured place in cinema history. In Santa Monica, out of reach of the RSC, he welcomed their forthcoming stage version of the novel.

"It's good that Burgess' book is done in as many versions as possible and I'm glad for him because I never thought that when we did the film originally that he got enough out of it. It was always a Stanley Kubrick movie and his original creation was sort of forgotten about. It's a good piece for the stage, theatrically written, and I understand they're doing it with music, which is very interesting. It has all the elements that would make a good musical, a kind of West Side Story of the '90s. In fact originally, before Kubrick had the movie, the Rolling Stones had it, Mick Jagger was going to play Alex and the Stones were going to be the Droogs. I'm glad they didn't get it off the ground because it allowed me the opportunity to do it." Jagger - a candidate for aversion therapy? The equipment couldn't take it.

In the USA the movie runs all the time on cable and it's a cult picture for college kids. So McDowell is understandably unsympathetic about Kubrick's British ban and clearly skeptical about the death threats the director received after the film's first British showing back in 1972.

"Oh come on - it's true it's scarey, but come on, honestly! Stanley said that the IRA tried to bomb him. I don't think anybody's going to be after Stanley, the film's as tame as can be. It's still brilliant, but to say it would influence anybody is a joke. There are far more violent films and if Stanley's scared about being blamed for all the muggings in Britain forget it. I don't think anyone would blame him at all.

McDowell's experiences of Kubrick are sufficiently unusual to allow him to question the maestro's reasons. After 'lf . .' and during Losey's 'Figures in a Landscape' McDowell was given a copy of 'A Clockwork Orange' by Kubrick. On the third reading he got into it.

"So I called him up and I said " Look Stanley, I'd like to meet with you, can you come by my house?" I didn't know that he never leaves Borehamwood, I hadn't got a clue youaranoid about any form of travel or leaving the house or anything. Anyway he eventually arrived and I thought "My God! He's brought an escort! He's in a white Landrover with a car in front of him and a car behind, it's ludicrous." In he came and a bemused McDowell then waited patiently for 20 minutes for the great man to use the toilet from which be could not escape. 'I heard this muffled banging, he was beginning to panic. Stanley is a brilliant man but be is a peculiar fellow in many ways.2

McDowell says the only adverse reaction he got from the film was being typecast by Hollywood. But it's not all one-sided. He seems to take the savagery of Alex and his Droogs too lightly, more lightly than the audience, and possibly the director, are able to. One reason is the way McDowell approached the part.

"It's very simple. Alex's character, as written, enjoyed violence and raping. He was at his most euphoric. That is why in the film I started to sing "Singing in the Rain" spontaneously, because for the actor the emotion is euphoria."

"It just means that my actions are rather strange, they don't really fit euphoria. I always felt the style of the film was high, it was real but not realistic. there was no blood and all that, so to me it was extremely funny. It was hard not to laugh and I went to play for the comedy. I know it's very black. I suppose when you see it the first time it's too overwhelming to get the humour but if you watch it a few times you see that it is actually very funny. There's one scene in there I know which is purely my interpretation of Eric Morecambe."

"Forget about the gangs and the peripheral violence. What it was really about was the freedom of the right to choose. I think the dichotomy of the film is that you have this immoral character of Alex and, by a matter of manipulation through the performance (and I only speak from my own point of view, not from Stanley's), you actually have sympathy for him because he has redeeming features, that he is a lover of Beethoven, that he is a sympathetic character. And that when the government makes him an automaton you feel it would be better if he was a free man to choose what he wanted to do, even though it may be a violent choice. And that's what is so difficult about the film and that's why it's so violent."

McDowell has always been a very vigorous defender of personal freedom. And though he may not quite say it, the authority of the thug is less irksome to him than the authority of the establishment. Let alone the British establishment. At 45, he has the seasoned diplomacy of a star, but the Northern disregard for a nation that belongs to people in the South still shows through.

"I'm neither pro nor anti-British. I think the British are taught to he very patriotic, through the Royal Family and the school system_.thank God I've dropped all that. I enjoy coming to England but I've got very mixed feelings about it."

It's no surprise that his directorial debut, to be cast from England and shot in Zimbabwe, is an anti-apartheid story. Money has yet to be found but there is a sense of moving on.

"I've just come off a flood of movies, another just starting here in Hollywood. Then I hope to direct this story which I've been wanting to do for ten years. Obviously it's something that I believe in and so I can go in and sell it without doing a performance. And if I'm going to make a film, put my name on it as the author. It has to be something I really believe in, especially the first one."

Take away the violence and Alex De Large and Malcolm McDowell are not so far apart. As Alex tells us in Burgess' book:

"Badness is of the self_and they of the Government and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self And is not our modem history, my brothers, the story of brave malenky selves fighting these big machines? I am serious with you brothers over this. But what I do, I do because I like to do."

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