The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Star of West End stage, Broadway and silver screen Alec McCowen, 91
Alec McCowen, a British West End and Broadway star who had global success with a one-man show about the life of Jesus, has died. He was 91.
Born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, on May 26 1925, McCowen trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and performed for troops with the Entertainment National Service Association at the end of the Second World War.
He performed in London and New York through the 1950s before joining the Old Vic Company – alongside Dame Judi Dench and Dame Maggie Smith – and then the Royal Shakespeare Company.
He was a notable Mercutio in Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet at the Old Vic in 1960, and a witty Fool alongside Paul Scofield’s king in director Peter Brook’s King Lear at the RSC in 1962.
In 1969, he gained the first of three Tony Award nominations as a failed priest who fantasises he is the pope in Hadrian the Seventh.
He also played the psychiatrist who treats a teen accused of mutilating horses in Peter Shaffer’s Equus; in 1973, he was Henry Higgins opposite Diana Rigg’s Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion.
A few years later he memorised a large chunk of the New Testament and turned it into an acclaimed one-man performance of St Mark’s Gospel. A one-man show about the writer Rudyard Kipling also went to Broadway in the 1980s.
Other major roles included an elderly missionary who returns from Africa to unsettle his Irish family in Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa in 1990; a hostage in Lebanon in Frank McGuinness’s Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me in 1992: and Prospero in a Sam Mendes-directed Tempest for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1993.
McCowen once said he “I wanted to be an entertainer, not an actor, when I was young. I wanted to be Jack Benny”.
In films, McCowen was memorable as a detective in Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy and played gadget-master Q in the unofficial James Bond film Never Say Never Again.
McCowen, whose partner, Geoffrey Burridge, died in 1987, is survived by his sister and several nieces and nephews.