It's fair to say that you don't mess with Malcolm McDowell.

Anyone who has made a career of playing some of cinema's most extreme outsider characters - Alex DeLarge in the notorious A Clockwork Orange, Mick Travis in If. . . , bonkers Roman emperor Caligula, bloodthirsty gangsters and cannibalistic child-killers - is not someone to be trifled with.

So when my telephone steadfastly refuses to connect me to the Leedsborn actor's Los Angeles home I wonder to myself which of the many celluloid hells McDowell has brought to life he will visit upon me. . . and whether I can ask BT for compensation if he goes all Clockwork Orange on my ass. He's 6,000 miles away but it's still a daunting prospect.

So I hope I'm not wrecking the 62year-old actor's credibility when I report that once I had managed a serviceable connection Malcolm McDowell turned out to be a thoroughly nice chap.

He appears at the Bradford Film Festival tomorrow where he will present a retrospective of the work of the director with which he's most closely associated, the late Lindsay Anderson, and also to receive a lifetime achievement award.

If awards were handed out purely on how hard an actor works, then McDowell would surely be eligible on the strength of his huge body of work - more than 100 movies, innumerable TV appearances, even cartoon and computer game voice-work.

"I've done so many movies, I can't remember some of them, " he says in his curious mix of trans-Atlantic Northern English tinged with a bit of Scouse and a smidgen of public school. "Some years I did six movies.

It's fair to say I've been pretty busy."

Perhaps not all his jobs have been critical and commercial smashes. But the weight of his classic, iconic roles will always far outweigh the alsorqans. For his portrayal of psychotic, rapacious juvenile delinquent Alex in Stanley Kubrick's masterful cinematic adaptation of Anthony Burgess's near-future treatment of crime and punishment, A Clockwork Orange, McDowell has certainly earned his place in film history. And as Mick Travis in Anderson's trio of groundbreaking, movies, If. . . , O Lucky Man!

and Britannia Hospital, he created an unforgettable anti-hero.

He's also notorious for playing Caligula in the controversially sexstuffed film of the same name, plus bravely took on a role based on the Russian serial killer Chikatilo in 2004's Evilenko.

"You could say I like a challenge, " laughs McDowell. "Sometimes the most difficult role is often the most successful. The more extreme characters are fun to try and make work."

Did it ever bother him that once he had established himself as the type of character actor who only had to peer out from under the brim of a bowler hat to make grown men want their mummies, the parts of sociopathic nutters came thick and fast?

"It possibly used to get on my nerves when I was younger, and wanting to try my hand at different parts, " he says, "but to be honest, it doesn't bother me at all now. So long as I enjoy the work, my attitude is never look back. Always look to the future."

But it is to the past that McDowell will be looking this weekend, as he introduces a retrospective of the films of his long-time collaborator Lindsay Anderson, who died in 1994.

"He was a wonderful man, " remembers McDowell. "Totally brilliant. He was one of the greatest post-War British directors.

"Of all the people who I've known in my life, if there's one who I had to say was a genius, he came closest to it. He was like an Oxford Don, a man of tremendous intellect, and a fiercely loyal friend. Lindsay Anderson was nothing short of a poet. Where are the titans like that today?"

After the success of If. . . in which McDowell's Mick Travis leads a guntoting rebellion against the stuffy authority of British public school life (McDowell, though born to working class parents who ran pubs in Bridlington and Liverpool, went to public school in Orpington, Kent), he reprised the role in Anderson's second film of a loose trilogy, O Lucky Man! The script was partly written by McDowell himself, based on his own experiences of being a coffee salesman in West Yorkshire.

"I remember coming to Bradford a lot in the early Sixties, " he says. "All those grand old buildings."

I tell him that most of the buildings he remembers have probably gone.

"Oh, " he says. "That isn't very good."

And for the briefest of moments, there's a flash of Alex, an undercurrent of Mick Travis.

So is Malcolm McDowell a Tyke who happens to live in California, or a Californian born in Yorkshire?

"Definitely a Californian, " he says.

"My children were born here, my life has been here for so long. But I'm a Californian who never forgets his roots. They are in the North of England and I'm proud of that. I'll never forget where I'm from."

If he doesn't dwell on the past, what about the future? He's just finished a new movie he describes as a cross between a "John Grisham thriller and a Civil War epic", and has a couple more irons in the fire. "I better not say just what in case I scupper them, " he says. It sounds like he's busier than ever. "I am, " he says.

"And loving it. I've worked with some brilliant people - as well as Lindsay, there was Robert Altman, Stanley Kubrick. I get very close to people I'm working with."

He reportedly had a rather intense relationship with Kubrick. "I did get very close to Stanley, " says McDowell, then adds after some thought: "I think I scared him, in a way."

With a young son, a 13-year marriage and a huge house in California, life seems good for the man who once received death threats from Star Trek fans for killing off Captain Kirk in the movie Star Trek: Generations.

"It is, " he says. "My wife said to me the other day, wouldn't it be great if we won the lottery? I said to her, but as far as I'm concerned, I'm winning the lottery every single day."

He pauses, then laughs. "It would be nice to win the lottery, though."

And then there's another call coming through. "It's one of those jobs I mentioned to you, " he says hurriedly.

"Someone needs to speak to me."

And far be it from me to get in the way of the man who played Alex DeLarge and his next role