Micheál Mac Liammóir (born Alfred Lee Willmore; 25 October 1899 – 6 March 1978) was an actor, designer, dramatist, writer, and impresario in 20th-century Ireland. Though born in London to an English family with no Irish connections, he emigrated to Ireland in early adulthood, changed his name, invented an Irish ancestry, and remained based there for the rest of his life, successfully maintaining a fabricated identity as a native Irishman born in Cork.

With his partner, Hilton Edwards, and two others, Mac Liammóir founded the Gate Theatre in Dublin, and became one of the most recognisable figures in the arts in twentieth-century Ireland. As well as acting at the Gate and internationally, he designed numerous productions, wrote eleven plays, and published stories, verse and travel books in Irish and English. He wrote and appeared in three one-man shows, of which The Importance of Being Oscar (1960) was the most celebrated, achieving more than 1,300 performances.

Life and career

Early years

thumb|right|As King Goldfish, 1911

Mac Liammóir was born Alfred Lee Willmore, in Willesden, in north-west London, into a family with no Irish connections. He was the youngest child and only son of Alfred George Willmore (1863–1934), a forage buyer for the firm of Whitney's of Bayswater, and his wife, Mary, née Lee (1867–1918).

He attended primary school in Willesden and then attended a children's theatre academy run by Lila Field. He became a professional actor at the age of twelve; his sister Marjorie took charge of his general education and was his chaperone on tours that included visits to venues in Ireland as well as Britain. He made his debut in 1911, as King Goldfish in Field's play The Goldfish, He later said, "I learned from Lila Field the absolute ABC of getting on and off the stage without disgracing oneself; I learned what a cue meant, what a stick of greasepaint was, the elements of timing, and that ghastly thing, the exploitation of childish charm". In September of that year he first worked for Sir Herbert Tree, playing Macduff's son in Macbeth. he studied painting at Willesden Polytechnic and then the Slade School of Art in 1915–16.|group=n Both students developed a keen interest in the Irish Literary Revival. The following month he went with O'Keefe and her mother to Ireland, the former having contracted tuberculosis and been prescribed "fresh air", the latter anxious to escape Zeppelin raids. Fitz-Simon suggests that Mac Liammóir's motive was to escape conscription into the army in the latter stages of the First World War.

Mary O'Keefe died in 1927. Mac Liammóir, now known by that name, returned to the theatre. His sister Marjorie had married the actor-manager Anew McMaster whose touring company Mac Liammóir joined,

Gate Theatre

Gate Theatre, Dublin<br /><small>(2018 photograph)</small>|thumb|alt=Exterior shot of grand neo-classical theatre in urban setting

In 1928 Mac Liammóir wrote, directed, designed and starred in Diarmuid and Gráinne for the opening of the Irish language theatre, An Taibhdhearc, in Galway. He subsequently produced twenty plays there. and Gearóid Ó Lochlainn. Mac Liammóir and Edwards had been considering theatrical plans for Dublin, while Bannard Cogley (a friend of Mac Liammóir) and Ó Lochlainn had been discussing finding a more permanent theatre space, and they met, along with some mutual friends, in Bannard Cogley's club at 7 Harcourt Street, in spring 1928. After further meetings, the quartet rented the Peacock Theatre and launched the Gate Theatre Studio there on 14 October 1928. The theatre studio spent its early years at the 102-seat Peacock Theatre and opened with a production of Peer Gynt, and Mac Liammóir subsequently acted in and designed nearly 300 productions at the Peacock and, after the company gained its own home in 1930, on Cavendish Row, at the Gate. He appeared in a wide range of plays, from Shakespeare (Romeo and Othello) to Ibsen (Oswald in Ghosts and the title role in Brand) and Eugene O'Neill (Orin in Mourning Becomes Electra), as well as lighter pieces.|group=n

Mac Liammóir returned to the West End in 1935, with the Gate company. The theatrical paper The Era rated his Hamlet one of the best in recent years: "charged with force, intelligence, humanity and dramatic certainty … a dominating and moving piece of acting", and said that the Gate company "looks like putting the Abbey in the shade". The cosmopolitan atmosphere of Mac Liammóir and Edwards' Gate Theatre was contrasted with the earnest Celticism of the Abbey, and the two Dublin theatres were affectionately dubbed "Sodom and Begorrah".

