Alec McCowen
Alexander " Alec " McCowen Duncan ( born May 26, 1925 in Tunbridge Wells, England ) is a British theater and film actor.
Life
McCowen grew up as the son of the shop owner Duncan McCowen and the dancer Mary McCowen, born in Walkden, in southeast England Tunbridge Wells and attended the local Skinners ' School. He took acting classes at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London .. With the role of Mickey in the play Paddy, the Next Best Thing at Repertory Theatre in Macclesfield McCorwen debuted in 1942 as a theater actor.
In the following years McCowen embodied especially classical roles, including in several Shakespeare productions. With Love in a Mist 1945 he went on tour in India and Burma. In 1950 he had his first gigs at London's Arts Theatre, a year later made his Broadway debut in the ensemble of a double production of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra at the Ziegfeld Theatre.
In the war film The Great Atlantic played McCorwen 1953 his first screen role. He never never worked for decades in several film productions, including Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy and Sean Connery's last James Bond film, Say, and several television series including, but remained primarily a theater actor. His most recent screen role came in 2002 in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York.
Until the 1990s McCorwen played mainly on London's theaters. At the Old Vic Theatre he played around 1960 in addition to several smaller roles Richard II in the same drama and Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, as well as Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream. He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, which toured with King Lear through Europe, the Soviet Union and the United States.
McCorwen writes sideline books about acting. Among the titles Young Gemini and Double Bill, he published in 1979 and 1980 his two-part autobiography.
Awards
McCowen Award for Best Actor three times with the Evening Standard Theatre Award 1968 for Hadrian VII, 1973 for The Misanthrope ( The Misanthrope ), and in 1982 for The Portage to San Cristobal of AH