of this old man's body." It was a performance that also won him his third Evening Standard Best Actor award, a record equalled only by Laurence Olivier and Paul Scofield. Two years later, again at the Mermaid, McCowen gave a portrayal of the British poet Rudyard Kipling in a one-man play by Brian Clark, performed in a setting that exactly matched Kipling's own study at Bateman's (his Jacobean rustic haven in Sussex) "and turning", as Michael Billington wrote, "an essentially private man into a performer." McCowen appeared in the play on Broadway and on television for Channel 4. Directing While preparing to co-star as Vladimir to John Alderton's Estragon in Michael Rudman's acclaimed production of Waiting for Godot at the National Theatre in November 1987, McCowen also spent a busy autumn staging Martin Crimp's trilogy of short plays Definitely the Bahamas at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond upon Thames, having previously enjoyed Crimp's style of writing in a BBC radio version of Three Attempted Acts. As Charles Spencer wrote in The Daily Telegraph: "As a director McCowen captures both the subtlety and the richness of these three original and beautifully written plays." At the Hampstead Theatre in December 1972 he directed a revival of Terence Rattigan's wartime London comedy While the Sun Shines. Film and television McCowen made his film debut in The Cruel Sea released in 1953. His other film credits include roles in Town on Trial (1957), A Night to Remember (1958), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), The Witches (1966), Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972), Travels with My Aunt (1972, for which he received a Golden Globe nomination), Never Say Never Again (1983), Personal Services (1987) and Henry V (1989). Television roles included the BBC's four-part adaptation of J. B. Priestley's Angel Pavement (1958), and his one-man stage performance of The Gospel According to Saint Mark, transferred to television by Thames for Easter 1979. He appeared alongside Maureen Lipman and Arthur Askey performing comic monologues in The Green Tie on the Little Yellow Dog, which was recorded 1982, and broadcast by Channel 4 in 1983. He appeared in the BBC Television Shakespeare series as Malvolio in Twelfth Night and as Chorus in Henry V. In 1984 and 1985 McCowen starred in the ten episodes of the short-lived television series Mr Palfrey of Westminster as a "spy catcher" working for British intelligence under the direction of