SOME actors have that indefinable quality that makes them stars. Some, though they may be very good at their jobs in other ways do not. Whatever it is, among the ones who undoubtedly has it is Milo O'Shea, back in Dublin to appear in Neil Simon's comedy The Sunshine Boys, which opens, at the Gate Theatre on Tuesday, June 11th.
A couple of weeks ago we went to the rugby peace international at Lansdowne Road. Meeting outside the Berkeley Court, he emerged carrying a box of chocolates, a gift from the hotel, though he wasn't staying there. We had hardly walked 10 yards when he was accosted by a tout, anxious, not to sell him a ticket, but toe shake his hand and tell him how much he admired him in some film. It's the same when we go out together in New York, for we have been friends for many years now. A constant stream of well wishers come up to him in the street, in bars or in theatres. Always they are greeted with the courtesy and warmth which are his hallmark, and an ease that comes with years of popularity.
Now in his late 60s, he has been an actor for the greater part of his life and never really wanted to be anything else. While still a small boy at Synge Street, an elocution teacher put him in for the Feis Maitiu recitation competition, which he won. The late P.P. Maguire of Radio Eireann, as it then was, was the adjudicator and looking for someone to play the title role in a radio version of Oliver Twist Milo was cast and went on to play a number of other radio parts. By the time he was 12 he was on stage in a Hilton Edwards Michael Mac Liammoir production of Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra at the Gaiety.
Though he is not from a theatrical family, both his mother and father had acted and sung with the Rathmines and Rathgar Musical Society and his mother played the harp (so, coincidentally, does his wife, the American actress Kitty Sullivan). Certainly there seems to have been none of the parental disapproval of a stage career which so many actors experience, though his father did insist he take a degree at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London.
Seeing an advertisement. "Wanted electrician and juvenile lead", he applied and found himself with a job with Louis D'Alton's touring company, though, he says, "I didn't even know how to put in a bulb". All went well until one night, without warning, all the lights blew in the hall where they were playing. They shouted at me. "Get a fuse", he says. "I didn't even know what a fuse looked like. Anyway, someone put one in, but with no success. The audience was getting restive when we finally discovered that the place was lit from a coin in the slot meter. We'd a whip round for shillings and put them in and up came the lights again."
Touring with the fit ups, including a season with the great Anew Me Master, was followed by some small parts with Lord Longford's company at.the Gate, and then a short first visit to America. There he played in summer stock in tents and did a little radio, but work was short and, like so many actors he had to take something else. I got a job for $10 a week, as a lift operator at the Waldorf Astoria, he remembers, but at the cad of the first week I discovered they didn't pay you for two weeks. At that time you could sell your blood for $5 a go out there, so I did that. But the money lasted no time at all, so I went back again and sold, some more. I think I over did it, cause every time the lift went down I used to buckle at the knees and nearly pass out."
Back in Ireland he found work more plentiful, appearing in a range of shows with Edwards Mac Liammoir and the Longfords. It was at this time, too, that Dublin discovered it had a new comic genius, through his appearances in the late night revues run by Alan Simpson and Carolyn Swift at the tiny Pike Theatre. We swap some of the endless number of stories about Hoddy, the late George Desmond Hodnett, sometime jazz critic of this paper and one of the great eccentrics of the time, who played the piano for these shows and slept in the theatre, wrapped up in the curtain, which he took down when the audiences went home.
"Hoddy also played the zither, which was very popular at the time because of the zither theme from the film The Third Man," Milo recalls. "I saw an ad for a talent contest at the old Queen's Theatre, offering a £10 prize and a week's engagement for the winner. I suggested to Hoddy that he enter and we all went down to cheer him on. He started to play, but the microphone failed and he couldn't be heard. The audience started whistling and giving him the bird, so he shouted into the wings. `For ****'s sake, turn on the ****ing mike!' and of course, at that very moment, the sound came on again. He got a huge cheer and his playing brought the house down, but afterwards all the adjudicator said was Competitor Number Three is disqualified for bad language.
