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Birth of Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany

Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany FRSL, Anglo-Irish writer and dramatist, is born in London, England, on July 24, 1878. Over 90 volumes of fiction, essays, poems and plays appear in his lifetime, and a modest amount of material is published posthumously.

Plunkett, known to his family as “Eddie,” is the first son of John William Plunkett, 17th Baron of Dunsany (1853–1899), and his wife, Ernle Elizabeth Louisa Maria Grosvenor Ernle-Erle-Drax (née Burton) (1855–1916). From a historically wealthy and famous family, he is related to many well-known Irish figures. He is a kinsman of the Catholic Saint Oliver Plunkett, the martyred Archbishop of Armagh. He is also related to the prominent Anglo-Irish unionist and later nationalist Home Rule politician Sir Horace Plunkett and George Noble Plunkett, Papal Count and Republican politician, father of Joseph Plunkett, executed for his part in the 1916 Easter Rising.

Plunkett’s only grown sibling, a younger brother, from whom he is estranged from about 1916, for reasons not fully clear but connected to his mother’s will, is the noted British naval officer Sir Reginald Drax. Another younger brother dies in infancy.

Plunkett grows up at the family properties, notably, Dunstall Priory in Shoreham, Kent, and Dunsany Castle in County Meath, but also in family homes such as in London. His schooling is at Cheam School, Eton College and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, which he enters in 1896.

The title passes to Plunkett at his father’s death in 1899 at a fairly young age. The young Lord Dunsany returns to Dunsany Castle in 1901 after war duty. In that year he is also confirmed as an elector for the Representative Peers for Ireland in the House of Lords.

In 1903, Plunkett meets Lady Beatrice Child Villiers (1880–1970), youngest daughter of Victor Child Villiers, 7th Earl of Jersey, who is then living at Osterley Park. They marry in 1904. Their one child, Randal, is born in 1906. Lady Beatrice is supportive of her husband’s interests and helps him by typing his manuscripts, selecting work for his collections, including the 1954 retrospective short story collection, and overseeing his literary heritage after his death.

The Plunketts are socially active in Dublin and London and travel between homes in Meath, London and Kent, other than during the First and Second World Wars and the Irish War of Independence. He circulates with many literary figures of the time. To many of these in Ireland he is first introduced by his uncle, the co-operative pioneer Sir Horace Plunkett, who also helps to manage his estate and investments for a time. He is friendly, for example, with George William Russell, Oliver St. John Gogarty, and for a time, W. B. Yeats. He also socialises at times with George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells and is a friend of Rudyard Kipling.

In 1910 Plunkett commissions a two-story extension to Dunsany Castle, with a billiard room, bedrooms and other facilities. The billiard room includes the crests of all the Lords Dunsany up to the 18th.

Plunkett serves as a second lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards in the Second Boer War. Volunteering in World War I and appointed Captain in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, he is stationed for a time at Ebrington Barracks in Derry, Northern Ireland. Hearing while on leave of disturbances in Dublin during the Easter Rising of 1916, he drives in to offer help and is wounded by a bullet lodged in his skull. After recovery at Jervis Street Hospital and what is then the King George V Hospital (now St. Bricin’s Military Hospital), he returns to duty. His military belt is lost in the episode and later used at the burial of Michael Collins. Having been refused forward positioning in 1916 and listed as valuable as a trainer, he serves in the later war stages in the trenches and in the final period writing propaganda material for the War Office with MI7b. There is a book at Dunsany Castle with wartime photographs, on which lost members of his command are marked.

During the Irish War of Independence, Plunkett is charged with violating the Restoration of Order in Ireland Act 1920, tried by court-martial on February 4, 1921, convicted, and sentenced to pay a fine of 25 pounds or serve three months in prison without labour. The Crown Forces had searched Dunsany Castle and had found two double-barrelled shotguns, two rook rifles, four Very pistols, an automatic pistol and a large quantity of pistol ammunition, along with shotgun and rifle ammunition.

During World War II, Plunkett signs up for the Irish Army Reserve and the British Home Guard, the two countries’ local defence forces, and is especially active in Shoreham, Kent, the English village bombed most during the Battle of Britain.

Plunkett’s fame arises chiefly from his prolific writings. He is involved in the Irish Literary Revival. Supporting the Revival, he is a major donor to the Abbey Theatre, and he moves in Irish literary circles. He is well acquainted with W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Percy French, George “AE” Russell, Oliver St. John Gogarty, Padraic Colum and others. He befriends and supports Francis Ledwidge, to whom he gives the use of his library, and Mary Lavin.

Plunkett makes his first literary tour to the United States in 1919 and further such visits up to the 1950s, in the early years mostly to the eastern seaboard and later, notably, to California. His own work and contribution to the Irish literary heritage are recognised with an honorary degree from Trinity College Dublin.

In 1940, Plunkett is appointed Byron Professor of English in the University of Athens in Greece. Having reached Athens by a circuitous route, he is so successful that he is offered a post as Professor of English in Istanbul. However, he has to be evacuated due to the German invasion of Greece in April 1941, returning home by an even more complex route, his travels forming a basis for a long poem published in book form (A Journey, in 5 cantos: The Battle of Britain, The Battle of Greece, The Battle of the Mediterranean, Battles Long Ago, The Battle of the Atlantic, special edition January 1944). Olivia Manning‘s character Lord Pinkrose in her novel sequence the Fortunes of War is a mocking portrait of Dunsany in that period.

