By Kilian Melloy

With the shelves laden under countless biographies, it’s hard to believe that, until now, there has not been one devoted to the life and times of beloved film and television star Roddy McDowall, a man whose talents far exceeded the thespian life and extended to photography and philanthropy… and, perhaps most importantly, the art of living in a meaningful way.

So beloved was the star of classics that spanned genres and decades that when screenwriter, director, producer, and Hollywood biographer Samuel Garza Bernstein [ https://samuelgarzabernstein.com/  ] undertook the writing of Roddy McDowall: An Actor’s Life – From How Green Was My Valley to Lassie to Planet of the Apes he encountered friend after friend and colleague after colleague who spoke of McDowall in terms that were unfailingly glowing and, often, tearful. Some Hollywood stars, fearing the project would be sensationalistic, declined to talk to Bernstein at all; indeed, in the wrong hands the story might simply have been about the open secret, known to his circle of friends and acquaintances, that McDowall was gay and had at least three significant same-sex relationships during the course of his life.

Now that the book has reached some of those people in the form of advance copies, some of those same people are reconsidering and speaking out in favor of the book. That includes no less a light than Carol Burnett, who, in an Instagram post, called the book “a beautiful tribute to a very special man” and said readers would “get to know a man who was as kind as he was gifted.” Could that mean that there’s more to hear of McDowall’s story, and more to relate, possibly in an expanded edition somewhere down the line?

“Oh, I don’t know,” Bernstein tells QulturVultur during a recent Zoom call. “I mean, I love their stories, and I love hearing from them, and it certainly helps bring attention to the book. The quote came out from Carol Burnett, and I think I spiked, like, 20 points that day on Amazon.

“It really matters to me,” Bernstein adds, “and each of their stories is individual, is wonderful, and often makes me cry. However, it doesn’t actually change anything I know or understand about Roddy, because I already know that that was his great gift and his capacity to make people feel so seen and wanted and loved and valued.”

Indeed, Bernstein, who has written biographies of Sid Caesar and Joan Crawford (as well as being the co-showrunner/co-executive producer and writer for the Amazon series After Forever, now in its third season) found plenty to impart when he gained access to McDowall’s archives — a resource that, myth had it, was sealed until 2098, a century after the actor’s 1998 death from cancer at the age of 70. In An Actor’s Life, he relates stories of McDowell’s beginnings as a child actor, his struggles against a Hollywood system that wanted to peg him as an eternal waif, and his skill at navigating the rarefied waters of movie stardom. (Who else could coax both Elizabeth Taylor and Sybil Burton, the former wife of one of Taylor’s husbands, to his bedside for a long-delayed détente?)

Samuel Garza Bernstein chatted with QulturVultur about McDowell’s prodigious gifts, his authentic (if under-the-radar) life, and his own massively creative journey.

QulturVultur: I find it fascinating that people stayed away from writing a bio of Roddy McDowall because they thought his archival material was sealed for 100 years.

Samuel Garza Bernstein: It’s sort of one of those things that one person says something, and it fits within an idea that people have, and it just becomes the truth. I really have no way of knowing, but my guess is that he might have made that joke to someone once — you know, “Like all my secrets, no one can access them for 100 years,” or whatever. Thankfully, it was just apocryphal.

QulturVultur: Once you got into those archives, were there ideas about McDowall that you might have had that became transformed?

Samuel Garza Bernstein: I realized almost immediately he was not closeted in the slightest. I think in our times we can get kind of judgy about the level of authenticity, the way that people lived in earlier times, and I think it’s important to recognize that all kinds of people lived very authentic lives. Certainly, there were limits to what could be said publicly, but he wasn’t sitting around going, “Poor me, no one can find out, I’m so scared.” I don’t think it ever occurred to him to stop himself from doing whatever he wanted. To me, that’s a true kind of fearlessness. I can’t think of a single thing that he talked about doing, that he didn’t go figure out a way and do it.

