Malcolm in middle age

Like most actors, Malcolm McDowell concluded long ago that performing was the show-off 's way of searching for love. In his case the pursuit has been nothing if not perverse. In Lindsay Anderson's 1968 movie If (now reissued by the British Film Institute), he played Mick Travis, leader of a group of sixth-form rebels who machine-gun their headmaster on speech day. Three years later he was the bowler-hatted thug, Alex, in A Clockwork Orange, whose balletic "ultra-violence" so shocked Britain that the movie was banned - by its own director. A hundred mostly terrible movies on, in which he has almost always played the villain, he has reached a further conclusion. "The meaner, more horrible I am, the more people seem to like it."

Being a mean, horrible little boy, repeatedly running away from home from the age of three, was, in a sense, his first salvation. His parents, pub landlords in Lincolnshire and then Liverpool, tried to reform him by sending him to Cannock House, a public school in Kent. It was here that he honed his excellence at drama. The only personal echo If provided was when Travis was beaten for having sex with a waitress. At 16, McDowell got eight whacks of the headmaster's slipper for escaping one night just to hold hands with a girl.

On location with If, McDowell met his first wife, but the person he profoundly fell in love with was its director. "Lindsay Anderson was a mixture of father, mentor, brother. We had the most awful rows. Oh Christ, yes. I mean thundering, screaming rows, but we always made up."

About Stanley Kubrick, who made A Clockwork Orange, McDowell speaks less warmly. "Stanley was a very great man, a great intellect, brilliantly clever and made wonderful films, but Lindsay was a poet."

There were rumours that Kubrick's treatment of McDowell verged on sadism. During the brainwashing scenes, his eyes were pinned open for lengthy periods. For an interrogation scene, he was spat on again and again (by Steven Berkoff) until the phlegm perched on his nose, just so.

"I don't think he was a sadist. I just think he was so driven that he really never considered the human element. If you got injured along the way, then, 'Oh dear, very sorry, but would you mind doing just one more shot?'"

Kubrick withdrew A Clockwork Orange after his family was threatened amid growing public hysteria. A judge suggested that a youth who beat a tramp to death had been inspired by Alex. "I remember driving around in Hammersmith and

seeing half-a-dozen kids in white with the cod pieces and the bowlers and the eyelashes. I went, 'Wow, people are really taking it seriously.' I was horrified."

The early Seventies was a period of paranoia about the power of the screen. "Yes, I think it was way over-stated. I think that television does way more damage because it's a gradual pounding night after night."

He's made his contribution to that: TV trash from Biker Mice from Mars to his latest, Stephen King's Firestarter: Rekindled. "I've worked," he says in a "so-sue-me" sort of way. "I like playing ... well ... I'm only offered evil men, so I've no choice. I love making them sympathetic."