In 1947, Plunkett transfers his Meath estate in trust to his son and heir and settles in Kent at his Shoreham house, Dunstall Priory, not far from the home of Rudyard Kipling. He visits Ireland only occasionally thereafter and engages actively in life in Shoreham and London. He also begins a new series of visits to the United States, notably California, as recounted in Hazel Littlefield-Smith’s biographical Dunsany, King of Dreams.

In 1957, Plunkett becomes ill while dining with the Earl and Countess of Fingall at Dunsany, in what proves to be an attack of appendicitis. He dies in hospital in Dublin, at the age of 79, on October 25, 1957. He is buried in the churchyard of the ancient church of St. Peter and St. Paul, Shoreham, Kent. His funeral is attended by many family members, representatives of his old regiment and various bodies in which he had taken an interest, and figures from Shoreham. A memorial service is held at Kilmessan in County Meath, with a reading of “Crossing the Bar,” which coincides with the passing of a flock of geese.

Beatrice survives Plunkett, living mainly at Shoreham and overseeing his literary legacy until her death in 1970. Their son Randal succeeds to the barony and is in turn succeeded by his grandson, the artist Edward Plunkett. Plunkett’s literary rights pass from Beatrice to Edward.


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Birth of Mary Manning, Novelist, Playwright & Film Critic

Mary Manning Howe Adams, Irish novelist, playwright and film critic, is born in Dublin on June 30, 1905.

Raised in Dublin, Manning goes to school in Morehampton House and Alexandra College, Dublin. She gets her theatre training in Sara Allgood‘s teaching class in the Abbey Theatre.

Prior to her career as a writer and filmmaker, Manning works as a film critic throughout the 1920s and 30s. She works as a film critic for The Irish Statesman for a year during that time until it goes out of business. She is known to disapprove of Hollywood‘s “unimaginable stories and its stereotypical portrayal of Ireland and the Irish.” She also works as a writer for the Gate Theatre. She adapts the short story “Guests of the Nation” for a film directed by Denis Johnston. She also helps found the Dublin Film Society in 1930 and co-founds the Gate Theatre arts magazine Motley in 1932.

From 1914 to 1926, Ireland experiences a surge of new film styles being produced, consisting of historical melodramas and romantic comedies. Following this, 1930 to 1935 births a second wave of industry produced silent films that are intended to be less cliche compared to the first wave. The films produced under the second wave are much more experimental and deal less with the commercial appeals of the first wave. There’s minimal information on how Manning specifically contributed to the second wave, however, it is stated that she plays an important role producing five out of the six films to come out of that wave.

In 1935, Manning moves to Boston where she marries Harvard Law School professor Mark De Wolfe Howe. They have three daughters, Fanny, Susan and Helen. When her husband dies, she returns to Dublin in 1967 and lives in Monkstown, County Dublin, for another ten years. During this time she writes for various publications such as The Hibernia Magazine, The Irish Times and The Atlantic. She later returns to live in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Manning is a founder of the Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and works as drama director at Radcliffe College during World War II. She marries Faneuil Adams of Boston, Massachusetts, in 1980.

Manning dies at the age of 93 on June 27, 1999, at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts.


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Death of Irish Actor Ray McAnally

Ray McAnally, Irish actor and winner of four BAFTA awards in the late 1980s, dies in County Wicklow on June 15, 1989.

McAnally is born on March 30, 1926, in Buncrana, a seaside town located on the Inishowen peninsula of County Donegal. The son of a bank manager, he is educated at Saint Eunan’s College in Letterkenny where he writes, produces and stages a musical called “Madame Screwball” at the age of sixteen. He enters St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth at the age of 18 but leaves after a short time having decided that the priesthood is not his vocation. He joins the Abbey Theatre in 1947 where he meets and marries actress Ronnie Masterson.

The couple later forms Old Quay Productions and present an assortment of classic plays in the 1960s and 1970s. McAnally makes his theatre debut in 1962 with A Nice Bunch of Cheap Flowers and gives a well-received performance as George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, opposite Constance Cummings, at the Piccadilly Theatre.

On television he is a familiar face, often in glossy thriller series like television series The Avengers, Man in a Suitcase, and Strange Report. In 1968 he takes the title role in Spindoe, a series charting the return to power of an English gangster, Alec Spindoe, after a five-year prison term. This is a spin-off from another series, The Fellows (1967) in which McAnally had appeared in several episodes as the Spindoe character. He could render English accents very convincingly.

McAnally regularly acts in the Abbey Theatre and at Irish festivals, but in the last decade of life he achieves award-winning notice on TV and films. His impressive performance as Cardinal Altamirano in the film The Mission (1986) earns him Evening Standard and BAFTA awards. He earns a second BAFTA award for his role in the BBC’s A Perfect Spy (1987). In 1988 he wins the BAFTA for Best Actor for his performance in A Very British Coup, a role that also brings him a Jacob’s Award. In the last year of his life, he portrays the father of Christy Brown, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, in the Academy Award-winning film, My Left Foot (1989).

