Patrick McGoohan, who died this past week at the age of 80, was cooler than the ice in your lemonade. Born in Astoria, New York but raised in Ireland and England, the young McGoohan worked a string of odd jobs before landing at Sheffield Repertory Theatre as stage manager, where he found his true vocation when he was pressed into service to fill in on-stage for an ailing actor. With his striking presence, rounded diction and rapid-fire delivery, he quickly established a name for himself on the English stage, especially after Orson Welles cast him as Starbuck in Welles's celebrated London production based on Moby Dick. (That and a few of McGoohan's other stage performances, including his acclaimed turn in the title role of Ibsen's Brand, were later recorded for TV.) McGoohan was something of a dabbler in movies, where his pleased-pussycat manner and what the critic Peter Rainer once called "perhaps the most villainous enunciation in the history of acting" made him a natural choice for sinister roles. His most notable movie credits included Ice Station Zebra (1968), The Moonshine War (1970), Mary, Queen of Scots (1971), Escape from Alcatraz (1979), Scanners (1980), and Silver Streak (1976), where he established his villainous bona fides by calling Richard Pryor a "nigger", in response to which Pryor slapped the taste out of his mouth. After a long absence from the big screen, he had a brief comeback in the mid-90s when Mel Gibson case him in Braveheart (1995) as the vile English king who made no effort to conceal the fact that he did not love his dead gay son. McGoohan followed that up with appearances in The Phantom (1996), as Billy Zane's dad, and the John Grisham potboiler A Time to Kill (1996), where he played a Southern judge with the unreassuring name of Omar Noose. His last movie credit was in 2002, when he did a voice for the animated feature Treasure Planet.
That's the movie stuff covered, because this is a movie site. Of course, it was in television that McGoohan really achieved pop culture immortality. He took his first baby steps towards that goal in 1960 with the first season of the half-hour spy series Danger Man.
Read More...
