Updated: January 06, 2025

Mr. McDowall grew up in the movies, and more so than many others, he maintained his equilibrium about his celebrity. Acting, he said, was "like being a fruit picker it's seasonal," and no matter how popular an actor is, he worries about his next job. His response was to keep working, sometimes accepting assignments that were beneath his talent, but generally finding something of value in whatever he did.

He tried not to concern himself with critical reaction. In an interview last year, he said he had once asked Noel Coward how he was able to survive rejection and vilification by the critics. Assuming a crisp Coward voice, he recalled the response: "It's perfectly simple. They're wrrrong." He loved movies and was an assiduous collector, with a large library of films, tapes and memorabilia, including still photographs and autographs.

Roderick McDowall was born in London on Sept. 17, 1928. His father was in the merchant marine and his mother, who had lived in the United States as a child, had always wanted to act in the movies. By the age of 5, he was enrolled in elocution classes. Two years later, guided by his mother, he was acting in his first movie, "Murder in the Family." Encouraged by his mother, he appeared in more than 20 movies, but because he was under 14, the age limit set by a child labor law, he had to be smuggled into film studios hiding on the floor of a car.

With the outbreak of World War II, he came to the United States with his mother and his sister. Within several weeks of his arrival he did a screen test for "How Green Was My Valley." Lew Schreiber, the casting director at 20th Century Fox, disliked him because he was not, in the actor's words, "cute and adorable" in the Hollywood tradition. When the test came on the screen, Mr. Schreiber put his hands over the projector, and said to William Wyler, "You don't want to see this kid." But Mr. Wyler, who was scheduled to direct the film, insisted on seeing him, and hired the young English actor.

"How Green Was My Valley" was momentarily shelved, but then John Ford decided he wanted to direct it and persuaded Darryl F. Zanuck to go ahead with the project. Ford kept the boy in the cast, and he was soon acting alongside Walter Pidgeon, Maureen O'Hara and Donald Crisp. As Huw, the youngest member of a Welsh coal mining family confronting tragedy, he was a splendid combination of stoicism and sensitivity. The movie won five Academy Awards, including one as best picture of 1941.

The child star was quickly in great demand in Hollywood, appearing in a series of family movies surrounded by horses and dogs in adaptations of the Mary O'Hara novels "My Friend Flicka" and its sequel "Thunderhead: Son of Flicka," and in "Lassie Come Home," in which he played Lassie's loving master and Ms. Taylor played a supporting role.

At 18, he was still playing the role of a child. Realizing that acting as a boy did not bear "any relation to acting as an adult," he moved to New York to study his craft. He made his stage debut in "Young Woodley" at the Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut and was soon working on Broadway in Shaw's "Misalliance" and playing in Shakespeare at the Stratford Festival in Connecticut.

In 1955 he did three plays, "The Doctor's Dilemma" at the Phoenix Theater, "The Tempest" at Stratford ( he played Ariel to Raymond Massey's Prospero ) and "No Time for Sergeants" on Broadway.

He also acted on television, and after about five years he returned to the movies, eventually acting in movies as varied as Orson Welles's "Macbeth" ( he played Malcolm both on stage and on screen ), "Cleopatra" ( he played Octavian ) and the ''Planet of the Apes'' series.

His other films included "The Subterraneans," "The Longest Day," "The Loved One," "Lord Love a Duck" "Evil Under the Sun" "Fright Night," "Dead of Winter," "Last Summer in the Hamptons" and "The Grass Harp."

He is survived by his sister Virginia, who lives at the Actors Home in Los Angeles, where Mr. McDowall often visited elderly actors.

Although Roddy McDowall never turned his back on his childhood acting, it also became something to overcome. It was, he said, a "demon walking with you." He added, "My whole life I've been trying to prove I'm not just yesterday." The fact is he had to keep reinventing himself in his many guises as an actor. He took a long view of his insecure profession, saying "Nothing is as good or as bad as it's judged in the moment," and sometimes "yesterday's kitsch is today's treasure."

But as a student of film he also knew that yesterday's treasures, like '"How Green Was My Valley" and "Lassie Come Home," were eternal. Because of all his personal attachments and his memories connected with those films, he had difficulty watching them again. In common with other moviegoers, he would weep at the grief of the little boy on screen.