McAnally dies suddenly of a heart attack on June 15, 1989, at the age of 63, at his home in County Wicklow which he shares with Irish actress Britta Smith. He remains married to actress Ronnie Masterson until his death, although they reside in different homes. He receives a posthumous BAFTA award for Best Supporting Actor for his last film, My Left Foot, in 1990.

At the time of his death, McAnally is due to play “Bull McCabe” in Jim Sheridan‘s film The Field. The part eventually goes to Richard Harris who receives an Academy Award nomination for his performance. McAnally had also been cast in the lead role of First and Last, a drama about a man who walked from Land’s End to John o’ Groats. Filming is almost a third of the way done when he dies, but the whole play has to be re-filmed, with Joss Ackland taking the role instead.


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Birth of Shelah Richards, Actress, Manager, Director & Producer

Shelah Geraldine Richards, Irish actress, manager, director and producer, is born in Dublin on May 23, 1903.

Richards is born to John William Richards, a lawyer, and Adelaide Roper, suffragist who had chained herself to the railings in St. Stephen’s Green. She goes to school at Alexandra College, Dublin, and after that she attends a finishing school in Paris. Though her family is not in the arts, her godmother is Beatrice Elvery. Shes attends Elvery’s salons with her parents as a child. She meets W. B. Yeats when she is sixteen. Her niece, Geraldine Fitzgerald, daughter of her sister, Edith Catherine Richards, is also one of Ireland’s pre-eminent actresses.

Richards’s acting career starts while attending the Dublin drama league and she is asked at short notice to replace Eileen Crowe in Juno and the Paycock, playing the role of Mary Boyle in the Abbey Theatre production. Richards gets the role of Nora Clithero in the 1926 production of The Plough and the Stars, Seán O’Casey‘s next production. This role means that she ends up with police protection for the duration of the run due to the disturbances the play engenders. Another important role is to take on playing the lead in The Player Queen by Yeats. Maire O’Neill had previously made the role her own and Yeats had let no one perform the part since then so taking on such a challenge is intimidating. Richards continues to take on leading roles with the Abbey Theatre but in 1926 she also begins to direct.

On December 28, 1928, Richards marries playwright Denis Johnston in St. Anne’s Church in Dublin. She tours the United States with the Abbey players in 1932 and with the Irish Players in the mid 1930s. A role in 1938 in Molly Keane‘s Spring Meeting starring Gladys Cooper and A. E. Matthews takes her to Broadway in New York City. War in Europe breaks out while the run is still going on and Richards is advised to stay in the United States. However, by then she has two children, producer Micheal and novelist Jennifer Johnston, so she returns to Dublin. There she runs her own theater company at the Olympia Theatre with Nigel Heseltine. Her marriage to Johnston, broken in 1938, ends with divorce in February 1945.

Richards next challenge is to take over the Abbey School of Acting. During her time there one of the designers she works with is Louis le Brocquy. With Siobhán McKenna she produces The Playboy of the Western World in Edinburgh to huge success allowing her to stage it in London and Dublin and later in Toronto‘s Library Theater. She brings Marcel Marceau to Dublin for the first time. She continues to act and has some film roles.

In 1961 Ireland launches its first television service, Raidió Teilifís Éireann. Richards is one of the first producers, recommended to the station by Hilton Edwards. She is one of the few women in the new station. The first Irish play produced during the opening week is directed by her and she is nominated for a Best Actress award in another production, Inquiry at Lisieux. She works as producer on a wide number of programs for the station including documentaries, soap operas and religious programming. Both Tolka Row and The Riordans are produced by her as well as Denis Johnston’s The Moon on the Yellow River, George Bernard Shaw‘s Arms and the Man and John Millington Synge‘s Riders to the Sea.

Richards retires from her RTÉ career in the early 1970s though she continues to raise funds for the Gate Theatre through the Edwards–MacLiammóir Playhouse Society. In 1983, for her 80th birthday, the Abbey puts on a party for her which includes a special rendition of “Nora” from The Plough and the Stars. Richards is the last living member of the original 1926 cast. The song is repeated at her funeral in 1985. She died in Ballybrack, County Dublin, on January 19, 1985. Her funeral is held in St. Anne’s Church in Dublin and she is cremated in Glasnevin Cemetery.


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Birth of Máire Nic Shiubhlaigh, Actress & Republican Activist

Máire Nic Shiubhlaigh, Irish actress and republican activist, is born Mary Elizabeth Walker in Charlemont Street, Dublin, on May 8, 1883. She starts acting in her teens and appears in the first Irish language play performed in Ireland. She is a founder-member of the Abbey Theatre and is leading lady on its opening night in 1904, when she plays the title role in W. B. Yeats‘s Cathleen ni Houlihan. She later joins the Theatre of Ireland, which she helps to found.

Nic Shiubhlaigh is born into a nationalist and Irish-speaking family. Her father, Matthew, comes from County Carlow and is a printer and publisher who becomes proprietor of the Gaelic Press. Her mother, Mary, is a dressmaker from Dublin. She grows up in 56 High Street in the Dublin Liberties.

Nic Shiubhlaigh joins the Gaelic League about 1898 and comes into contact with Arthur Griffith and William Rooney. She joins the cultural and revolutionary women’s group Inghinidhe na hÉireann in 1900. With the help of drama enthusiasts William and Frank Fay, she starts acting with the drama group of Inghinidhe na hÉireann. In 1901, the drama group takes part in a feis with two plays, Tobar Draoidheachta by Patrick S. Dinneen and Red Hugh by Alice Milligan. George Russell and W.B. Yeats, who are in attendance at the performance, are moved by the dedication of the amateur players. Russell, who had already offered the Fays his mythic play Deirdre, persuades Yeats to offer them his patriotic play, Cathleen ni Houlihan.

