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Tag Archives: The New York Times


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Death of Patrick McGee, Actor & Director

patrick-mcgeePatrick George McGee, Northern Irish actor and director of stage and screen known professionally as Patrick Magee, dies from a heart attack at his flat in Fulham, London on August 14, 1982. He is known for his collaborations with Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, as well as creating the role of the Marquis de Sade in the original stage and screen productions of Marat/Sade. He also appears in numerous horror films and in two Stanley Kubrick films, A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon.

McGee is born into a middle-class family in Armagh, County Armagh, Northern Ireland on March 31, 1922. He is the first born of five children and is educated at St. Patrick’s Grammar School, Armagh.

McGee’s first stage experience in Ireland is with Anew McMaster’s touring company, performing the works of William Shakespeare. It is here that he first works with Pinter. He is then brought to London by Tyrone Guthrie for a series of Irish plays. He meets Beckett in 1957 and soon records passages from the novel Molloy and the short story From an Abandoned Work for BBC Radio. Impressed by “the cracked quality of Magee’s distinctly Irish voice,” Beckett requests copies of the tapes and writes Krapp’s Last Tape especially for the actor. First produced at the Royal Court Theatre in London on October 28, 1958, the play stars McGee and is directed by Donald McWhinnie. A televised version is later broadcast by BBC Two on November 29, 1972.

In 1964, McGee joins the Royal Shakespeare Company, after Pinter, directing his own play, The Birthday Party, specifically requests him for the role of McCann. In 1965 he appears in Peter Weiss‘s Marat/Sade, and when the play transfers to Broadway he wins a Tony Award. He also appears in the 1966 RSC production of Staircase opposite Paul Scofield.

McGee’s early film roles include Joseph Losey‘s The Criminal (1960) and The Servant (1963), the latter an adaptation scripted by Pinter. He also appears as Surgeon-Major James Henry Reynolds in Zulu (1964), Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964), Anzio (1968), and in the film versions of Marat/Sade (1967) and The Birthday Party (1968). He is perhaps best known for his role as the victimised writer Frank Alexander, who tortures Alex DeLarge with Ludwig van Beethoven‘s music, in Stanley Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange (1971). His other role for Kubrick is as Redmond Barry’s mentor, the Chevalier de Balibari, in Barry Lyndon (1975).

McGee also appears in Young Winston (1972), The Final Programme (1973), Galileo (1975), Sir Henry at Rawlinson End (1980), The Monster Club and Chariots of Fire (1981), but is most often seen in horror films. These include Roger Corman‘s The Masque of Red Death (1964), and the Boris Karloff vehicle Die, Monster, Die! (1965) for AIP; The Skull (1965), Tales from the Crypt (1972), Asylum (1972), and And Now the Screaming Starts! (1973) for Amicus Productions; Demons of the Mind (1972) for Hammer Film Productions; and Walerian Borowczyk‘s Docteur Jekyll et les femmes (1981).

Patrick McGee dies from a heart attack at his flat in Fulham, London on August 14, 1982 at the age of 60, according to obituaries in The Herald and The New York Times. On July 29, 2017 a blue plaque is unveiled in Edward Street, Armagh to mark Patrick McGee’s birthplace.


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Birth of Jazz Guitarist Louis Stewart

louis-stewartLouis Stewart, Irish jazz guitarist, is born in Waterford, County Waterford on January 5, 1944.

Stewart grows up in Dublin. He begins playing guitar when he is thirteen, influenced by guitarists Les Paul and Barney Kessel. He begins his professional career performing in Dublin showbands. In 1968 he wins an award as best soloist at the Montreux Jazz Festival. Soon after, he spends three years with Benny Goodman.

Stewart records his debut album, Louis the First, in Dublin, and then records in London with Billy Higgins, Peter Ind, Sam Jones, Red Mitchell, and Spike Robinson. From the mid to late 1970s he works with George Shearing, touring the United States, Brazil, and playing European festivals, and recording eight albums, including several in a trio with bassist Niels-Henning Orsted-Pedersen. He also appears on albums by Joe Williams and J. J. Johnson.

In 1981, ahead of his debut in the United States as a leader, The New York Times states, “Mr. Stewart seems to have his musical roots in be-bop. He leans toward material associated with Charlie Parker and he spins out single-note lines that flow with an unhurried grace, colored by sudden bright, lively chorded phrases. His up-tempo virtuosity is balanced by a laid-back approach to ballads, which catches the mood of the piece without sacrificing the rhythmic emphasis that keeps it moving.” In a review of Stewart’s 1995 album Overdrive, AllMusic states, “Louis Stewart is one of the all-time greats, and it is obvious from the first notes he plays on any occasion.”