Wartime and later years

Mac Liammóir remained based in Ireland during the Second World War. In the post-war years, he returned to the West End in his own play Ill Met by Moonlight. The Stage thought the piece "too obscure and too discursive", but praised the performances of Mac Liammóir, Edwards and their supporting cast. The following year the company played a short season on Broadway – Mac Liammóir's début there – giving his Where Stars Walk, Johnston's The Old Lady Says No!, and Shaw's John Bull's Other Island. Mac Liammóir returned to the role onstage at the Dublin Festival in 1962 opposite William Marshall in the title role.|group=n

In 1954 Mac Liammóir returned to London, playing Brack in Hedda Gabler with Peggy Ashcroft as Hedda. In the role he was judged to be both sinister and amusing. Most of his work continued to be at the Gate, but in 1959 he returned to New York to play Don Pedro in Much Ado About Nothing, with John Gielgud as Benedick and Margaret Leighton as Beatrice.

Mac Liammóir's biggest theatrical success came in 1960, with his one-man show The Importance of Being Oscar, which won enthusiastic reviews and did well at the box office. It opened at the Gate, after which he played it on Broadway, in London and on tour around the world. He appeared in the piece more than 1,300 times between 1960 and 1975. He followed this in May 1963 with a new one-man entertainment I Must Be Talking to My Friends, and in 1970 presented a third, Talking About Yeats.|group=n The writer Éibhear Walshe has described them as Ireland's only publicly acknowledged homosexuals. They were jointly created freemen of the city of Dublin in 1973, the first theatre people to be thus honoured. For many years after his death, reference books continued to record him inaccurately as a native of Cork.

Works

Plays

In his Who's Who in the Theatre entry, Mac Liammóir listed ten plays of which he was the author, as well as the three one-man shows, and an unspecified number of adaptations ("Jane Eyre, The Picture of Dorian Grey, A Tale of Two Cities, etc.")

  • Henry VIII (Page) (1911)
  • Enoch Arden (1914)
  • The Little Minister (Micah Dow) (1915)
  • Comin' Thro' the Rye (1916)
  • Land of Her Fathers (1924)
  • Hamlet at Elsinore (1951)
  • Othello (Iago) (1951)
  • Tom Jones (Narrator) (1963)
  • 30 Is a Dangerous Age, Cynthia (Irish storyteller) (1968)
  • The Kremlin Letter (Sweet Alice) (1970)
  • What's the Matter with Helen? (Hamilton Starr) (1971)

Ballet scenarios

An Cóitín Dearg (The Red Petticoat), choreography by Joan Denise Moriarty, music by Aloys Fleischmann, costume and set designs by MacLiammóir, first performed in May 1951 in Cork by the Cork Ballet Company, accompanied by the Cork Symphony Orchestra.

The Enchanted Stream, based on the poem by W.B. Yeats 'Song of Wandering Aengus', choreography by Anton Dolin, music Rondes de Printemps by Debussy, décor by Edward Delany, first performed by the London Festival Ballet, accompanied by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, at the Dublin International Theatre Festival of 1959.

Full Moon for the Bride, choreography by Joan Denise Moriarty, music by A. J. Potter, costume and set designs by MacLiammóir, first performed in Cork and then in Dublin's Gaiety Theatre in November 1974 by the Cork Ballet Company, accompanied by the Cork Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Aloys Fleischmann.

Biographies

Books about Mac Liammóir include Micheál Mac Liammóir: Designs & Illustrations 1917–1972, by Richard Pine and Orla Murphy (1973); Enter Certain Players: Edwards–MacLiammoir and the Gate 1928–1978, edited by Peter Luke (1978); a biography, The Importance of Being Micheál by Micheál Ó hAodha (1990) and The Boys: A Double Biography, by Christopher Fitz-Simon (1996).

In 1985, Orson Welles was the narrator for Two People... With One Pulse, a documentary film about Mac Liammoir and Edwards. To mark Mac Liammóir's centenary in 1999 the BBC commissioned a documentary, Dear Boy: The Story of Michéal Mac Liammóir, which included rare archive footage.

Mac Liammóir is the subject of the 1990 play The Importance of Being Micheál by John Keyes; Frank McGuinness's play 2008 Gates of Gold is inspired by Edwards and Mac Liammóir; and Mac Liammóir is the subject of Antoine Ó Flatharta's 2023 play Wáltsáil Abhaile.

Commemorations

The annual Dublin Gay Theatre Festival presents the "Michéal Mac Liammóir Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male".

Notes, references and sources

Notes

References

Sources

Academic articles on Mac Liammóir available in open access regime

  • Markus, Radvan. "Micheál mac Liammóir, the Irish Language, and the Idea of Freedom." Marguérite Corporaal and Ruud van den Beuken, eds. A Stage of Emancipation: Change and Progress at the Dublin Gate Theatre. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021, 113–131.
  • Dean, Joan Fitzpatrick, and Radvan Markus. "The Internationalist Dramaturgy of Hilton Edwards and Micheál mac Liammóir." Ondřej Pilný, Ruud van den Beuken, Ian R. Walsh, eds. Cultural Convergences: The Dublin Gate Theatre, 1928–1960. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, 15–46.