In 1902, Nic Shiubhlaigh joins W. G. Fay’s Irish National Dramatic Company, along with others such as Maire Quinn, Brian Callender, Charles Caulfield, James H. Cousins, P. J. Kelly, Dudley Digges and Frederick Ryan. Their first production of the two one-act plays, Cathleen ni Houlihan, with Maud Gonne in the lead role, and Deirdre, is on April 2, 1902. The company, which has no funds to speak of, acquires a couple of bare rooms at 34 Lower Camden Street, which with the help of friends from Irish-revival societies, they turn into a tiny theatre. They rehearse at the Coffee Palace and also use the Molesworth Hall for productions. In March 1903, with other members of her family, she appears in the first production of Yeats’ morality play, The Hour-Glass, in which she plays the part of the Angel.

In 1903, the playwrights and most of the actors and staff from these productions go on to form the Irish National Theatre Society, which has its registered offices in the Camden Street theatre. Nic Shiubhlaigh is a founder member and on the management committee of the society. Yeats is president, while Russell, Maud Gonne and Douglas Hyde are vice-presidents. William Fay is stage manager. The society founds the Abbey Theatre.

Nic Shiubhlaigh acts in the Abbey Theatre from the time of its founding. On its opening night on December 27, 1904, she plays the name part in Cathleen ni Houlihan. Her portrait is painted by John Butler Yeats for the occasion and hangs in the vestibule. She is the principal actress of the company after Máire Quinn’s departure to the United States, and when she leaves, the burden of the chief women’s rôles falls upon Sara Allgood.

In September 1905, the Abbey administrator and financial backer, an English theatre impresario called Annie Horniman, in hopes of improving the artistic quality of the productions at the Abbey, offers to guarantee salaries (a sum of £500 per year) for the actors and for Willie Fay as producer. To her mind, this will allow the actors and Fay to dispense with their day jobs and concentrate wholly upon their acting. The more nationally-minded members of the staff disagree. Nic Shiubhlaigh writes, “It was pointed out that the old Irish National Theatre Society had been founded in 1902 on the understanding that its independence as a national movement was to be secured only through the efforts of its members. It would be contrary to these ideals to accept a subsidy from an independent source.” For them it would mean a choice between a national theatre and an artistic theatre. At a meeting of the society, supported by Yeats, Gregory and Synge, the motion to accept Miss Horniman’s proposition is passed by a majority of shareholdings rather than a majority of votes. Nic Shiubhlaigh along with others resign, but they agree to remain until the end of the year, as part of an upcoming tour of England.

Nic Shiubhlaigh remains with the Abbey until December 1905, when along with Honor Lavelle (also known as Helen Laird), Emma Vernon, Máire Garvey, Frank Walker, Seumas O’Sullivan, Padraic Colum and George Roberts, she leaves. She joins the Theatre of Ireland, which she helps to found. This is formed in June 1906 with aims similar to the Irish National Theatre Society. She returns to the Abbey in 1910.

At the time of the 1916 Easter Rising, Nic Shiubhlaigh is living in Glasthule, a suburb of Dublin. She cycles into the city and, along with other members of Cumann na mBan, makes her way to Jacob’s Biscuit Factory, whose garrison under the command of Thomas MacDonagh guards the city against the troops of Portobello Barracks, and acts as an information and supplies hub for other garrisons around the city. She commands the women of the garrison. They remain there until the surrender, cooking and rendering first aid to the garrison, and bringing despatches through the city.

Nic Shiubhlaigh had retired from professional acting in 1912, and seldom works in professional theatre again. In 1929, she marries former IRA Director of Organisation, Major General Eamon “Bob” Price, and they move to Laytown, County Meath.

Nic Shiubhlaigh’s last stage appearance, alongside her sister Gypsy, is in a production of Gaol Gate at the Olympia Theatre, Dublin, on November 21, 1948, staged to mark the 150th anniversary of the death of Theobald Wolfe Tone.

Nic Shiubhlaigh dies on September 9, 1958, in the Drogheda cottage hospital.

Her book, The Splendid Years, written with the help of her nephew Edward Kenny, recalls the years of the national revival and the Easter Rising.

On July 23, 1966, a plaque bearing Nic Shiubhlaigh’s name is unveiled at the Abbey Theatre by the Taoiseach, Seán Lemass. The others named on the plaque are Ellen Bushell, Sean Connolly, Helena Molony, Arthur Shields, Peadar Kearney and Barney Murphy.

(Pictured: 1904 portrait of Máire Nic Shiubhlaigh, as painted by John Butler Yeats)


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Death of Frank O’Connor, Poet & Novelist

Frank O’Connor, Irish writer of over 150 works and best known for his short stories and memoirs, dies of a heart attack in Dublin on March 10, 1966. The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award is named in his honour.

