जीवनी

Gravelly smoke burnished voice

"Be seeing you", his catchphrase from The Prisoner (1967).

Almost always played monstrously arrogant, egotistical characters

Powerful vocal projection, a tremendous shouting voice

Often used pauses at inappropriate moments during a sentence, in order to make himself more unsettling to the audience. As in: "You will report to my [pause] office tomorrow for [pause] discipline."

Was a reclusive celebrity, hardly ever giving interviews.

For The Prisoner (1967), he sometimes used "Joseph Serf" for directing credits and "Paddy Fitz" for writing credits. "Paddy" being a nickname for "Patrick" while "Fitz" was derived from his mother's maiden name, Fitzpatrick.

Liked to drink Irish whiskey at 217 bar in Santa Monica, owned by burlesque great Betty Rowland.

In 1977 he was considered to replace Peter Falk as Columbo. However, McGoohan turned the part down because he was a close friend of Falk, and believed that only Falk should play Columbo. In addition he did not want to be the star of another TV series but only make guest appearances.

Was reportedly so devoted to his wife, he often refused to kiss or perform love scenes with other women in films.

On the fact that he is mostly known as his The Prisoner (1967) character, Number Six: "Mel [Gibson] will always be Mad Max, and me, I will always be a Number."

[on Rafferty (1977)] a disaster ... the most miserable job I've ever done in my life ... a total frustration from start to finish ... The scripts [were] monstrous pieces of garbage, [with] no time to rewrite them ... There were too many people in charge and all passing the buck. I counted them. There were 11 people who thought that they were the 'creators' of this load of garbage. But you couldn't find one to take responsibility [when it failed].

The more intense the work, the happier that I am.

I always had this fascination with the man in isolation, against the bureaucracy, against society, and also I've always had the constant fear that we're becoming a numeralised society more and more, and that for the individual, the rebel, shall we say the 'arrogant individual' to survive and keep his self respect, there has to be a certain amount of fighting against the system.

They don't quite - they think there's something in the background there that needs to be dug up. That it's not true that I've been married for thirty years and that I can't have a happy family because there is a reputation that I have for being a rebel. A reputation for being arrogant.