Patrick McGoohan was one of the most distinctive actors of his generation — physically commanding, intellectually intense, and allergic to the comfortable choices that might have made him simply famous rather than genuinely memorable. He was born on March 19, 1928, in Astoria, Queens, New York City, to Irish Catholic immigrant parents, Thomas and Rose McGoohan. The family returned to Ireland shortly after his birth, settling in County Leitrim, before relocating to Sheffield in Yorkshire when McGoohan was seven years old.
His schooling in Sheffield — first at St Marie's, then St Vincent's, and finally De La Salle College — gave him a solid foundation, and he proved to be gifted in mathematics and boxing, two disciplines demanding precision and endurance. During the Second World War he was evacuated to Loughborough, where he attended Ratcliffe College alongside a fellow student who would also become an actor: Ian Bannen. McGoohan left school at sixteen, returned to Sheffield, and passed through a succession of occupations — chicken farmer, bank clerk, lorry driver — before finding his way into the Sheffield Repertory Theatre as a stage manager. When an actor fell ill and McGoohan substituted for him, a career began.
His rise was swift. He appeared on the West End in 1955 in a production of Serious Charge, and his stage presence was powerful enough to make an impression on no less an observer than Orson Welles, who cast him as Starbuck in his York theatre production of Moby Dick—Rehearsed. Welles later reflected, in 1969, that he believed McGoohan could have been one of the defining actors of his generation had television not claimed him, praising his looks, intensity, and unmistakable acting ability. For television, McGoohan's first significant appearance had come in 1954 with a portrayal of Charles Stewart Parnell. He also took small film roles in the mid-1950s, including an uncredited part in The Dam Busters in 1955, and appeared in Zarak in 1956. The Rank Organisation signed him to a contract, though they tended to cast him in villainous parts, a restriction that chafed against his range.
The role that made him a household name in Britain arrived with Danger Man in 1960, an ITC espionage series in which he played secret agent John Drake. During the height of the show's popularity McGoohan became the highest-paid actor on British television. He won the BAFTA Television Award for Best Actor in 1960. But commercial success and critical validation were never sufficient to hold his interest for long, and by the late 1960s he was already thinking beyond the genre that had defined him.
What he created next, and what has proved his most enduring contribution to television, was The Prisoner, a surrealistic ITV series that ran from 1967 to 1968 and in which he starred as Number Six, a former British intelligence agent held against his will in a mysterious village from which escape seems impossible. McGoohan created and produced the series, and it operated as something between philosophical allegory and psychological thriller, asking questions about identity, conformity, and the nature of freedom that audiences are still arguing over more than half a century later. The show ran for seventeen episodes and concluded in a final episode so cryptic and demanding that it sparked public controversy.
His film work during the same period was substantial. He appeared as David Jones in Ice Station Zebra in 1968, played the historical James Stewart, Earl of Moray in Mary, Queen of Scots in 1971, and embodied the Warden in Escape from Alcatraz in 1979 with memorable cold authority. His performance as King Edward I in Braveheart in 1995 gave younger audiences an introduction to his particular brand of controlled menace. In 1981 he appeared in David Cronenberg's Scanners and in 1996 played Judge Omar Noose in A Time to Kill.
His long association with Columbo beginning in the 1970s yielded two Emmy Awards for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series, the first of them coming in the award's inaugural 1975 entry. He also received a Drama Desk nomination for his Broadway work in Pack of Lies.
McGoohan died in Los Angeles on January 13, 2009. He was eighty years old. His career stood as evidence that artistic ambition and genuine originality could occasionally find a home inside the entertainment industry, even when — perhaps especially when — the artist refused to make things easy for anyone, including himself.