O’Connor is born Michael Francis O’Donovan in Cork, County Cork, on September 17, 1903. The only child of Minnie (née O’Connor) and Michael O’Donovan, he attends Saint Patrick’s School on Gardiner’s Hill and North Monastery CBS. His early life is marked by his father’s alcoholism, debt, and ill-treatment of his mother. His childhood is shaped in part by his mother, who supplies much of the family’s income by cleaning houses, because his father is unable to keep steady employment due to his drunkenness. He adores his mother and is bitterly resentful of his father. In his memoirs, he recalls his childhood as “those terrible years,” and admits that he has never been able to forgive his father for his abuse of himself and his mother. When his mother is seventy, O’Connor is horrified to learn from his own doctor that she has suffered for years from chronic appendicitis, which she has endured with great stoicism, as she has never had the time nor the money to see a doctor.

In 1918 O’Connor joins the First Brigade of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and serves in combat during the Irish War of Independence. He opposes the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 and joins the Anti-Treaty IRA during the Irish Civil War, working in a small propaganda unit in Cork city. He is one of twelve thousand Anti-Treaty combatants who are interned by the government of the new Irish Free State. Between 1922 and 1923 he is imprisoned in Cork City Gaol and in Gormanston, County Meath.

Following his release, O’Connor takes various positions including that of teacher of the Irish language, theatre director, and librarian. He begins to move in literary circles and is befriended by George William Russell (Æ), through whom he comes to know most of the well-known Irish writers of the day, including William Butler Yeats, Lennox Robinson, F. R. Higgins and Lady Gregory. In his memoirs, he pays tribute to both Yeats and Russell for the help and encouragement they gave him.

In 1935, O’Connor becomes a member of the board of directors of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, founded by Yeats and other members of the Irish National Theatre Society. In 1937, he becomes managing director of the Abbey. Following Yeats’s death in 1939, O’Connor’s long-standing conflict with other board members comes to a head and he leaves the Abbey later that year. In 1950, he accepts invitations to teach in the United States, where many of his short stories have been published in The New Yorker and have won great acclaim. He spends much of the 1950s in the United States, although it is always his intention to return eventually to Ireland.

From the 1930s to the 1960s O’Connor is a prolific writer of short stories, poems, plays, and novellas. His work as an Irish teacher complements his plethora of translations into English of Irish poetry, including his initially banned translation of Brian Merriman‘s Cúirt an Mheán Oíche (The Midnight Court). Many of his writings are based on his own life experiences – notably his well-known The Man of the House in which he reveals childhood details concerning his early life in County Cork. The Sullivan family in this short story, like his own boyhood family, is lacking a proper father figure.

O’Connor’s early years are recounted in An Only Child, a memoir published in 1961 which has the immediacy of a precocious diary. He continues his autobiography through his time with the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in his book My Father’s Son, which is published posthumously in 1968. It contains valuable character sketches of many of the leading Irish literary figures of the 1930s, in particular Yeats and Æ.

Frank O’Connor has a stroke while teaching at Stanford University in 1961, and he later dies from a heart attack in Dublin on March 10, 1966. He is buried in Deans Grange Cemetery two days later.


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Birth of Playwright Michael Joseph Molloy

Michael Joseph Molloy, Irish playwright, is born March 3, 1914, in Milltown, County Galway, the son of William Molloy, originally of Glenamaddy, County Galway, who runs a shop at Milltown, and Maria Molloy (née Tucker), a native of Claremorris, County Mayo, and a teacher at Milltown girls’ school.

Molloy is the fifth in a family of five boys and three girls. Two other children die at birth. He is educated at Milltown national school and St. Jarlath’s College, Tuam, County Galway, from 1927 to 1931. His father dies when he is six years old and his uncle, Sonny Tucker, becomes an important influence, encouraging his life-long habit of extensive reading. In 1931 he goes to St. Columba’s Seminary at Dalgan Park, Shrule, County Mayo, but discontinues his studies for the priesthood when he contracts tuberculosis. He undergoes several operations, has to use crutches for three years, and is left with a permanent limp. While under the care of the sanatorium in Newcastle, County Wicklow, in the late 1930s, he is encouraged by a friend to attend a performance of two plays by George Bernard Shaw, Candida and Village Wooing, at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. He becomes a regular playgoer and is inspired to begin a career as a dramatist.

Having lived in the family home at Milltown until 1955, he takes up residence at a nearby farmhouse on the marriage of his brother Christy. Despite his handicap, he works the small farm for the rest of his life to supplement the irregular income from his plays. He never marries and is attended by his housekeeper, Agnes Johnston. He is a familiar sight as he travels around his local area on the high bicycle he had fitted with one fixed pedal. The purpose of these journeys is to collect folklore, which provides a rich body of material for his plays and which he gathers into a prose volume, though this remains unpublished and privately held.

Molloy has nine of his thirteen plays produced at the Abbey Theatre, from Old Road in 1943 to Petticoat Loose in 1979. His plays reveal him as a folklorist in the line of John Millington Synge and draw on the same mixture of Christian and pagan beliefs, but with a more sympathetic understanding of his characters’ Catholicism. There is also the same strong vein of grotesque physical humour. His accomplished one-act play The Paddy Pedlar (1953) is based on a folk tale about a man carrying the body of his dead mother around in a sack and takes its bearings from an extraordinary amalgam of beliefs about the afterlife.

