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Michael MacLiammoir

(Micheál mac Liammóir)

1899–1978

 

Though all his life Michael MacLiammoir claimed to have been born in Cork on 25th October 1899, this was a self-made legend.  The date was true, the place was not.  The actor and writer was in fact born in east London, and of English parents.  He was the son of Alfred Wilmore and his wife, formerly Mary Elizabeth Lawler Lee.  Called Alfred Wilmore after his father, he deliberately chose to create for himself an Irish identity in his twenties as Micheál mac Liammóir.  Mac Liammóir, 'son of great William', unknown as an Irish name, is a simple transliteration of Wilmore.  During his career, he signed his works with the Irish form of his name, though all his friends called him Michael.  Since his death the accented Gaelic version has become common amongst those writing about him, but not in the form he finally preferred, which is used here.

      Though little Alfred made his stage debut in London in 1911, at the age of eleven, playing a goldfish, it was to Ireland and its theatre that he dedicated his life, changing his name in the process and becoming, among other things, an accomplished writer and dramatist in Gaelic.

      That first appearance was at the Little Theatre in London.  Parts in West End plays followed between 1911 and 1915, and he rose to become one of the best known child actors on the English stage, as famous as the young Noel Coward.  He even worked with the legendary Beerbohm Tree.

      For the years 1915-16 he left the stage to enrol in the Slade School of Art, a device perhaps to cross that boundary from being a child actor into an adult one.  It was there he met an Irish girl, Máire O'Keefe, with whom he developed a platonic relationship which was to prove crucial.  After playing Lord Cornwallis at the Haymarket Theatre in February 1917, he moved to Ireland, largely to avoid conscription in London during the Great War, where it had not been introduced for political reasons.  There he worked on designs for the Irish Theatre and the Dublin Drama League, up to 1921.

      This was the true beginning of Micheál mac Liammóir.  More conscious now of his homosexual nature, he remade himself completely, casting off the London suburbs and adopting all things Irish, even the Gaelic language.  His sister was now married to Anew McMaster, whose famous Shakespearian touring company was such a feature of Irish theatrical life in the years before the war.

      For some years until 1927 he travelled in Europe, mainly painting, though this period of his life remains obscure.  He then returned to Ireland, then in its first years of independence, and joined Anew McMaster's company, in which he met his life-long companion, the English actor Hilton Edwards.

      With Hilton Edwards he opened a Gaelic theatre in Galway in 1928, which still thrives.  (He was also appointed a director of the Dublin Gaelic language theatre at the Peacock three years later.)  Later that year the pair moved back to Dublin where they opened the Gate Theatre.  The distinction of the Gate was its intention to bring to Irish audiences the best of modern and Continental theatre, at a time when the great Abbey Theatre, after the brusque rejection of O'Casey's play, The Silver Tassie, was retreating into folksy quaintness, living off its past reputation.

      Though greeted warmly by critics, all was not well at first.  By the end of 1930 they were £700 in debt and had to be bailed out by Lord Longford.  The greatest success of the Gate in these early years was the production of Denis Johnston's drama The Old Lady Says 'No' which the Abbey Theatre had also rejected (the 'old lady' in question being Lady Gregory).  Mac Liammóir, who played Robert Emmet, took the play to London in 1935, where the Gate also played Hamlet.  During his years at the Gate he was involved in over 300 productions.  The survival of the theatre, whose home was in the elegant building of the eighteenth century Dublin Rotunda, was largely due to the financial aid of Lord Longford, whose wealth underwrote the scheme until the 1960s.  London was not the only foreign tour.  The Gate Company went to Egypt in 1936-38, and toured the Balkan states in 1939.

      It was in the Gate, as a teenager lying about his age, that the youthful genius of Orson Welles was discovered.  James Mason was another discovery of man Liammóir's.

      After the war mac Liammóir appeared in his own play Ill Met by Moonlight in London, and the following year he made his debut on the New York stage, as Larry Doyle in Shaw's John Bull's Other Island.  He played Iago in Orson Welles' film version of Othello in 1949.  Many other distinguished plays followed, as well as many books including All for Hecuba, which was about theatre life in Ireland, and Each Actor on his Ass, about the making of Welles' film of Othello.

      Aside from modern plays and classics, the Gate also mounted lighter works, such as Christmas entertainments.  Adaptations were also produced: The Heart's a Wonder, a musical based on The Playboy of the Western World, and The Informer, from Liam O'Flaherty's novel, in which he played the unfortunate Gypo Nolan.

      However, it was his one-man show created in 1960, The Importance of Being Oscar, devoted to the career and wit of Oscar Wilde, that made him a famous figure worldwide.  Rarely have an actor and his material been so well matched, and his evocation of Wilde was magical.  Directed by Hilton Edwards, this entertainment was not only taken to London (twice), and the USA, but also to South America and the Antipodes.  During the tour of The Importance of Being Oscar, mac Liammóir was almost blind.  As a stage prop he is said to have had a carpet specially woven on which the strong pattern provided him with his cues to his stage movements, preventing him from walking off the stage and into the orchestra pit.  Wherever he went with the production he magic carpet went with him.

      This major success was followed by two other one-man shows, both of great charm but without the startling impact of the first one, I Must be Talking to My Friends and Talking About Yeats.

      Though mac Liammóir appeared in many films, cinema was not his métier.  He also wrote towards the end of his life a book about Yeats, on which he was assisted largely by the young poet Eavan Boland; though full of interesting asides, it demonstrated that biography too was not his métier.  Two memoirs followed, An Oscar of No Importance and Enter a Goldfish.  These being on Wilde and himself proved far more successful.  His art being largely confined to stage sets has unfortunately dropped out of sight.  His book illustrations have a fey, fin de siècle air about them.

      Though it has been claimed (on not fully convincing evidence) that he had a sexual relationship with the ultra-catholic Irish fascist General Eoin O'Duffy, leader of the Blueshirts in the 1930s, his one lasting relationship was with Hilton Edwards.  For many years the pair of them, 'The Boys' as they were known to their friends, both of whom enjoyed travel and the ballet, made their home in a Regency house in Harcourt Terrace, now graced by a plaque.

      Micheál mac Liammóir died on 6th March 1978, by which time both he and his partner and the theatre they had founded had become national institutions.  At a time when Ireland was supposedly wallowing in the extremist forms of Catholic reaction, he and Hilton lived opened as a homosexual couple.  This was not the least of the courageous things that they did, though for those with an experience of his profession, the long haul of maintaining a theatre as a functioning asset against all odds, was even more courageous.

      The talents of actors, especially when these are largely confined to the stage, are particularly hard for future generations to grasp.  But with all his multifarious talents, so lavishly used, at a professional and social level Michael MacLiammoir (under whatever name one wishes) was a man of exceptional influence.