A gift for the absurd – Brian Maye on actor Jack MacGowran

This is regarded as a golden age in Irish acting, with so many of our actors being nominated for awards so frequently, but in truth, in the first century of our independence that we have just marked, Ireland has produced many, many stars of stage and screen. One of these was Jack MacGowran, who became particularly associated with the works of Samuel Beckett, and who died prematurely 50 years ago on January 30th.

He was born on October 13th, 1918, in Ranelagh, Dublin, one of three children of Matthew MacGowran, a travelling salesman, and Gertrude Shanahan.

After leaving CBS, Synge Street, he went into insurance, first appearing on the stage in November 1940 in the Gaiety Theatre as part of the chorus in a Rathmines and Rathgar Musical Society operetta. Three years later, he played the lead in Brendan Smith’s play Are You Invited? at the Peacock and followed this with a number of comedy parts written specially for him by Smith.

By 1947, he decided to try acting full time, joined the Abbey Theatre but did not do well. “His appearance was unheroic: he was frail, undernourished and birdlike, with an enormous nose, and this hindered his landing leading roles,” according to Bridget Hourican, who wrote the entry on him in the Dictionary of Irish Biography.

Maureen Dowd: Trump’s line about being martyred always seemed risible but I guess it works with some people

---

Breda O'Brien: Are the mistakes of Junior Cycle reform about to be repeated in the Leaving Cert?

---

Kevin Barry: ‘I didn’t publish a book till I was 37. I thought I must have been an awful f*cking waster’

---

Can we finally say goodbye to shaming women for letting their hair go grey?

---

On the other hand, she remarked that he had an “intensely expressive” physique and that the London Evening Standard called him “an Irish droll who given the opportunity would make Chaplin a fading memory”. He sought to develop this aspect of his character by studying in Paris with the teacher who later taught Marcel Marceau.

Frustrated at the Abbey and with the lack of opportunities in Ireland generally, in 1954 he moved to London and was never again to live in Ireland. He debuted in London as the Young Covey in O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars and was working in a ketchup factory when he got the part of Harry Hopen in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh.

For this he won the critics’ best supporting actor of the year award, the enormously influential Kenneth Tynan noting: “Jack MacGowran, pinch-faced and baggy-trousered, plays the proprietor with a weasel brilliance I have not seen since the heyday of FJ McCormick.”

Following a brief summer sojourn in Hollywood, where he began to drink to excess, he returned to London to play Clov in the Royal Court’s production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, “and the most important collaboration of his career began,” according to Bridget Hourican.

He’d met Beckett in March 1957 and said later: “I was born when I met Sam Beckett. So I’ve had two existences on this sphere. In the attempt to run away from myself, I ran into myself.”

He became one of Beckett’s leading interpreters and contributed significantly to a much greater appreciation of that playwright’s work.

“Vulnerable, depressive and alcoholic, MacGowran communicated all Beckett’s despair and sense of absurdity; an inspired mime and comic, he brought out all his humour,” according to Bridget Hourican.

In return, Beckett supported him greatly, including financially. For his role in the 1961 BBC production of Waiting for Godot, MacGowran won the British actor of the year award. He played in Beckett works on radio and television as well as on stage, including one-man shows, as at the Dublin Theatre Festival in October 1962. There was some controversy about the latter, with one critic calling it “shambolic” and claiming he’d performed it without Beckett’s permission but the playwright, far from being offended, helped McGowran to improve it and it afterwards played in London and New York and won him the actor of the year award at the 1972 Dublin Theatre Festival.

The collaboration with Beckett helped his career to prosper and his life improved in other ways as well. He controlled his drinking, having been warned by a doctor that it could prove fatal, and in March 1963 he married Gloria Nugent, with whom he had a daughter. His role as a highwayman in the popular 1963 film Tom Jones, brought him to the attention of Roman Polanski, who gave him the lead in his film Dance of the Vampires (1966). At the same time as working on that film, he was rehearsing for Juno and the Paycock, opposite Peter O’Toole; it opened in Dublin in August 1966 to rave reviews.

Another American tour of his one-man Beckett show led to his getting a role in the cult-horror classic, The Exorcist, in 1972. While appearing in an American production of The Plough and the Stars in January 1973, he was taken ill and died in the Algonquin Hotel, where he had been confined. He was only 54.