Roddy McDowall Overboard (1987)

Roddy McDowall (September 17, 1928 – October 3, 1998) played Andrew the butler in Overboard (1987) — the role that delivers the film's thesis line in the late "rare privilege of escaping your bonds" speech.

McDowall was a child star who grew up into a working actor's working actor

McDowall was a London-born child actor evacuated to the United States during the Blitz; he became a Hollywood star at thirteen as Huw in John Ford's How Green Was My Valley (1941, Best Picture) and as the lead in My Friend Flicka (1943) and Lassie Come Home (1943). The transition to adult acting was rocky — most child stars do not survive it — and McDowall did so by becoming the kind of actor every casting director knew could play a butler, a Roman senator, an English professor, a chimpanzee, or a vampire and would deliver the same level of craft to each. The career stretched fifty-eight years and accumulated two hundred and fifty credits. (wikipedia)

The two roles he is best remembered for are Cornelius/Caesar in the Planet of the Apes franchise (five films and a TV series, 1968–75) and Octavian in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Cleopatra (1963) — the latter so heavily reshot that McDowall was disqualified from the Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination he was widely expected to receive.

Andrew is the film's conscience and its thesis

The Andrew role is small in screen-time and structurally enormous. McDowall's tasks across the film are: hand Joanna a lemon she has summoned in the opening (b2); refuse Grant's order to abandon the search and look aghast at Edith's threats (b30); meet Joanna at the gangway in white gloves on her return ("Welcome back, Mrs Stayton," b34); deliver the rare-privilege speech (b38); and stand between Joanna and the rail in the climax with a lifejacket and the line "Madam, I cannot let you do this. Not without a lifejacket" (b42).

The rare-privilege speech — quoted in full in the framework reasoning — is the film's structural thesis articulated, pointedly, by the character whose entire job is to enforce the station-of-birth Joanna was raised inside:

"Most of us go through life with blinders on, madam, knowing only that one little station to which we were born. But you, madam, on the other hand, have had the rare privilege of escaping your bonds for just a spell to see life from an entirely new perspective. How you choose to use that information, madam, is entirely up to you." — Andrew (Roddy McDowall), Overboard (1987), via IMDb quotes

McDowall plays the speech as the gentlest possible defection from his employer: he does not raise his voice, does not break the formal address ("madam"), does not editorialize. The structural radicalism of the speech (the butler tells the heiress that station is escapable) is delivered in the register of butler-perfect deference. The performance is exactly calibrated to the script's structural requirement.

McDowall was the patron saint of the working Hollywood actor

McDowall is famous in Hollywood lore as the keeper of an enormous archive of personal photographs of his colleagues — taken on sets, at parties, in private — that he donated to the Academy Foundation and that became the source for one of the most important visual records of mid-century Hollywood. He was also the actor whose home dinners brought together every generation of the industry; he is in the address book of practically every Golden Age survivor and every New Hollywood director.

"Roddy was the man who had been at every party for forty years and who knew where every body was buried and who never told anyone." — Robert Osborne, TCM tribute (2008)

He died of cancer in October 1998 at age seventy.

Selected filmography

Year	Film	Role	Note
1941	How Green Was My Valley	Huw Morgan	Best Picture
1943	Lassie Come Home	Joe Carraclough
1963	Cleopatra	Octavian	Oscar campaign disqualified
1968	Planet of the Apes	Cornelius	First of five
1972	Conquest of the Planet of the Apes	Caesar
1972	The Poseidon Adventure	Acres
1985	Fright Night	Peter Vincent
1987	Overboard	Andrew
1988	Fright Night Part 2	Peter Vincent
1991	The Naked Target (later The Magic Voyage)	(voice)
1995	It's My Party	Damian Knowles	One of his last roles