Alec McCowen obituary
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — A Night to Remember
Shadow2700 — 9 years ago(February 07, 2017 10:20 AM)
Alec McCowen obituary
Alec McCowen, who has died aged 91, was an actor of dazzling technical brilliance whose career encompassed the classics, new plays, two remarkable one-man shows and an abundance of TV and film, including lead roles in 1972 in Alfred Hitchcocks Frenzy and George Cukors Travels With My Aunt. I have always wanted to be an entertainer rather than an actor, McCowen once wrote, but the truth is he was both: he could immerse himself in a character but also hold an audience spellbound, as in his celebrated one-man performance of St Marks Gospel.
I got to know McCowen in his later years and he proved a wonderful raconteur. He delighted in telling a story about going to New York in the 1950s to appear in The Matchmaker, discovering he was debarred by American Equity rules and, moodily unemployed, finding himself one day sharing a backstage sofa with a highly intelligent woman who shyly revealed she too was an actor: her name was Marilyn Monroe. On a more caustic note, he claimed that Peter Brook, who directed him as the Fool in King Lear at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1962, told him just before curtain-up on the first night, Youre nine-tenths there. Not, said McCowen, the most helpful thing to tell an actor about to go on.
He was born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, and gave a vivid account of his early years in his book Young Gemini (1979). His father, Duncan, whom he grew to adore, was a pram-shop owner and natural exhibitionist with a rare capacity to fart God Save the King at the dinner table. Even in the Kentish bourgeoisie, the strain of performance seemed to run in the family: McCowens mother, Mary (nee Walkden), was a teenage soubrette and his paternal grandfather one of the areas leading Christian evangelists. Acting, however, was still regarded with suspicion and McCowen, although a passionate cinema-goer, learned to disguise his ambition by posing as an average schoolboy at the Skinners school.
In 1941 he broke free by gaining a place at Rada in London. After a summer vacation appearance in Paddy the Next Best Thing in Macclesfield, he cut short his studies and over the next few years combined appearances in weekly rep with tours to India and Burma as well as a season in Newfoundland. It was during the latter that he had a life-changing trip to New York where, during the 1948 season, he saw Marlon Brando on stage in A Streetcar Named Desire. After the cold, efficient naturalism of London theatre, McCowen later wrote, this acting was warm, rich and human and had a depth and subtlety I had never seen before.
Newly energised, McCowen returned to London, where he made his West End debut in 1950 and built up an enviable portfolio. I first became aware of him at the Old Vic in 1960 where he played Mercutio in Franco Zeffirellis production of Romeo and Juliet. I have never forgotten his electrifying death, where, joking to the last and blithely unaware that he has received a mortal thrust, he suddenly slid down the side of a pillar.
He was equally remarkable as the Fool in Brooks 1962 King Lear, sitting on a bench alongside Paul Scofield, in the title role, as if anxiously gauging how close the king was to madness. He accompanied this with a pin-sharp performance as the Antipholus of Syracuse in the same year in The Comedy of Errors, Ian Richardson his twin, and earned even more acclaim at Hampstead Theatre in John Bowens dystopian drama After the Rain (1966).
In that McCowen played a bespectacled fanatic who believes he is God. Oddly enough, in his next play, Hadrian the Seventh (1967), he played a similar hermetic fantasist who imagines he is pope. It was this performance, first at Birmingham Rep and then, for two years, at the Mermaid, that turned McCowen from an admired actor into a star. What he caught brilliantly was the way the hero leapfrogged from indigent obscurity to the Chair of St Peter, and one particular image of McCowen, raffishly smoking a cigarette while papally enthroned, is enshrined in the memory. The play won him the first of many Evening Standard awards and was in 1969 as big a hit on Broadway as in London.
After that, all doors opened for McCowen. In 1970 he appeared in Christopher Hamptons hit play The Philanthropist, which moved from the Royal Court to the West End and Broadway and in which he memorably declared: My trouble is that I am a man of no convictions at least I think I am.
Having played Hamptons compulsively amiable hero, McCowen then appeared as Alceste in Tony Harrisons version of Molires The Misanthrope for the National Theatre in 1973. He was partnered in that by Diana Rigg and, after McCowen had created the role of the psychiatrist Dysart in Peter Shaffers Equus, the two made an equally dazzling team in John Dexters West End revival of Pygmalion the following year: McCowens Higgins was a brilliant study of a testy, childlike neurotic exultantly crying that making life means making trouble.
McCowens career, however, took a new turn in 1978 when he devised and di