Stewart receives an honorary doctorate from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1998. In 2009, he is elected to Aosdána, an Irish affiliation of people engaged in literature, music, and visual arts that was established by the Arts Council of Ireland in 1981 to honour those whose work has made an outstanding contribution to the creative arts in Ireland.

In late 2015, Stewart is diagnosed with cancer. He dies nine months later, on August 20, 2016, at Our Lady’s Hospice, Harold’s Cross at the age of 72.


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Birth of Frank Delaney, Novelist, Journalist & Broadcaster

frank-delaneyFrank Delaney, Irish novelist, journalist and broadcaster, is born in County Tipperary on October 24, 1942. He is the author of The New York Times best-seller Ireland, the non-fiction book Simple Courage: A True Story of Peril on the Sea, and many other works of fiction, non-fiction and collections.

Delaney begins working as a newsreader for the Irish state radio and television network RTÉ in 1970. In the early 1970s he becomes a news reporter for the BBC in Dublin, and covers an intense period of violence known as the Troubles. After five years of reporting on the violence, he moves to London to work in arts broadcasting. In 1978 he creates the weekly Bookshelf programme for BBC Radio 4, which covers books, writers and the business of publishing. Over the next five-and-a-half years he interviews over 1,400 authors, including Anthony Burgess, John Updike, Margaret Atwood, Christopher Isherwood and Stephen King.

On television, Delaney writes and presents for Omnibus, the BBC’s weekly arts series. He serves as the Literature Director of the Edinburgh Festival in 1980, and hosts his own talk show Frank Delaney in the early 1980s, which features many cultural and literary personalities. Afterward, he creates and presents Word of Mouth, the BBC’s radio programme about language, as well as a variety of radio and television documentaries including specials on James Joyce, Robert Graves, Ernest Hemingway in Paris, and the Shakespeare industry. He presents The Book Show on the Sky News satellite channel for many years.

Delaney’s first book, James Joyce’s Odyssey (1981), is well received and becomes a best-seller in the UK and Ireland. He writes and presents the six-part documentary series The Celts: Rich Traditions and Ancient Myths (1987) for the BBC, and writes the accompanying book. He subsequently writes five books of non-fiction (including Simple Courage), ten novels (including Ireland, Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show and Tipperary), one novella, and a number of short stories. He also edits many compilations of essays and poetry.

After moving to the United States and settling in Kent, Connecticut in 2002, Delaney writes the screenplay for an adaptation of Goodbye, Mr. Chips (2002), which stars Martin Clunes and is shown on ITV in Britain, and in the Masterpiece Theatre series in the United States. His articles are published by newspapers in United States, the UK and Ireland, including on the Op-ed pages of The New York Times. He is a frequent public speaker, and is a contributor and guest on National Public Radio (NPR) programmes.

On Bloomsday 2010, Delaney launches Re:Joyce, a series of short weekly podcasts that go page-by-page through James Joyce’s Ulysses, discussing its allusions, historical context and references.

Frank Delaney dies in Danbury Hospital in Danbury, Connecticut on February 21, 2017 after suffering a stroke the previous day.


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Death of Olympic Gold Medalist Martin John Sheridan

martin-john-sheridanMartin John Sheridan, “one of the greatest athletes the United States has ever known” according to his obituary in The New York Times, dies in St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan, New York City on March 27, 1918, the day before his 37th birthday.

Sheridan is born in Bohola, County Mayo on March 28, 1881. At 6’3″ and 194 lbs., Sheridan is the best all-around athlete of the Irish American Athletic Club, and like many of his teammates, serves with the New York City Police Department from 1906 until his death. He is so well respected in the NYPD, that he serves as the Governor’s personal bodyguard when the governor is in New York City.

A five-time Olympic gold medalist, with a total of nine Olympic medals, Sheridan is called “one of the greatest figures that ever represented this country in international sport, as well as being one of the most popular who ever attained the championship honor.” He wins the discus throw event at the 1904, 1906, and 1908 Summer Olympic Games as well as the shot put at the 1906 Olympics and the Greek discus in 1908. At the 1906 Intercalated Games in Athens, Greece he also wins silver medals in the standing high jump, standing long jump and the stone throw.

In 1907, Sheridan wins the National Amateur Athletic Union discus championship and the Canadian championship, and in 1908 he wins the Metropolitan, National and Canadian championships as well as two gold medals in the discus throw and bronze in the standing long jump at the 1908 Olympic Games.

Two of Sheridan’s gold medals from the 1904 Summer Olympic Games in St. Louis, Missouri and one of his medals from the 1906 Intercalated Games in Athens, Greece, are currently located in the USA Track & Field‘s Hall of Fame History Gallery, in Washington Heights, Manhattan.

