THINKER, HELLRAISER, SOLDIER, SPY

From If... to A Clockwork Orange, Aces High to new film The Partisan (in which he plays an undercover agent), screen legend Malcolm McDowell has made a career out of portraying mavericks and oddballs. He talks type casting, war heroes and what he misses most about life in Britain

- By Alison James

IT IS A summer's evening in 1970 and young actor Malcolm McDowell has just enjoyed an early dinner with Stanley Kubrick at the acclaimed film director's home in the Hertfordshire countryside.

Kubrick has cast McDowell as the teenage delinquent gang-leader Alex DeLarge in his adaptation of the 1962 Antony Burgess novel, A Clockwork Orange.

For most of the evening the two men have been debating what kind of look DeLarge should sport in the movie.

Jeans and T-shirt, McDowell suggests? But Kubrick thinks that is neither strong nor subversive enough.

They need something truly memorable that will act as a visual clue to the kind of people DeLarge and his gang of Droogs are.

As the director is seeing the actor to his car, he spots Malcolm's cricket whites lying on the back seat.

"I remember him pointing to the cricket box groin protector and asking me what it was," remembers McDowell.

"I told him, explaining that the kit was there because I'd come straight to his house from playing cricket at my nephew's school.

"Immediately, Kubrick exclaimed that was it! DeLarge should wear the cricket box, but over rather than under cricket whites.

"I think he thought the result would be a mix of provocation, costume and a defiance of norms, with a nod to medieval codpieces."

He laughs. "It's insane to think one of the most iconic costumes in cinema history came about because I'd just happened to play in a school cricket match."

We may be chatting away like old friends, but before the call with Malcolm I had felt a tad apprehensive.

This was the man who had unsettled audiences as rebellious Mick Travis in the 1968 film If... And then positively terrified them - or me at any rate - playing the brilliantly brutal, stylishly savage, charming yet horrifying, cricket box and bowler hat wearing Alex DeLarge.