In the reception area of Jurys Hotel, Cork, there is a mural of famous Cork men, showing a youthful-looking Micheal Mac Liammoir, surrounded by local celebrities such as Terence McSwiney, Michael Collins, Jack Lynch, Joe Lynch, Danny La Rue and Christy Ring. It was painted some 20 years ago when the myth of Mac Liammoir's birth in Cork was widely accepted. A generation earlier, the Cork sculptor, Marshall Hudson, RHA, had given the permanence of bronze to the strikingly handsome image.
Nowadays a newer image is fashionable in the depiction of Mac Liammoir as the gay icon of sexual liberation. oir as 'that most unique of figure within post-independence Ireland, the openly homosexual public figure. In a state where homosexual acts were criminalised until 1993, and the homoerotic was censured and expunged from all official literary and cultural discourse, Mac Liammoir and his partner Edwards survived and even flourished as Ireland's only visibly gay couple'. While Mac Liammoir would have welcomed a more liberal regime, and must have felt restrained by the sexual mores of his time, he was well past middle age before the Gay Rights Movement was founded. Even then, when a campaigner asked him to lead a protest march to Dail Eireann, he replied wearily: 'My dear boy, I shall have nothing to do with it, it will get us a bad name.' Long before Mac Liammoir met the bisexual Hilton Edwards in 1928, he had achieved the metamorphosis from Alfred Wilmore, born in east London in 1899, the son of lower-middle-class English parents with more Jewish than Irish blood in their veins. In his authoritative biography, The Boys, Christopher FitzSimon is sceptical of an alleged Spanish ancestry. Furthermore, he seems reasonably certain that Alfred left London for Ireland in 1917 to escape the attention of at least one 'stage door Johnny' and to avoid conscription. A more complex and unanswered question is why Mac Liammoir returned to Ireland in 1927 to join Anew McMaster's touring company after he had enjoyed the days of wine and roses in post-war Europe.
It is ironic to note that apart from his prowess as a child actor, little Alfred had first come to notice as an artist with a recruiting poster for Punch, in 1915, entitled, The Damsel I Left Behind Me. It is a stylised black and white drawing in the Beardsley manner of a soldier taking his leave of his sweetheart beneath the shade of the old apple tree. His teacher at the Willeson Polytechnic School of Arts said of this first publication that it was 'something of which the school is justly proud'.
In several respects Mac Liammoir's writings in Irish in Ceo Meala La Seaca and La Agus Oidhche give a more reliable and convincing account of his early years in London than do his autobiographical works in English. In Ceo Meala La Seaca, he wrote: 'I went to the Slade School to study painting and about this time I read an essay by a man named Yeats. Ireland And The Arts was the title of the essay and I believe it changed my whole life.'
His fevered imagination fuelled his prose works, and he was spin-doctoring the facts of his life long before the name was coined. He set about the business of creating an Irish identity, not in any light or self-indulgent manner, but by settling down with determination and great practical application to the formidable task of learning to speak Irish like a native.
It was certainly remarkable that this late student of the language could acquire the competence and confidence to become a regular contributor to Fainne An Lae, at that time the most important periodical published in Irish.
This would lead to a progressive separation from his true background in England. It meant he could never reveal that he had a half-brother Patrick, a distinguished scientist who later became head of the global seismology unit in Edinburgh. From an early age, Alfred Wilmore seemed to pay heed to Wilde's dictum that man's first duty in life is to assume a pose.
In his long career as an actor, however, he went far beyond striking a pose. The greatest of all the distinguished parts he played was not that of Hamlet, of Robert Emmet, of Iago, or even Wilde in The Importance Of Being Oscar, but that character now known internationally as Miche al Mac Liammoir. On stage he created many superb characters but none richer or more complex than himself. No man is real, according to Shaw, 'until he has turned himself into a work of art'. Mac Liammoir did not believe his mentor Wilde when he wrote of the Decay Of Lying, but saw it as 'the proper aim of art'.
Memories of childhood recollected in old age by Mac Liammoir resemble scenes from a toy theatre, not penny plain but two-pence coloured. In Enter A Goldfish, subtitled Memoirs of an Actor; Young and Old, he shows an innate tendency to act, to pose, to mystify, even to hide. The members of his family have their entrances and their exits: occasionally they have good lines to deliver, but they remain supporting players in a domestic drama where Alfred was destined to top the bill.
Nevertheless, it would be unfair to dismiss his prose works as those of a fantasist. Much has been written of how Mack seemed to believe in his own lies, but one does not read O'Casey for factual truth and Brendan Behan's memoirs, as written and recorded, fall well short of the whole truth. Rather they should be reconsidered as part of the role-playing of a splendid actor. Hilton Edwards, in later years, may have been as much his Svengali as well as his lover. But there were others. Those who knew, did not talk; those who talked did not know. His last years at 4 Harcourt Terrace, Dublin, were lonely, despite his international acclaim in The Importance Of Being Oscar.
He could not act, he could no longer draw. He could only dream of Pavlova, Nijinsky, Beerbohm Tree, Maud Gonne, Bernhardt and the great figures of his Edwardian childhood. They were all part of the splendid pretence - the grand illusion.
There are artists of international status whose work transcends political and national boundaries, so much that their place of origin scarcely matters. Other artists wrap their identity in an adopted culture, so that it is indeed a shock when one learns where they were actually born. Mac Liammoir's claim to have given 'all for Hecuba' as an actor, dramatist and designer was not braggadacio but the motto of a man who, with the zeal of a convert, showed Ireland, at Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe and the Gate, what a living theatre could be. The gradual transformation of little Alfred Wilmore, reading his first stage direction, 'Enter a goldfish', to the final creation of the legend named Mac Liammoir was a performance that sets it apart in 20th century theatre.
This piece was typed and submitted by the author's daughter, Nuala Hayes, after his death - 'As I typed the notes up,' she wrote, 'he was at my shoulder in spirit.'
