Micheál Mac Liammóir

As Alfred Willmore, he was born in Kensal Green, in north-west London, into a family with no Irish connections at all.[1] His father, also called Alfred Willmore, was a Superintendant of an International Correspondence School. His mother, Mary Willmore, was originally from Farningham in Kent, and he had four older sisters, Dorothy, Christine, Winifred, and Marjorie, the last of whom became an art teacher.[2]

Becoming a child actor, Willmore's first appearance on the English stage was in January 1911, as King Goldfish in The Goldfish, and in September of that year he first worked for Beerbohm Tree. In June 1912, he played Oliver Twist in Tree's revival of the play, and he also appeared for several months in Peter Pan, playing Michael Darling.[3]

After leaving school, Willmore studied painting at London's Slade School of Art, but he abandoned his course shortly before graduating, to travel overseas and to avoid conscription.[4] In the 1920s, he travelled all over Europe. The young Willmore was captivated by Irish culture: he learnt Irish, which he spoke and wrote fluently, and he changed his name to an Irish version.[5]

Mac Liammóir's early life and development are the subject of a study by Tom Madden, The Making of an Artist: Creating the Irishman Micheál MacLiammóir.[6]

In 1924, Marjorie Willmore married Anew McMaster, an actor with his own company. Newly renamed, Mac Liammóir joined his brother-in-law's company on a tour of Ireland, presenting himself as a descendant of Irish Roman Catholics from Cork.[5] While there, he met the man who would become his partner and lover, Hilton Edwards.[7] Their first meeting took place in the Athenaeum, Enniscorthy, County Wexford. Deciding to remain in Dublin,[7] where they lived at Harcourt Terrace, the pair assisted with the inaugural production of Galway's Irish language theatre, An Taibhdhearc; the play was Mac Liammóir's version of the mythical story Diarmuid agus Gráinne, in which Mac Liammóir played the lead role as Diarmuid.[8]

Mac Liammóir and Edwards then threw themselves into their own venture, co-founding the Gate Theatre in Dublin in 1928. The Gate became a showcase for modern plays and design (even as Mac Liammóir himself maintained an ongoing fascination with Celticism). Mac Liammóir's set and costume designs were key elements of the Gate's success. His many notable acting roles included Robert Emmet/The Speaker in Denis Johnston's The Old Lady Says "No!" and the title role in Hamlet.

In 1948, he appeared in the NBC television production of Great Catherine with Gertrude Lawrence. In 1951, during a break in the making of Othello, Mac Liammóir produced Orson Welles's ghost-story Return to Glennascaul which was directed by Hilton Edwards. He played Iago in Welles's film version of Othello (1952). His Iago is unusual in that Mac Liammóir was about fifty (and looked older) when he played the role, while the play gives Iago's age as 28. This may have been because of Welles's intended interpretation – he wanted Iago played as an older "impotent" man consumed by envy for the younger Othello.[9] The following year, he went on to play 'Poor Tom' in another Welles project, the TV film of King Lear (1953) for CBS.

Mac Liammóir wrote and performed a one-man show, The Importance of Being Oscar, based on the life and work of Oscar Wilde. The Telefís Éireann production won him a Jacob's Award in December 1964. It was later filmed by the BBC with Mac Liammóir reprising the role.

He narrated the 1963 film Tom Jones and was the Irish storyteller in 30 Is a Dangerous Age, Cynthia (1968) which starred Dudley Moore.

In 1969 he had a supporting role in John Huston's The Kremlin Letter. In 1970 Mac Liammóir performed the role of narrator on the cult album Peace on Earth by the Northern Irish showband, the Freshmen and in 1971 he played an elocution teacher in Curtis Harrington's What's the Matter with Helen?.

Edwards and Mac Liammóir were the subject of a biography, titled The Boys by Christopher Fitz-Simon. This obliquely references Mac Liammóir's homosexual relationship with General Eoin O'Duffy, former Garda Síochána Commissioner and head of the paramilitary Blueshirts in Ireland, during the 1920s, depicted by the Irish playwright Mary Manning, in a documentary, Dear Boy, directed by Donald Taylor Black and broadcast on Raidio Teilefis Eireann in 1999.

Edwards and MacLiammoir are buried alongside each other at St. Fintan's Cemetery, Sutton, Dublin.[10]

In 1973, he and Edwards were granted the Freedom of the City of Dublin.

Frank McGuinness's play "Gates of Gold" is a nod to Edwards and Mac Liammóir[11]

Although he adopted acting as his career, he continued to paint throughout his lifetime. He also wrote three books of autobiography in Irish and translated them into English.[12]

Mac Liammóir is the subject of the 1990 play The Importance of Being Micheál (also published as a book, not to be confused with a memoir with the same title, by Micheal O hAodha, also published in 1990) by John Keyes.

The academic Éibhear Walshe of University College Cork notes that Mac Liammóir and Edwards did not ever identify themselves as gay as "Irish cultural discourse simply didn’t accommodate any public sexual identity outside the heterosexual consensus", noting that Irish society at the time only recorded lesbian and gay communities and cultures "in police records, prosecutions of men for same sex activities or medical records of institutional committals of men and women for the mental illness of inversion".[13]

They were, however, prominent features on the Dublin social scene and as Walshe notes elsewhere "MacLiammóir [sic] and his partner Edwards survived, and even flourished, as Ireland's only visible gay couple". Walshe goes on to say that "when MacLiammóir died in 1978, the president of Ireland attended his funeral, as did the taoiseach and several government ministers, while Hilton Edwards was openly deferred to and sympathised [with] as chief mourner"[14]

The International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival presents an award for "Best Actor" in his name.

• List of people on stamps of Ireland

Notes

Sources

• Fitz-Simon, Christopher. The Boys: A Double Biography.
• Holmstrom, John. The Moving Picture Boy: An International Encyclopaedia from 1895 to 1995, Norwich, Michael Russell, 1996, pp. 15–16.

• Recording of MacLiammóir reading from the Book of Genesis on YouTube
• Micheál Mac Liammóir at IMDb