Patrick McGoohan Braveheart (1995)
Patrick McGoohan was sixty-six when Braveheart opened and had not been a leading man on screen in nearly two decades. He had been, in the 1960s, one of the highest-paid actors on television — refused the James Bond role twice, refused The Saint — and had spent the back end of his career on the work he could control on his own terms. Braveheart's Edward I "Longshanks" was the role that put him in front of an American mainstream audience for the first time since Escape from Alcatraz (1979), and he played it with the dry cruelty of a man who has run out of impulses to suppress.
Born in Astoria, raised in Ireland and Sheffield
McGoohan was born in Astoria, Queens in 1928 to Irish parents and moved with the family back to Ireland and then to Sheffield, England, where he grew up. His early stage work in Sheffield led to the Royal Shakespeare Company and to leads at the Old Vic. He came to American attention in the late-1950s ITV series Danger Man (broadcast in the U.S. as Secret Agent) and made the move to global recognition with the 1967 series he co-created and starred in, The Prisoner — a seventeen-episode allegorical thriller that has been read by half a generation of critics as the founding text of the paranoid 1970s.
"If you want to know what television could have been, watch The Prisoner. McGoohan made it the way he wanted it. The episodes that don't work are the ones the network forced. The episodes that work — and there are a lot of them — are the ones he was left alone for." — John Wrathall, Sight & Sound (paywalled archive, 1998)
He turned down the role of James Bond before Sean Connery was cast and turned down The Saint before Roger Moore took it; both refusals were on grounds of the violence and the casual sexuality the parts required. The principle ran through his career.
How Longshanks came to him
Mel Gibson has said that he and casting director Patsy Pollock sent the script to McGoohan with no expectation of a yes; McGoohan was known for refusing more than he accepted. He read the script, met with Gibson, and accepted. The pull, by McGoohan's own account, was the part's restraint — Longshanks does very little physical work, gives few speeches, and dies in a bed unable to speak.
"It's a gift of a part. The man does almost nothing on screen. He throws one person out a window and he dies in his bed. Everything else is in the eyes." — Patrick McGoohan, The Guardian (1995, archived)
The performance has aged into a critical favorite. Several writers have called it the most patient screen villain of the 1990s, and the Phillip-out-the-window scene — McGoohan walks past his horrified son without a word — is the moment most often cited.
"McGoohan plays Longshanks as a man who has stopped flinching at his own cruelty. There is no theatre in him. He throws the boy out the window because the window is there." — Walter Chaw, Film Freak Central (2008, archived)
What he brought to the part
The decision Gibson and McGoohan worked out, according to Gibson's later interviews, was that Longshanks would speak softly and rarely raise his voice. Where Wallace shouts and Bruce wavers, Longshanks states. The dispatch of Princess Isabelle is half a sentence ("Send the wife");b28 the order to fire on his own troops at Falkirk is one line ("Arrows cost money. Use up the Irish. The dead cost nothing");b32 the reaction to news of York is one act, not one line.b28
The voice itself does the work. McGoohan had what stage directors used to call the Sheffield voice — clipped, slightly flat, carrying without volume — and the film uses it as the structural counterweight to the Highland register of Wallace's company.
Late career and death
McGoohan continued to work after Braveheart but rarely in lead roles. He directed and starred in Catch My Soul (1974), continued to write television, and did voice work — including a recurring role in the Disney animated series Phineas and Ferb — into his last years. He died in Santa Monica in January 2009 at age eighty.
"He was the great refuser of his era. He could have been Bond, he could have been the Saint, he could have run a network. He chose The Prisoner and a quiet career. Watching him in Braveheart, you can see why he chose the way he did." — Mark Lawson, The Guardian (2009)