Donal McCann

Irish actor Donal McCann: Understated but emotive.

Donal McCann was born in Dublin on May 7, 1943. One of the most acclaimed Irish actors of his time, his often understated but emotive, transfixing style won him widespread recognition.
He went Terenure College in the 1950s and it was there that he began thinking of a career on stage. The college had a stong Shakespearian tradition and it became clear to some of his teachers that he was “actor material”.
However, he first studied architecture in Bolton Street, though this was short-lived. He then worked as a copyboy on the Irish Press newspaper. He eventually went to the Abbey School of Acting in the early sixties, from where he joined the company.
His father John had been the Lord Mayor of Dublin, a Fianna Fáil man and was also a playwright. Donal starred in one of his plays. His first big part in theatre came when he was cast as Tarry Flynn in the Patrick Kavanagh adaptation of that novel. At the age of twenty, he got his first big film role in the Disney production “The Fighting Prince of Donegal“.
Over the years he has acted in innumerable stage and screen productions. But, he will perhaps be best remembered for his TV role in “Strumpet City” in the seventies and in John Huston’s film, “The Dead”. Later he was highly acclaimed for his role in “The Steward of Christendom“.
Although he spent most of his career at the Abbey and Gate theatres in Dublin, his reputation grew in England and the United States. In 1997 he won praise for his performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Sebastian Barry’s ”Steward of Christendom” as a Lear-like, senile Roman Catholic Dublin police chief torn between loyalty to Britain and the emerging independent Irish Free State.
Critics said he was probably never better than as Gabriel Conroy, the kind but unloved and unloving husband in John Huston’s film adaptation of James Joyce’s story ”The Dead” (1987). He performed to wide acclaim in several plays by his friend Brian Friel.
While Donal McCann appeared in many films, he considered himself primarily a stage actor, particularly a character actor. But his roles were large in plays like Friel’s ”Faith Healer’‘ and Samuel Beckett’s ”Waiting for Godot,” in which he was Estragon.
His work included a film of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Strindberg’s ”Miss Julie.” He also had the lead role in Hugh Leonard’s ”Da” and in 1988 began to win recognition in New York as Captain Boyle, the comic-tragic drunkard coward in Sean O’Casey’s ”Juno and the Paycock.”
After one performance of ”Juno,” Katharine Hepburn went backstage in tears and said, ”How did you learn to do that?” Mr. McCann, as quick-tongued offstage as on, said, ”By watching you.”

Devil and a Saint

Michael Colgan, the artistic director of the Gate, said: ”Donal’s genius is that he always proves the writer right, proves the director right and proves the audience right just for being there. That is why he’s the greatest actor we’ve ever had. He is both a devil and a saint, and he has suffered for it. But that’s also where he gets his great power.”
Sebastian Barry said his style was ”extravagant minimalism.”
His work was interrupted by depressions and by his alcoholism until he stopped drinking in the late 1980s. He could joke wryly about it. ”It was worth having something to get away from,” he said in 1998, ”but nobody made me drink.”
He said that he was a devout Christian but did not consider himself Roman Catholic. ”God takes my life forward,” he said, after his cancer was diagnosed. ”I would like to leave the theatre for a while. I’m not in a panic to do anything. I’m not ambitious for anything.”

Donal McCann and Anjelica Huston in a scene from 'The Dead'

In an interview on RTE in 1998, he said: ”I always took myself for a character actor. An actor’s job is to serve writing. It’s not self-advertisement.”
In an interview with The Guardian newspaper he said: ”There is a suggestion that everyone would like to be a Hollywood actor, that doing well-paid rubbish is what we all aspire to. It’s ludicrous. I’m not going to hire a soapbox to denounce the whole thing, but this desire to be known, I just don’t understand it.”
His films, some made for television, included ”Illuminata,” produced by John Turturro in 1997; ”Hedda Gabler’‘; ”The Miracle”; ”Out of Africa,” and ”Cal,” produced by David Puttnam, about the sectarian warfare in Northern Ireland.
He had been battling cancer for some time when he died on July 17, 1999, in Dublin at the age of 56. He was survived by his sister Margaret.