CORENEWS: How we made A Clockwork Orange

‘The eyelid clamps kept slipping off and scratching my corneas. I was in so much pain I was banging my head against a wall’

Stanley Kubrick had put aside his adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s novel because he couldn’t find the right actor to play Alex, the violent thug. Then he saw Lindsay Anderson’s If …, in which I played another victim of institutionalisation. He turned to his wife and said: “We’ve found our Alex.”