Molloy’s history plays re-create a world that shows the oppressions of colonialism on a subject race who respond with a wild anarchy mixed with subdued acceptance. His plays with a contemporary setting most often take emigration as their theme and are prophetic of later work by John B. Keane and Brian Friel. He writes in a heightened folk idiom, which only rarely loses touch with natural speech. Old Road wins an Abbey Prize and is staged in 1943 with Cyril Cusack as the young farm labourer trying to decide whether to emigrate to England or to stay in Ireland. Joseph Holloway gives a touching account of the shy author taking his curtain at this first production, who, though his lips move, is unable to say anything. The Visiting House follows in 1946, and dramatises a night of singing, dancing, and storytelling, peopled by a richly diverse cast of characters.

Molloy’s first masterpiece, The King of Friday’s Men, is launched in 1948. It takes the uncompromising theme of the droit du seigneur exercised by an eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish landlord on the most beautiful young women on his estate. His latest prey seeks to evade her fate by enticing the aged faction fighter, Bartley Dowd, to fight the landlord on her behalf. The play recreates that eighteenth-century world with colour, immediacy, and a strong sense of how the colonial system envelops all of the characters save the marginalised Bartley, who in the first production is played by the actor and author Walter Macken.

Molloy’s even greater The Wood of the Whispering follows in 1953 at the Queen’s Theatre, where the Abbey company is now playing. It is his most probing treatment of the effects of emigration, an issue of which Molloy, living in Galway, is only too aware. It is the most Beckettian of Irish plays, with its old tramp, Sanbatch Daly, and a host of older characters who are not so much eccentric as damaged in some profound way. At the play’s close Sanbatch feigns madness to gain entry to the asylum, though he is not in truth far from genuine madness. The various younger couples agree to stay and marry in Ireland rather than go their separate ways back to England. This idea of cultural renewal also underscores the importance Molloy places on the staging of his plays by amateur drama companies.

From the 1960s onwards Molloy’s plays are less readily accepted by the Abbey Theatre and a Dublin audience, but they still find a ready reception in his native place. In later works, such as Daughter from Over the Water (1963), the older characters retain their exuberance, but the younger ones seem beyond his reach. His last play, The Bachelor’s Daughter, is given its first performance by the Tuam Theatre Guild on March 3, 1985. The revival by Galway’s Druid Theatre of The Wood of the Whispering in 1983, which Molloy lives to see, is a revelation, and a reminder to the wider theatrical and academic world of the continuing importance of this playwright, not just as the ‘missing link’ between Synge and Keane but as an original in his own right.

In later years Molloy is a member of Aosdána. He dies of aortic aneurysms at Galway Hospital on May 27, 1994. He remains a committed Catholic all his life and his tombstone reads: “Woe to those who call evil good and who call good evil” (Isaiah, 5: 20).

(From: “Molloy, Michael Joseph” by Anthony Roche, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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Death of David Kelly, Film & Television Actor

David Kelly, Irish actor who has regular roles in several film and television works from the 1950s onwards, dies on February 12, 2012, in Goatstown, Dublin, following a short illness. One of the most recognisable voices and faces of Irish stage and screen, he is known for his roles as Rashers Tierney in Strumpet City, Cousin Enda in Me Mammy, the builder Mr. O’Reilly in Fawlty Towers, Albert Riddle in Robin’s Nest, and Grandpa Joe in the film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005). Another notable role is as Michael O’Sullivan in Waking Ned.

Kelly is born on July 11, 1929, in Dublin, and educated at Dublin’s Synge Street CBS Christian Brothers school. He begins acting at the age of eight at the city’s Gaiety Theatre, encouraged by a teacher at school. He also performs with the Rathmines and Rathgar Musical Society and goes on to train at the Abbey School of Acting. As a backup career, he additionally trains as a draughtsman and calligrapher, and also learns watercolour painting. He appears onstage in the original production of Brendan Behan‘s The Quare Fellow, and gains his first major career attention in Samuel Beckett‘s Krapp’s Last Tape at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in 1959. By then he has made his screen debut in a small part in director John Pomeroy’s 1958 film noir Dublin Nightmare.

One of Kelly’s first television appearances is on RTÉ in O’Dea’s Your Man (1964) in which he plays the part of Ignatius opposite Jimmy O’Dea. He goes on to become a familiar face on British television with the BBC comedy Me Mammy, opposite Milo O’Shea and Anna Manahan. He goes on to often-memorable guest roles on such series as Oh, Father! and Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Width, and particularly during the 1970s with a long-running role as the one-armed dishwasher Albert Riddle in the Man About the House spin-off Robin’s Nest. He also has a regular long running role alongside Bruce Forsyth in both series of the comedy Slinger’s Day from 1986 to 1987, and, in 1991, he appears in the first series of the BBC sitcom 2point4 Children as the cafe-owner Paddy.

Kelly gains some of his greatest recognition in 1975, playing inept builder Mr. O’Reilly on the second episode of Fawlty Towers (“The Builders”).

Kelly is in the voice cast of The Light Princess, a partly animated, hour-long family fantasy that airs on the BBC in 1978.

In Ireland, Kelly may be most famous for his portrayal of the character “Rashers” Tierney in the 1980 RTÉ miniseries Strumpet City, which stars Peter O’Toole, Cyril Cusack and Peter Ustinov. He goes on to have starring roles in television shows such as Emmerdale Farm in the 1980s and Glenroe in the 1990s, as well as playing the grandfather in Mike Newell‘s film Into the West (1992).