There are claims that Sheridan fuels a controversy in London in 1908, when flagbearer Ralph Rose refuses to dip the flag to King Edward VII. Sheridan supports Rose by explaining “This flag dips to no earthly king,” and it is claimed that his statement exemplifies both Irish and American defiance of the British monarchy. However, careful research has shown that this is first reported in 1952. Sheridan himself makes no mention of it in his published reports on the Games and neither does his obituary.

Martin Sheridan dies in Manhattan, New York City on March 27, 1918, a very early casualty of the 1918 flu pandemic. He is buried in Calvary Cemetery, Queens, New York. The inscription on the granite Celtic Cross monument marking his grave says in part: “Devoted to the Institutions of his Country, and the Ideals and Aspirations of his Race. Athlete. Patriot.” He is part of a group of Irish American athletes known as the “Irish Whales.”


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Birth of Christopher Nolan, Irish Poet & Author

Christopher Nolan, Irish poet and author, is born to parents Joseph and Bernadette Nolan in Mullingar, County Westmeath on September 6, 1965.

Due to asphyxiation at birth, Nolan is born with permanent impairment of his nerve-signaling system, a condition now labelled dystonia. Because of these complications, Nolan is born with cerebral palsy and can only move his head and eyes. Due to the severity of the cerebral palsy, he uses a wheelchair. In an interview, his father, Joseph, explains how, at the age of 10, he is placed on medication that “relaxed him so he could use a pointer attached to his head to type.” To write, Nolan uses a special computer and keyboard. In order to help him type, his mother holds his head in her cupped hands while Christopher painstakingly picks out each word, letter by letter, with a pointer attached to his forehead.

He communicates with others by moving his eyes, using a signal system. When he is young, his father tells him stories and reads passages from James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and D.H. Lawrence to keep his mind stimulated. His mother strings up letters of the alphabet in the kitchen, where she keeps up a stream of conversation. His sister, Yvonne, sings songs and acts out skits. His mother stated that “he wrote extensively since the age of 11 and went on to write many poems, short stories and two plays, many of which were published.” Many of the writings are compiled for his first publication, the chapbook Dam-Burst of Dreams.

Upon becoming a teenager, Nolan receives his education from the Central Remedial Clinic School, Mount Temple Comprehensive School and at Trinity College, Dublin. His first book is published at the age of fifteen. He is also awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters in the U.K., the medal of excellence from the United Nations Society of Writers, and a Person of the Year award in Ireland. He writes an account of his childhood, Under the Eye of the Clock, published by St. Martin’s Press, which wins him the U.K.’s Whitbread Book of the Year Award in 1987 at the age of 21. He soon drops out of Trinity College to write a novel entitled The Banyan Tree (1999).

Nolan spends more than a decade writing The Banyan Tree. According to The New York Times, the book is a multigenerational story of a dairy-farming family in Nolan’s native county of Westmeath. The story is seen through the eyes of the aging mother. It is inspired, he tells Publishers Weekly, by the image of “an old woman holding up her skirts as she made ready to jump a rut in a field.” A review of the book is done in The New York Times by Meghan O’Rourke. She reviews the book and relates it to James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in the story the protagonist leaves his mother in Ireland while he moves on to travel the world. Nolan however, gives the reader a version of the mother’s story. “And so, in the end, one suspects that he wants Minnie’s good-natured, commonplace ways to stand as their own achievement, reminding us that life continues in the places left behind.”

At the age of 43, while working on a new novel, Christopher Nolan dies in Beaumont Hospital in Dublin at 2:30 AM on February 20, 2009. His death is the result of a piece of salmon becoming trapped in his airway. However, nothing from the novel he was working on has been released since his death.

Upon hearing the news of Nolan’s death, President of Ireland Mary McAleese says, “Christopher Nolan was a gifted writer who attained deserved success and acclaim throughout the world for his work, his achievements all the more remarkable given his daily battle with cerebral palsy.”


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The Funeral of Michael Collins

Michael Collins, soldier and politician who is a leading figure in the struggle for, and achievement of Irish independence in the early 20th century, is laid to rest in Dublin‘s Glasnevin Cemetery on August 28, 1922.

Collins is shot and killed by anti-Treaty ambushers as his Free State Army convoy approaches Béal na Bláth, an isolated crossroads in County Cork, on August 22, 1922 during the Irish Civil War.

