Biography

Malcolm McDowell has created a gallery of iconic characters since catapulting to the screen as Mick Travis, the rebellious upperclassman in Lindsay Anderson's prize-winning sensation, If... His place in movie history was subsequently secured when he played the gleefully amoral Alex in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange; reprised the role of Mick Travis in Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man!; and appeared as the romantically inquisitive H.G. Wells in Time After Time. Those legendary roles are among the ones that have endured with legions of filmgoers while new fans have been won over by his tyrannical Soran (the destroyer of Capt. Kirk) in Star Trek: Generations; his Machiavellian Mr. Roarke in Fantasy Island, and his comically pompous professor Steve Pynchon in the CBS television series, Pearl, starring opposite Rhea Perlman. Mr. McDowell's distinctive motion picture characterizations include roles in Richard Lester's Royal Flash, Paul Schrader's Cat People, Rachel Talalay's Tank Girl, Joseph Losey's Figures in a Landscape, Bryan Forbes's The Raging Moon, Blake Edwards's Sunset, Caligula, Martin Ritt's Cross Creek; Robert Altman's The Player and The Company; and his final incarnation as Mick Travis in Britannia Hospital. Mr. McDowell's other films include Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius, In Good Company, I Spy,  Robert Downey Sr.'s Hugo Pool, and Just Visiting, Mr. Magoo, My Life So Far, Blue Thunder, Doomsday, Halloween I & II, and the voice of villain Dr. Calico in Disney’s Bolt. In 2011, Mr. McDowell was seen in the Academy Award-winning silent film, The Artist.  Other recent films include Amy Heckerling’s Vamps and Silent Hill Revelation: 3D. For his motion picture work, the American Cinemateque honored him with a retrospective in June 2001, highlighted by showings of two major works: Gangster No. 1 and Russian director Karen Chakhnazarov's Assassin of the Tsar.

On television, McDowell had a recurring role as Terence on the HBO series Entourage, in addition to appearing on Heroes, CSI: Miami, and The Mentalist. He played Stanton Infeld on TNT’s Franklin & Bash for four seasons. His latest role is in Amazon’s new series Mozart in the Jungle.

(January 2015)