Following his appearance as Michael O’Sullivan in the 1998 film Waking Ned, Kelly plays roles in such films as Tim Burton‘s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), in which he plays Grandpa Joe, and Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London (2004). He plays title character Frank Kovak in the mystery film The Kovak Box, in a rare villainous role. In 2007, he appears in Stardust, which features Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer, and which is also his final film. He also does extensive radio work, including a guest appearance on the BBC Radio 4 series Baldi.

Kelly is married to actress Laurie Morton, who survives him, along with children David and Miriam. He dies at age 82 after a short illness on February 12, 2012. The Irish Times refers to him as the “grand old man of Irish acting.” A Catholic funeral mass takes place on February 16, 2012, at the Church of the Miraculous Medal, in his hometown of Dublin. He is cremated at Mount Jerome Cemetery and Crematorium.

Kelly wins a 1991 Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Supporting Performer, Non-Resident Production, for a Kennedy Center revival of The Playboy of the Western World. As well, he earns a Screen Actors Guild Awards nomination for the 1998 film Waking Ned. In 2005, he wins the Irish Film & Television Academy‘s Lifetime Achievement Award, in addition to earning a nomination for Best Supporting Actor for the film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.


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Birth of Geraldine Cummins, Spiritualist Medium, Novelist & Playwright

Geraldine Dorothy Cummins, spiritualist medium, novelist and playwright, is born in Cork, County Cork, on January 24, 1890. She began her career as a creative writer, but increasingly concentrates on mediumship and “channelled” writings, mostly about the lives of Jesus and Saint Paul, though she also publishes on a range of other topics. Her novels and plays typically document Irish life in a naturalist manner, often exploring the pathos of everyday life.

Cummins is the daughter of the physician Ashley Cummins, professor of medicine at the National University of Ireland and sister to Mary Hearn and Iris Cummins. In her youth she is an athlete, becoming a member of the Irish Women’s International Hockey Team. She is also active as a suffragette. Her desire to follow her father in a medical career is vetoed by her mother, so she begins a literary career as a journalist and creative writer. From 1913 to 1917 she writes three plays for the Abbey Theatre in collaboration with Suzanne R. Day, the most successful of which is the comedy Fox and Geese (1917). She publishes the novel The Land they Loved in 1919, a naturalistic study of working class Irish life.

As she concentrates on mediumship, Cummins’s literary work tails off. However, she continues to publish creative literature in her later years. Her solo-written play, Till Yesterday Comes Again, is produced by the Chanticleer Theatre, London, in 1938. She also publishes another novel, Fires of Beltane (1936) and a short-story collection Variety Show (1959).

Literary critic Alexander G. Gonzalez says that Cummins work tries to encompass the full range of Irish social life, from the aristocracy to the lower classes. In this respect she is influenced by Somerville and Ross. Gonzalez considers her short story The Tragedy of Eight Pence to be the “finest” of her writings, the tale of a “happily married woman trying to shield her ill husband from the knowledge that his death will leave her penniless.”

Cummins begins to work as a medium following prompting from Hester Dowden and E. B. Gibbes. She receives alleged messages from her spirit-guide “Astor” and is an exponent of automatic writing. Her books are based on these communications. In 1928 she publishes The Scripts of Cleophas, which provides channelled material on early Christian history complementing Acts of the Apostles and St. Paul’s writings, supposed to have been communicated by the spirit of Cleophas, one of Paul’s followers. This is later supplemented by Paul in Athens (1930) and The Great Days of Ephesus (1933).

Cummins’s next work describes human progress through spiritual enlightenment. The Road to Immortality (1932) provides a glowing vision of the afterlife. Its contents are purportedly communicated from the “other side” by the psychologist and psychic researcher Frederic W. H. Myers. Unseen Adventures (1951) is a spiritual autobiography. She also publishes several books of spiritually-derived knowledge about details of the life of Jesus.

During World War II Cummins allegedly works as a British agent, using her personal contacts to identify pro-Nazi factions within the Irish Republican movement. She also employs her psychic activities to support the Allied cause, sending channelled messages from sympathetic spirits to Allied leaders to support the war effort. This includes information from Theodore Roosevelt, Arthur Balfour and Sara Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt‘s mother.

In the 1940s and 50s Cummins works with psychiatrists to develop a model for using spiritualism to treat mental illness, ideas she explores in Perceptive Healing (1945) and Healing the Mind (1957). She collaborates with a psychiatrist who uses the pseudonym R. Connell on both books. Their method is for her to “read” an object associated with the patient and thus identify either childhood traumas or experiences of ancestors which have created the problem. This includes treating a patient who is concerned about his homosexual desires by discovering that this derives from the fact that his Huguenot ancestors were humiliated by Catholics in the 18th century.

Cummins’s biography of writer and spiritualist Edith Somerville is published in 1952. She also writes The Fate of Colonel Fawcett (1955) which offers her psychic insights into the disappearance of the explorer Percy Fawcett in Brazil in 1925. She claims she had received psychic messages from Fawcett in 1936. He was still alive at that time, informing her that he had found relics of Atlantis in the jungle, but was ill. In 1948 she has a message from Fawcett’s spirit reporting his death. Her last book is an account of her conversations with the spirit of Winifred Coombe Tennant, Swan on a Black Sea; a Study in Automatic Writing; the Cummins-Willett Scripts (1965).

