Books

Malachy McCourt, Irish-American actor, writer and biographer, dies at 92

McCourt, brother of Angela’s Ashes writer Frank, spent childhood in Limerick before acting and bartending in 1960s and 1970s New York

Malachy McCourt in his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 2023. Photograph: Haruka Sakaguchi/The New York Times

Keith Duggan
Mon Mar 11 2024 - 21:18

New York is mourning the loss of one its most gregarious and beloved exemplars of the Irish-American experience with Monday’s announcement of the death of Malachy McCourt. He was 92.

The writer, actor, barkeeper and general bon viveur wrote a celebrated biography, A Monk Swimming. It was an eclectic and live wire companion piece to Angela’s Ashes, the phenomenally successful memoir written by Frank, his older brother, which was a publishing sensation on its release in 1996, winning that year’s Pulitzer prize.

Malachy McCourt was born in Brooklyn in 1931 but returned as a three-year-old to Ireland with his parents, who left New York in the midst of the depression. He spent his formative years in Limerick and moved to England to find work, arriving back in New York at the age of 20 after Frank, working as a state schoolteacher in the city, sent him the fare.

Over the next 70 years, he established himself as both institution and chronicler of the New York literary and bohemian scene and grappled with the conflicting emotions of being an emigrant son.

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“I had a murderous rage in my heart of Limerick, the humiliation of coming out of the slums,” he said in a New York Times interview which appeared in 1998, when his memoir was a best-seller.

‘’It made you feel like nothing and there was no place to go but down. It was assumed we’d be low-class the rest of our lives. But who can you blame? Governments and churches that are gone now? It’s useless. Let those things live rent-free in your head and you’ll be a lunatic. Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”

Flame haired and bearded in his younger years, McCourt belonged to the “Irish hellraiser” set of the 1960s and 1970s, combining the bar trade with stage acting and cinematic roles in Reversal of Fortune and Bonfire of the Vanities; playing a well-cast Henry VIII in a television commercial and enjoying periodic turns as a television and radio host.

He quit drinking and smoking in the mid-1980s but retained a flair for fun. A natural raconteur, he ran for governor of New York in 2006, on a progressive agenda which opposed the Iraq War and promoted environmentalism.

His death was not unexpected as he had required hospice care for some time but proved so resilient that he was released from its care in 2022. Still, his death marks the end of a distinct era in Irish New York and of a remarkable picaresque life.

“A giant has died,” wrote former Irish diplomat Ted Smyth in a tribute on Monday, noting that McCourt “detested euphemisms for ‘died’ ”.

McCourt was married twice: first to Linda Wachsman and then to Diana Galin, with whom he lived in the same Upper West Side apartment for 59 years. He is survived by his wife, his daughter Siobhán, sons Malachy, Conor and Cormac and stepdaughter Nina Galin.

Ireland’s ambassador to the United States, Geraldine Byrne Nason remembered McCourt as “a raconteur of the Irish experience” and he was remembered by his friend, New York Times columnist and author Dan Barry, as “a fierce advocate of justice and equality”.

Keith Duggan

Keith Duggan

Keith Duggan is Washington Correspondent of The Irish Times

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