Collins’s body is transported by sea from Cork to Dublin. He lay in state for three days in Dublin City Hall where tens of thousands of mourners filed past his coffin to pay their respects, including many British soldiers departing Ireland who had fought against him. His funeral mass on August 28, 1922 takes place at Dublin’s St. Mary’s Pro-Cathedral where a number of foreign and Irish dignitaries are in attendance. According to a report in The New York Times, the seven mile journey from the cathedral to his final resting place in Glasnevin Cemetery is lined with half a million mourners, almost one fifth of the country’s population at the time, and many of whom likely differed with him on his Treaty vote.

No official inquiry is ever undertaken into Collins’s death and consequently there is no official version of what happened, nor are there any authoritative, detailed contemporary records.

In this vacuum, independent investigations and conspiracy theorists have put forward a number of suspects as having executed or ordered his death, including an anti-Treaty sharpshooter, members of his own escort, the British Secret Intelligence Service, or Éamon de Valera himself.

De Valera is alleged to have declared in 1966, “It is my considered opinion that in the fullness of time history will record the greatness of Michael Collins; and it will be recorded at my expense.”

An annual commemoration ceremony takes place each year in August at the ambush site at Béal na Bláth, organised by The Béal na mBláth Commemoration Committee. In 2009, former President of Ireland Mary Robinson gives the oration. In 2010, the Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan, Jnr. becomes the first Fianna Fáil person to give the oration. In 2012, on the 90th anniversary of the death of Collins, Taoiseach Enda Kenny gives the oration, the first serving head of government to do so. There is also a remembrance ceremony in Glasnevin Cemetery every year at Collins’s gravesite on the anniversary of his death.

RIP Big Fellow!


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Death of Charles G. Halpine, Journalist, Author & Soldier

Charles Graham Halpine (Halpin), Irish journalist, author and soldier during the American Civil War, dies on August 3, 1868, in New York City.

Born at Oldcastle, County Meath, on November 20, 1829, Halpine is the son of the Rev. Nicholas John Halpin. He is educated at Trinity College, Dublin, until 1846, with original intentions for the medical profession, but ultimately prefers the law. In his leisure time he writes for the press. The sudden death of his father and his own early marriage compel him to adopt journalism as a profession.

In 1851 he emigrates to the United States, and takes up residence in Boston, where he becomes assistant editor of The Boston Post, and, with Benjamin Penhallow Shillaber, commences a humorous journal called The Carpet Bag, which is unsuccessful. Afterwards he resides in Washington, D.C., where he acts as the correspondent of The New York Times.

After moving back to New York he secures employment with the New York Herald, and in a few months establishes relations with several periodicals. He undertakes a great variety of literary work, most of which is entirely ephemeral. He next becomes associate editor of The New York Times, for which he writes in 1855 and 1856 the Nicaragua correspondence at the time of William Walker‘s filibustering expedition. In 1857 he becomes principal editor and part proprietor of the New York Leader, which under his management rapidly increases in circulation.

At the beginning of the American Civil War in April 1861, he enlists in the 69th New York Infantry, in which he is soon elected a lieutenant, and serves during the three months for which he has volunteered. He is then transferred to the staff of General David Hunter as assistant-adjutant-general with the rank of major, and soon afterwards goes with him to Missouri to relieve General John Charles Frémont. He accompanies General Hunter to Hilton Head, and while there writes a series of burlesque poems in the assumed character of an Irish private. Several of them are contributed to the New York Herald in 1862 under the pseudonym of “Miles O’Reilly,” and with additional articles are issued in two volumes entitled Life and Adventures, Songs, Services, and Speeches of Private Miles O’Reilly, 47th Regiment New York Volunteers (1864), and Baked Meats of the Funeral, a Collection of Essays, Poems, Speeches, and Banquets, by Private Miles O’Reilly, late of the 47th Regiment New York Volunteer Infantry, 10th Army Corps. Collected, revised, and edited, with the requisite corrections of punctuation, spelling, and grammar, by an Ex-Colonel of the Adjutant-General’s Department, with whom the Private formerly served as Lance-Corporal of Orderlies (1866).

Halpine is subsequently assistant-adjutant-general on General Henry W. Halleck‘s staff with the rank of colonel in 1862, and accompanies General David Hunter as a staff-officer on his expedition up the Shenandoah Valley in the spring of 1864. On his return to New York he resigns his commission in consequence of his bad eyesight, receiving the brevet of brigadier-general of volunteers.

He then makes New York his home and resumes his literary work. He becomes editor and, later, proprietor of the Citizen, a newspaper issued by the citizens’ association to advocate reforms in the civil administration of New York City. In 1867 he is elected registrar of the county of New York by a coalition of republicans and democrats. Incessant labour brings on insomnia. He has recourse to opiates, and his death in New York City on August 3, 1868 is caused by an undiluted dose of chloroform.