The Times Obituary
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/commen ... s/article5 518785.ece
Patrick McGoohan came to the peak of his fame in the cult television series The Prisoner which he devised, wrote and starred in. It is still repeated on TV networks across the world after more than 40 years.
It was in 1966 when the stubborn, fiery-tempered actor first mooted his concept of an agent-scientist, known simply as Number Six, who decides to resign and is held captive week after week in a model village by polite gentlemen in boaters and blazers trying to prise from him vital space secrets. At the time McGoohan was the highest paid TV actor in Britain. He had been earning £2,000 a week for his other highly successful spy series Danger Man, which at its peak played in 61 countries, making much money for Lew Grade and his company Associated Television.
Danger Man, in which McGoohan played the hero John Drake, was renowned for its clean-cut image; no sex and no undue violence, at the star’s insistence. In spite of the show’s purity compared with rivals like The Saint, it remained high in the American charts for years. But finally the TV moguls there became nervous and wanted Drake to loosen up and seduce a woman or two. So McGoohan resigned and took The Prisoner to Grade, who swallowed hard at the enormous budget for its day of £75,000 an episode. But Grade decided to indulge his forceful moneymaker and allowed him to go ahead.
McGoohan wrote most of the scripts and took his cameras and crew to the village of Portmeirion in North Wales. He began shooting his puzzling blend of cliff-hanging thriller and political allegory — 17 episodes in all.
When they were screened, audiences, familiar with a diet of simple, easily understood plots and characters in format thrillers like The Avengers, were left baffled. McGoohan’s brainchild, on which he staked his reputation, was no immediate hit but it was not a flop either, building to a then respectable audience of 4,300,000 and peaking at six million.
Not everyone was intrigued by the Kafkaesque riddles, the electroaversion therapy, the brainwashing benignly inflicted to create a harmonious, unchallenging society that McGoohan’s Number Six was ever trying to flee.
The freedom and power that McGoohan was allowed by Grade in producing The Prisoner was unprecedented in British TV. Possibly there was some unease within ATV’s hierarchy because the series was unexpectedly terminated. McGoohan dashed off the final episode two days before filming was to start, and immediately after it was screened angry viewers choked the company’s switchboard demanding to know why the myriad puzzles raised in the series were not explained. McGoohan was besieged at his home in Mill Hill, northwest London, and even physically attacked in the street.
Before The Prisoner, Portmeirion was famous as the inspired architectural folly of Clough Williams-Ellis. It is now almost as known as “the Prisoner’s village”, with a shop stuffed with Prisoner badges, stills and handbooks to individual episodes.
McGoohan was born in New York of Irish parents who, when he was 6 months old, returned to Ireland where he was brought up on a family farm in Co Leitrim. He was 10 when the family moved to Sheffield from where he attended Ratcliffe College in Leicester, proving to have a talent for mathematics and rugby. His mother was devoutly religious and said that if her first-born was a boy he would become a priest.
McGoohan dropped that idea at 16 and left school at the height of the Second World War, taking a variety of jobs including wire-making in a steel works, a clerk in a bank and chicken farming. He appeared in amateur theatricals in his spare time. His four younger sisters found their shy brother a girlfriend, and the couple dutifully walked out for 18 months but it came to nothing. He was engaged as an assistant stage manager with the city’s repertory company at the Sheffield Playhouse where, helped by his athletic 6ft 2in build, blue eyes and chilling good looks, he rapidly became a regular leading man doing 24 plays a year. There he met the actress Joan Drummond and after an 18-month conventional courtship — he made no secret of his disapproval of sex before marriage — they were married in 1955 in between rehearsals for The Taming of the Shrew and a matinee of Sheridan’s The Rivals. They were to have three daughters.
McGoohan moved to London where after a few minor stage roles in the West End he was signed by Rank at a time when the British film industry was flourishing. His clipped, almost metallic delivery in the manner of Olivier’s Richard III, and the persistent stare, made him an ideal movie actor. Among his early films were No Life for Ruth, Dr Syn, Three Lives of Thomasina and All Night Long, in which he played a jazz drummer and locked himself in a garage with a drum kit to practise for hours. Possibly his most memorable role of the period was a villain at the wheel in a taut thriller called Hell Drivers that co-starred the also emerging Stanley Baker and Herbert Lom.
Danger Man followed in 1959 after a troubled Rank failed to renew his contract along with other players.
Ever the prickly perfectionist, McGoohan quickly found fault with the early scripts and came close to losing the part because of his demands. He insisted that John Drake should never carry a gun, although he was permitted to wrestle one away from a baddie occasionally, and all women were to be treated with strict courtesy. The overseas sales of Danger Man contributed largely to McGoohan’s boss Lew Grade winning the Queen’s Award for Industry in 1967 for earning Britain £35,700,000 in TV sales overseas.
At different times McGoohan turned down the chance to play James Bond and also the Saint (he said they were immoral) because of the sex and violence content. Who, he would ask, wants their children to grow up imitating James Bond?
But he collected his share of accolades. He won a TV Actor of the Year award for his performance in The Greatest Man in the World, and in 1959 the Critics Award for Best Actor of the Year on stage when he played the title role in Ibsen’s verse drama Brand, as the religious bigot who finally destroys himself.
He left Britain with his family in 1967 and after a brief period in Switzerland he settled in California, pointedly avoiding Hollywood and settling in the expensive ocean-side suburb of Pacific Palisades. While his wife, Joan, built a successful business in property sales, he was cast in mostly forgettable films, among them The Moonshine War, Ice Station Zebra, Mary Queen of Scots and Silver Streak.
He moved behind the camera directing several episodes of his friend Peter Falk’s long-running TV detective series Columbo, although he did appear in several, picking up a pair of Emmy Awards. He starred in another TV series, Rafferty, a tailor-made role about a rebellious, irascible doctor, and he returned to Britain occasionally for TV appearances. Among them a remake of Jamaica Inn with Jane Seymour, and Hugh Whitemore’s The Best of Friends in which he played George Bernard Shaw.
He appeared as Edward I in the 1995 Oscar-winning Braveheart. In 1996 he appeared as Judge Omar Noose in A Time to Kill. He directed Richie Havens in Catch My Soul, a rock-opera version of Othello. He also appeared in 1981 in Scanners, a science fiction/horror film directed by David Cronenberg that became something of a cult movie. In 1996 he appeared in a big-budget cinema adaptation of The Phantom comic strip. In 2000 he reprised his role as Number Six in an episode of The Simpsons. His last contribution to the cinema was a voice role in the animated film Treasure Planet (2002).
At various times he was beset by tax, drink and health problems but overcame them. He set up companies with the intention of producing films that would be “honest commercial ventures”. Some producers called him a genius who might have succeeded Olivier. Others said he was difficult. He said he never wished to be an international star because he had seen so many others end up “joining the galaxy of alimony payers”.
McGoohan was a hard worker who disliked mixing with his peers, loathed interviews, limiting them to 15 minutes, and intimidated journalists with an intense blue-eyed stare. He talked like a puritan.
It is for The Prisoner and its infuriating, fascinating mystery that he will be remembered most. As he once said in exasperation: “Will I never escape it? I am a prisoner of The Prisoner.”
Patrick McGoohan, actor, writer, director and producer, was born on March 19, 1928. He died on January 13, 2009, aged 80
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I just learned this from you. Wow.
