Despite the acclaim for – and criticism of – Micheál MacLiammóir as an actor, from the 1920s to the 1970s, we know little about his private life before he and his partner, Hilton Edwards, founded the Gate Theatre in Dublin in 1928. His real origins, and even his name, were unknown to all except his family, his partner and a very few friends.
Micheál Ó hAodha and Christopher Fitz-Simon debunked the myth of his Irishness by revealing that he was in fact born Alfred Willmore in London and had no Irish family connections whatsoever. His juvenile friendship with Máire O’Keeffe, which lasted until her death, from tuberculosis, in 1927, was known but undocumented.
Now, however, Thomas Madden presents us with a trove of letters and diaries that enable us to understand that early period. O’Keeffe’s letters to their mutual friend Jack Dunne, a Kildare-based solicitor who was also tubercular, read together with Dunne’s diaries and MacLiammóir’s letters, allow us to appreciate Willmore’s transition from London to Ireland, via Davos, the Swiss resort, which in those days was a vast sanatorium attracting TB sufferers from throughout Europe. (Today we might be forgiven for viewing its World Economic Forum in a similar light.)
Becoming an artist
From O’Keeffe’s observations we can clearly see Willmore (whose career as the leading child actor in Edwardian London was behind him) becoming an artist first and foremost. The book is plentifully illustrated with the sketches he incorporated into his letters, and we also learn of his one-man and joint exhibitions in Davos and Dublin, where he was encouraged by Paul Henry.
Madden is at pains to depict Dunne as Willmore’s mentor, leading him towards an appreciation of literature that he might otherwise not have achieved. But there is no evidence in these letters that he did so.
But Madden does show how Dunne introduced O’Keeffe and Willmore to the work of Sigmund Freud, from which they derived the idea that “one should not be ashamed of one’s desire” and that one should “put sex among the beautiful things” (O’Keeffe’s words). This may well have been Willmore’s passport to sexual emancipation in the place of guilt and suppression. Freud may have been responsible for one of Mac- Liammóir’s 1956 diary entries: “What have the pleasures of sex to offer that is not a mere compensation for the lost raptures of childhood?”
Madden also lays heavy emphasis on the significance of the Ballets Russes at Monte Carlo as an artistic, as well as a sexual, magnet. This is undeniable, but he gives no credit to the fact that it was Willmore’s sister Marjorie who had supervised his childhood reading and, more importantly, that it was with her that Alfred first saw the Ballets Russes, in London in 1912-13, when he saw Nijinsky – which was, for him, a life-changing experience.
Nijinsky's charismatic stage presence in the role of Harlequin (in Carnaval) dominated Willmore/MacLiammóir's imagination as an artist and, later, as an actor. Harlequin became the ubiquitous presence in Mac-Liammóir the actor: he can metamorphose into many shapes, passions and identities; he can appear and disappear at will, without detection.
In later life, MacLiammóir noted in a diary that “I delight in disguise: in the assumption of a fantastic alien personality which may or may not deceive my Arch-enemy, the World. How else could I ever have hoped to become an actor?”
Dunne disapproved of Willmore’s flagrant and promiscuous homosexual behaviour and repulsed his sexual advances, writing in his diary of his “sense of subtle horror” that the “monstrous growth” of homosexuality could appear in “a nature in all other respects clean, healthy, boyish and charming”.
In a letter to Dunne, Willmore referred to himself as a changed girl. It puts me in mind of a letter he received in later years from Terence de Vere White: “You have a woman’s perception but a man’s mind.”
O’Keeffe wrote to Dunne of Willmore/MacLiammóir’s pick-ups, “his affairs are so numerous I can’t keep pace with them”.
He attributed his lack of application to “lazing around with my lovers in Paris or Munich”. Still experimenting with his sexuality, he was like a butterfly, unable to settle on any single project, or boyfriend, until his thunderbolt meeting with Hilton Edwards after O’Keeffe’s death, which canalised his life thereafter.
Madden does not live up to his subtitle: he is less concerned with the way in which MacLiammóir became the quintessential Irishman and only sketchily (and inaccurately) indicates how he came to translate his surname into MacLiammóir.
Together the trio discussed whether Ulysses was art and resolved to make Ireland "a country fit for James Joyce to live in" – to which O'Keeffe added the name of Oscar Wilde.
This suggests itself to Madden as the origin of MacLiammóir's lifelong fascination with Wilde and his one-man The Importance of Being Oscar (which had its first performance under the aegis of Jack Dunne, 40 years later), even though we know that that fascination can be traced back to Willmore's boyhood.
In emphasising that the Irishness became evident through O'Keeffe's undeniable interest in Celtic mythology, Madden also ignores the other major influence on the transition, Yeats's essay Ireland and the Arts (1901), in which he called on Irish artists to reassert the role of the arts and ignited MacLiammóir's commitment to the Irish language. Madden arguably prefers to see O'Keeffe as the catalyst for Willmore's joining the Gaelic League.
Inaccuracies
Madden frequently refers to Willmore as a Cockney, which is incorrect. He was born and raised in Kensal Green and Willesden, in London’s northwest. Cockneys are East Enders.
He furthermore presents the preposterous idea that Willmore’s “vocal journey” started in “the colloquialism of his native London”. If Alfred had spoken with a Cockney accent he would never have been cast to play Oliver Twist to Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s Fagin.
Unfortunately the material is not as well served by its editor as we might have hoped: a tantalising reference to James Cousins having bought three of Willmore’s pictures for display in Madras is not followed up, nor are many other missed opportunities to alert the reader to the full Willmore/MacLiammóir story. Many characters with walk-on parts go unidentified.
Madden’s commentary is a mixture of amateur psychology, unwarranted suppositions, solecisms and sillycisms that interrupt what should be a flowing narrative of the trio’s discovery of themselves and each other.
But these criticisms of the editor cannot detract from what would otherwise be lacking: the letters and diaries themselves, which are an invaluable window on the creation of an artist and an Irishman who was also coming to terms with his homosexuality.
Richard Pine organised the golden jubilee of the Gate Theatre in 1978 and worked with Micheál MacLiammóir on exhibitions of his graphic art. His new book is Greece Through Irish Eyes
