Malachy McCourt, actor, memoirist and Gadabout, dies at 92

Malachy McCourt, who fled a melancholy childhood in Ireland for America, where he applied his blarney and brogue to become something of a professional Irishman as a stage actor, bartender and best-selling memoirist, died Monday in Manhattan. He was 92.

His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his wife, Diana McCourt.

In 1952, when he was twenty, the Brooklyn-born Mr. McCourt settles with New York.

He left Ireland with a ticket paid for with $200 in savings, sent by his older brother, Frank McCourt, who had emigrated earlier and was working as an English teacher at a public school. Frank would also become a late-blooming author, whose books include the Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiographical work “Angela’s Ashes” (1996).

Malachy left school in Limerick when he was 13, two years after his hard-drinking father abandoned the family, leaving his mother, Angela, to raise the four of their seven surviving children. The family, Malachy would write, was “not poor, but poverty-stricken.”

“When you come out of that life, the things that get you are the two evils of shame on one shoulder, and the fear of demons on the other,” he told The New York Times in 1998. no one, they will find you out for what you and your mother did. Fear says what’s the point of bothering, drink as much as you can, ease the pain. As a result, shame brings about the past, fear about the future, and there is no life left in the present.”

He stopped drinking and smoking in the mid-1980s.

The buxom, red-bearded Mr. McCourt appeared regularly on soap operas – most notably “Ryan’s Hope,” in which he had a recurring role as a bartender – and had supporting roles in several films. In the 1950s, he opened what was considered Manhattan’s original singles bar: Malachy’s, on the Upper East Side.

For all its idiosyncrasies, his 1998 best-selling “A Monk Swimming” (the title recalls the author’s misunderstanding of the Hail Mary “Blessed are ye, among women”) in his youth and “Sing my him song” (2000) would inevitably provoke comparison with his brother’s autobiography.

“I was blamed because I’m not my brother,he complained, adding slyly, “I now promise to all those naysayers that one day I will write ‘Angela’s Ashes’ and change my name to Frank McCourt.”

In his review of ‘A Monk Swimming’ in The Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote that ‘where Frank is understated and tragic, Malachy is outrageous and comic’ – which may be largely because the younger brother focuses largely on his whisky-fuelled barfly antics, as if to be happy in America, instead of the fear he left behind as he struggled to survive in Ireland.

“The big psychobabble of today is the dysfunctional family,” Mr. McCourt told The Times in 1988. “Well, I’ve never met one that was functional. In Limerick, a dysfunctional family was one that could afford to drink but didn’t.”

Malachy Gerard McCourt was born on September 20, 1931 in Brooklyn. His father, also named Malachy, had fled the British to New York as an Irish Republican Army terrorist – or patriot, depending on the narrator’s perspective. His father met his mother, Angela Sheehan, after he was released from prison for hijacking a truck.

The McCourts returned to Ireland during the Depression in search of work following the death of a seven-week-old daughter. Malachy was 3 years old.

“I was a laughing little fellow with a raging heart and murderous instincts,” he wrote, adding that relatives and neighbors described him as cute, which “in Ireland meant cunning and cunning.”

Relatively few entries on his resume are verifiable (or would be, if he had ever bothered to put one together). But among McCourt’s intimates, his achievements – bona fide, embellished or even fabricated, but now folkloric – seem entirely plausible.

“The truth is,” he acknowledged, “I knew there was nothing I could do but tell stories and lies.”

One of his childhood goals was to become an American gangster; the worst outcome, he thought, would have been to get caught and be guaranteed room and board. (His brother Frank recalled that after stealing some lemonade and bread for the family, Malachy said that “this was only what Robin Hood would have done.”)

He was eleven when he went to a bar for the first time with another preadolescent (who would become a priest) and ordered a cider and porter (after which “we got into a mess”), plus whiskey.

“The taste of alcohol allowed me to be smart and charming and behave outrageously,” he wrote. “Acting also prevented me from being myself.”