QulturVultur: Did it help that there was a queer demimonde in Hollywood, and he was acquainted so many stars we now know to have been gay?

Samuel Garza Bernstein: To a degree. He was so much younger than, like, George Cukor [and the] men hanging around the pool on a Sunday, and [he was] in a very tightly controlled home environment. Where he really developed his network was in New York in the ’50s, and that is what sustained him through the rest of his life in terms of his queer demimonde. I mean, he and Dirk Bogart were really devoted friends, and [he knew] that whole group, branching out to Noel Coward and Christopher Isherwood and [Isherwood’s partner] Don Bachardy, but it’s not like he spent every week seeing them when he was in Hollywood. They were kind of in a different group of people.

QulturVultur: He clearly had a way of seeing people. Is that how he managed to also become such an accomplished photographer?

Samuel Garza Bernstein: I think so. What he was fascinated with was the beautiful ugly under the beautiful. He liked that thing where you saw something that wasn’t in the packaged version of that person. He absolutely respected the packaged versions of people and was absolutely capable of taking those photos when it was called for — you know, if he’s doing a magazine spread on Tuesday Weld being a teen dream. We’re such strange concoctions of emotion and self-invention. Those layers are infinite, and he had an ability to make people feel comfortable enough that they would show that. But you had to be complicit. He wasn’t going to force you into it or make you show something that you didn’t want to.

QulturVultur: You dive quite deeply into the man behind the mask, but I am also curious to ask you about the technique of the mask itself, especially with his performance in the Planet of the Apes movies, where McDowell is covered in prosthetics, yet he’s so expressive.

Samuel Garza Bernstein: Like so many things in Roddy’s life, it appears effortless; it is not. He spent hours in front of his mirror looking at the prosthetics and how they work and how he can manipulate them, because it’s a very technical process. He experimented with ways within the confines of what he was able to manipulate cranio-facially. Did this look quizzical? Did this look hungry? Did this look emotional? He figured out almost like those old silent movie charts where they would show joy [or whatever other emotion] — it was almost that specific. “If I move this device on my face in this way, it gives the impression of this.” It was a very mapped-out kind of process, and he taught it to the other actors who wanted to learn it. He would have little tutorials and work with the other actors. This was after the most important tutorials, which were how to smoke.

QulturVultur: Really?

Samuel Garza Bernstein: Everybody had to figure out how to smoke without damaging [the film’s prosthetic makeup]. You know their endless behind-the-scenes photographs of all the actors [with] long cigarette holders? He wasn’t that technical in how he approached every job, but he did a lot of work, and he prepared. William Ragsdale, who was still very young when they made Fright Night, talked about how the director [Tom Holland] was very keen on backstory and diaries and things, and Roddy was totally into it, and he did a lot of that work. It all goes back to the idea that you prepare, and you get everything done, and you make all of these things, and then you let it all go and just do the scene. He was very much that way.

QulturVultur: If he lived today, with the way influencers are 24/7 creating very carefully curated images of themselves online and with celebrity gossip such a big part of the news cycle, could Roddy McDowall still have been who we remember?

Samuel Garza Bernstein: I think he would have thrived. He loved the newest technology. I think he would have been an early adopter. I think that he would have loved [social media]. Like anybody in today’s world, he might have gotten himself in trouble occasionally, but he was so politic. He must have had extraordinary powers of diplomacy to be best friends with both Elizabeth Taylor and Sybil Burton throughout their adult lives. I mean, it’s not as if the two women were having cat fights or something; they were not. They were grown women. It’s not an episode of Dynasty, where they’re going to be throwing each other in the pool or whatever. But I think it is fair to say there was no love lost between those two women, and these were the two most important women in his life, and they both knew that he was close to the other and it was just okay. Now, if you can navigate that, I’m thinking you can navigate Twitter. 

Roddy McDowall: An Actor’s Life – From How Green Was My Valley to Lassie to Planet of the Apes by Samuel Garza Bernstein will be released on May 26, 2026 by Citadel Press. For more information, follow this link.