From Variety: London's laudable Lawson. Author/s: Matt Wolf Issue: March 8, 1999 American filmgoers may remember Denis Lawson as the Scot of many parts (well, at least three or four) in Bill Forsyth's "Local Hero" some 16 years ago. Now 51, the actor has reinvented himself as a London stage director and given his celebrated nephew, Ewan McGregor, a fresh medium in the process. In November, Lawson made his theater directing debut on the London fringe, with a sellout production of David Halliwell's 1965 ode to anarchy, "Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs," with McGregor in an equally notable London theater debut. Scalpers were quickly charging extortionate prices. The play has since transferred to the Comedy Theater in the West End for a limited run through March 13. In other hands, "Little Malcolm" could seem impossibly stagy and dated. But with Lawson in the directorial hot seat, the revival is both funny and mournful: a requiem for a vanished energy that is only one or two steps short of being rampantly egomaniacal, even at times fascistic. "I think my main aim when I started to rehearse was to have a very, very good time," says Lawson during a rehearsal break for the West End transfer, "to have an enjoyable experience and put that joy in front of an audience." But with his nephew as star, couldn't the event have devolved into too cozy a family affair? "Ewan doesn't work in that way. He's a very generous actor who very much puts himself on a par with the other actors. He has a great ability to treat everyone he meets in exactly the same way, no matter who they are." Lawson's older sister is McGregor's mother, and the entire family hails from the town of Crieff in Perthshire, even if nowadays Lawson and McGregor both live within walking distance of London's Hampstead Heath. The synchronicity doesn't stop there. Lawson played Wedge, one of the rebel pilots ("I flew around and blew things up"), in the first three "Star Wars" movies, while McGregor shares the screen with numerous light sabers as the young Obi-Wan Kenobi in the forthcoming "Star Wars" prequels. "We had a chat about it," Lawson says, remembering when McGregor was offered the role, "since as a job, it's not really much more than acting by numbers." Still, the uncle maintains of his nephew, "it's a very good move for him because he's so well-established in other work. There are no worries of Ewan doing `Star Wars' and then disappearing." Lawson, for his part, sounds as if he's been almost too busy, filming his role as Capt. Foster in TV's forthcoming A&E co-production "Hornblower" ("we were shooting at sea for 12 hours; I was sick for most of the time"), and finishing a 17 1/2 minute short film, which he adapted from a Chekhov short story and directed, called "The Bass Player." Laughs Lawson: "A lot of my family are in it." The extended clan has clearly been good to Lawson, though on the basis of "Little Malcolm," so has he to them.