As a young student he also took refuge in books. He read voraciously, but failed to pass the foundation diploma from Leamy’s National School. (In 2002, the Irish Department of Education and Science awarded Mr. McCourt its first primary school honors certificate. He called it “the only academic honor I have ever received.”)

At the age of 15 he enrolled at the Irish Defense Forces School of Music in Dublin, but for Malachy the army and the trumpet were not in harmony. He left for England, where, as Frank McCourt recalled, he was hired as a janitor at a wealthy boarding school, “and he walks around happily and smiling as if he were the equal of every boy in the school and everyone knows when you work in a school . At an English boarding school you have to hang your head and shuffle like a real Irish servant. He was fired.

He then welded wheels in a bicycle factory and shoveled coal at the Coventry gas works until his brother Frank saved $200 to take him to America. There he washed dishes, worked on the docks, sold Bibles on Fire Island, served in the army and, as the novelist Frank Conroy wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “became a professional Irishman, for which he can hardly be blamed.” datum. ”, as “his Irishness was all he had.”

Mr McCourt’s other exploits include: smuggling gold bars from Switzerland to India; cold auditioning for an Off-Broadway production, which led to his first stage role in “The Tinker’s Wedding”; cast in “Reversal of Fortune,” “Bonfire of the Vanities” and other films; playing Henry VIII in commercials for Imperial margarine and Reese’s peanut butter cups; and doing stints as a radio and television host (“I couldn’t wait to hear what I had to say next”).

His first marriage, to Linda Wachsman, ended in divorce. A love affair with Diana Huchthausen Galin resulted in marriage in 1965.

In addition to Mrs. McCourt, he is survived by a daughter from his first marriage, Siobhan McCourt; a son from that marriage, Malachy Jr.; two sons from his second marriage, Conor and Cormac; a stepdaughter, Nina Galin; nine grandchildren; and a great-grandson. Frank McCourt died in 2009. Malachy and Mrs. McCourt had lived in the same apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side for 59 years.

It was folly to distinguish between Mr. McCourt’s “stories and his lies.” Both were so enchanting.

For example, there was his meeting with Prince Philip at a reception at the Park Avenue Armory for the New York Rugby Club. He introduced himself to the prince, who immediately recognized Mr. McCourt’s brogue and asked how he liked America.

“I love it here,” he replied. “George was a fool to let it go.”

To which the prince supposedly replied (distinguishing the allusion to his royal predecessor): “We all make mistakes.”

Or the time he was asked to check his overcoat for compliance with a restaurant’s dress code. He walked to his car, took off all his clothes, put his coat back on, returned to the restaurant and this time cheerfully complied with the house rules when the attendant beckoned with a ticket for the cash register.

“There was a silence in the room, much the same, I think, as when Jesus took leave of his apostles and left the upper room forever at the Last Supper,” Mr. McCourt wrote. “I had a passing thought that it was my uncircumcised condition that was the cause of the consternation, and I prayed that there would be no opportunistic mohel among my assailants.”

In 2006, he ran for governor of New York, fittingly enough as the Green Party candidate. He opposed the war in Iraq and, as part of his environmental agenda, proposed a ban on chewing gum. He received 42,000 votes, or about 1 percent of the total, which was enough to qualify for a distant third place. (Eliot Spitzer was the winner.)

As a member of a species with a 100 percent mortality rate but in denial about death, Mr. McCourt said he had belatedly “learned acceptance and letting go and just keeping a sense of humor about this absurd state” in which humans find themselves. himself.

As for immortalizing the past that created this condition, he advised fellow memoirists: “Write that which most shames you, and never judge your own material; you will always feel guilty. He added: ‘Never show anything to your relatives.’

That advice was prompted by an incident in 1977 when he and Frank performed an early version of their play “A Couple of Blaguards,” which they billed as a “lighthearted look at Ireland.”

In the middle of the performance, an audience member stood up and shouted, “It wasn’t like that! It’s all lies!” It was their mother.

Alex Traub reporting contributed.