By now Milo was working as only a busy actor could in those badly paid times, rehearsing by day, playing in the theatre at night and often going on again after that to do late night revue or cabaret. He remembers doing a cabaret spot in the old Metropole Ballroom for the Cavalry Ball. Afterwards he remarked to the manager that there seemed to be no army uniforms among the audience, to be told that the Cavalry Ball was actually in the Gresham. He appeared, too, in a number of Irish musicals and when one of them, Glory Be! went to Joan Littlewood's theatre in Stratford East, London, he started to become known abroad, too.
There were plays, including one called Treasure Hunt with Sybil Thorndyke, directed by John Gielgud, films, including a Carry On, and an immensely popular television series by Hugh Leonard, Me Mammy, the Father Ted of its day. As always, he has a story connected with it. "We were filming on the canal and I was meant to be cycling along, looking the wrong way, and to go straight in. They had a double for that part and into the canal he went, but he never came up again. Jimmy Gilbert, the director, had to dive in and save him and afterwards the guy told us he couldn't even swim. That didn't stop him taking the job, though. They weren't that easy to come by in those days".
BUT it was Joe Strick's 1966 film version of Ulysses ("I heard an ould fella in the street saying they were making a film called Useless ) which really marked his breakthrough internationally. Now he was in demand every where. He appeared in two films in Italy, Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet and Roger Vadim's Barbarella, followed by a Broadway play, Staircase, with Eli Wallach, for which he received a Tony nomination. Then it was back to Italy for an additional shoot on Barbarella, which bought out Staircase entirely for three days so he could gover.
He was living in a big house on the Vico Road, travelling constantly and still doing the occasional show here, but it was becoming more and more difficult. His first marriage, to the actress Maureen Toal, had ended in divorce in 1973 (they have a son, Colm, and O'Shea has another son, Stephen, an actor who lives in England). In 1974 he married Kitty Sullivan, with whom he had appeared in Dublin in the musical I Do! I Do! Soon after he decided to move permanently to New York. He and Kitty have lived there since, in a penthouse with a roof garden looking over Central Park and across the street from the famous Dakota Building, outside which John Lennon was shot.
In his time he has met everyone in the business from Chaplin ("he, told me how he taught himself to do that incredible tightrope sequence in The Circus and how it was shot without a safety net") to Richard Burton, from Robert Mitchum to Edith Evans to Robert Stephens, Albert Finney and Paul Newman, and worked with a great many of them. He has done musicals, plays and films. He has appeared in just about every American comedy television series, including Cheers, The Golden Girls and, most recently Frazer for which he has just been nominated for an Emmy Award as Best Guest Actor.
In that time nearly every theatre management in Ireland has tried to entice him to return to do something, but without avail. "It just never worked out," he says. "I was always tied up." Now finally, though, he is back, for Neil Simon's comedy The Sunshine Boys ("his best, I think"). The play is about two elderly vaudeville comedians, enticed out of retirement to do a television special, though they have hated each other for years. By a coincidence it was the last stage play he did in Ireland, 17 years ago, with the late Eddie Byrne. On that occasion it was done in tandem with another Simon play, The Prisoner of Second Avenue, which entailed a heavy workload for the actors.
One of the reasons which brought him back, one Suspects is that this time he will be playing, opposite David Kelly, another comic wizard and one of his oldest friends. They date back to the Pike revues and the musicals that followed them. Milo is godfather to David's daughter, the actress. Miriam Kelly, and first worked with his wife, Laurie Morton, in a long ago hit, Maura Laverty's Liffey Lane. "Ia fact," he says, "you could say I was on their honeymoon with them. We were in Belfast with Glory Be! when they were married. I remember, in the hotel where we were staying, when Dave left the bedroom on the first night to go to the loo, we rushed in and picked up the mattress with Laurie on it and dumped her out in the corridor."
It all seems long ago, now, those days of revue and musicals, of starving actors, bonafide pubs and the late lamented Groom's Hotel, where a curious mixture of theatre people and Fianna Fail politicians drank into the late hours, illegally.
"One night when I was there it was jam packed, says Milo, and a very young guard raided the place about four in the morning and started taking down names. Brian Lenihan... Justice Donagh a few more the better parts of valour and closed his book. Now I'll be back in an hour or two he said, and I hope to see the whole place cleared."
If Milo O'Shea's popularity is still as great as ever with Dubliners and there is every sign that it is then they too will be back, in numbers, to rejoice in his return.
