Allan Bryce chats with Malcolm McDowell. The Infinity Ed was a bit awed by Malcolm’s star status, but the legendary actor turned out to be a lovely fellah and so the interview went like clockwork...

Malcolm McDowell as Mick Travis in O Lucky Man! a 1973 British comedy-drama fantasy film directed by Lindsay Anderson, Malcolm again as Mick Travis, in If... (1967). A satire of English public school life, the film follows a group of pupils who stage a savage insurrection at a boys’ boarding school

First of all I’d like to offer up my sincere thanks to Gill and Wendy, organisers of the brilliant Sheffield HorrorConUK held in Sheffield on May 21-22nd. One of their star guests was Malcolm McDowell and on the eve of the event they arranged for me to have a chat with him. Malcolm has always been one of my favourite actors, right back from when I first saw him on screen in Lindsay Anderson’s If... (1968). It was such a delight to discover that Malcolm is a really nice guy too, so here’s our chat, hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Great to meet you, Malcolm. I’ve loved your work forever, and we have one of your old acting buddies booked for our own more modest London DarkFest later in the year, the great David Warner, who starred opposite you in Time After Time (1979), a really good film.

Oh what a lovely man David is. A great actor, and I think very under-appreciated considering the amount of talent he has. He is magnificent in Time After Time of course, but he always is. You know, a lot of the great performances he gave were actually on the stage, where he was completely charismatic and extraordinary. His Hamlet is well known and actually I was in that as well. He’s a really nice guy, we’ve been friends since 1965.

Back in the day lots of interviews stressed that you were from a working class background, and that you didn’t have any knowledge of the kind of posh public school that was the backdrop of your breakthrough role in If... Is that true?

Well no, actually (laughs). I went to a boarding school that was run on the public school system. It was in Eltham in South East London and then moved to Chelsfield in Kent. It was called Cannock House School. I did tell Lindsay Anderson I went to a public school and he said, “Yes, Malcolm, but yours was rather minor.”

So is it correct to say you started your career on stage with the RSC?

No, the RSC came a bit later. I started out in repertory theatre in Shanklin on the Isle of Wight. Then with the same company - it was called the Barry O’Brian Company -Iwent to Torquay for the Winter season. Then I wrote to the Royal Shakespeare Company and got an audition and got in.

I note that before you became a big screen success you appeared in some classic TV shows like Emergency Ward 10 and Dixon of Dock Green.