The automatic writing and alleged channeled material from Cummins have been examined and have been described by some psychical researchers to be the product of her own subconscious. For example, Harry Price, who studies various mental mediums including Cummins, writes that “there is no question that most of the automatic writing which has been published is the product of the subconscious.” Paranormal researcher Hilary Evans notes that unlike most spiritualists, Cummins does not accept the phenomena at face value and questions the source of the material.

According to the psychical researcher Eric Dingwall information published in Cummins’ scripts allegedly from Winifred Coombe Tennant are discovered to be erroneous. Biographer Rodger Anderson writes that although spiritualists consider Cummins completely honest “some suspected that she occasionally augmented her store of knowledge about deceased persons by normal means if by doing so she could bring comfort to the bereaved.”

Cummins’ book The Fate of Colonel Fawcett (1955), contains her automatist scripts allegedly from the spirit of Colonel Fawcett. Spiritualists claim the scripts are evidence for survival. However, the psychical researcher Simeon Edmunds notes that before his disappearance Fawcett had written articles for The Occult Review. Cummins also contributes articles to the same review and Edmunds suggests it is likely she had read the work of Fawcett. Edmunds concludes the scripts are a case of subliminal memory and unconscious dramatization.

Other researchers such as Mary Rose Barrington have suspected fraud as Cummins had long standing connections with friends and families of the deceased that she claimed to have contacted and could have easily obtained information by natural means. The classical scholar E. R. Dodds writes that Cummins worked as a cataloguer at the National Library of Ireland and could have taken information from various books that would appear in her automatic writings about ancient history. Her writings were heavily influenced by literature and religious texts. Dodds also studies her book Swan on a Black Sea which was supposed to be an account of spirit conversation but writes there is evidence suggestive of fraud as Cummins had received some of the information by natural means.

Cummins dies in Cork on August 25, 1969, and is buried in St. Lappan’s churchyard, Little Island.


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Death of George Moore, Novelist, Poet & Critic

George Augustus Moore, novelist, short story writer, poet, art critic, memoirist, and dramatist, dies at his home in London on January 21, 1933. He is considered an innovator in fiction in his day.

Moore is born in Moore Hall, near Lough Carra, County Mayo on February 24, 1852. He comes from a distinguished Catholic family of Irish landholders. When he is 21, he leaves Ireland for Paris to become a painter. His Reminiscences of the Impressionist Painters (1906) vividly describes the Café Nouvelle-Athènes and the circle of Impressionist painters who frequent it. He is particularly friendly with Édouard Manet, who sketches three portraits of him. Another account of the years in Paris, in which he introduces the younger generation in England to his version of fin de siècle decadence, is his first autobiography, Confessions of a Young Man (1888).

Deciding that he has no talent for painting, Moore returns to London in 1882 to write. His first novels, A Modern Lover (1883) and A Mummer’s Wife (1885), introduce a new note of French Naturalism into the English scene, and he later adopts the realistic techniques of Gustave Flaubert and Honoré de Balzac. Esther Waters (1894), his best novel, deals with the plight of a servant girl who has a baby out of wedlock. It is a story of hardship and humiliation illumined by the novelist’s compassion. It is an immediate success, and he follows it with works in a similar vein: Evelyn Innes (1898) and Sister Teresa (1901).

In 1901 Moore moves to Dublin, partly because of his loathing for the South African War and partly because of the Irish Literary Revival spearheaded by his friend, the poet William Butler Yeats. In Dublin he contributes notably to the planning of the Abbey Theatre. He also produces The Untilled Field (1903), a volume of fine short stories reminiscent of Ivan Turgenev’s writing that focuses on the drudgery of Irish rural life, and a short poetic novel, The Lake (1905). The real fruits of his life in Ireland, however, come with the trilogy Hail and Farewell (Ave, 1911; Salve, 1912; Vale, 1914). Discursive, affectionate, and satirical by turns, it reads like a sustained monologue that is both a carefully studied piece of self-revelation and an acute, though not always reliable, portrait gallery of his Irish acquaintance, which included Yeats, George William Russell, and Lady Gregory. Above all it is a perfectly modulated display of the comic spirit.

The increasing narrowness of the Irish mind, politics, and clericalism sends Moore back to England in 1911. After Hail and Farewell, he makes another literary departure. Aiming at epic effect he produces The Brook Kerith (1916), an elaborate and stylish retelling of the Gospel story that is surprisingly effective despite some dull patches. He continues his attempts to find a prose style worthy of epic theme in Héloïse and Abélard (1921). His other works include A Story-Teller’s Holiday (1918), a blend of autobiography, anecdote, Irish legend, and satire, Conversations in Ebury Street (1924), autobiography, The Pastoral Loves of Daphnis and Chloe (1924) and Ulick and Soracha (1926), an Irish legendary romance.

George Moore dies at his home at Ebury Street in the London district of Belgravia on January 21, 1933, leaving a fortune of £70,000. He is cremated in London at a service attended by Ramsay MacDonald among others. An urn containing his ashes is interred on Castle Island in Lough Carra in view of the ruins of Moore Hall, which had been burned by anti-treaty forces in 1923, during the final months of the Irish Civil War.