The Joyous Genius of Jack McGowran

Jack MacGowran (1918-1973) was what it’s all about: a muse for many of the best creative minds of the 20th century, an indispensible character actor, and a career most of us would die for, with major success in three countries and a presence in works ranging from the greatest classics to the most enjoyable schlock. I hope to God his name is well known in his native Ireland. In the States the best you can do is remind folks what he was in, and so I do today.

You know how in any story set in an Irish village there’s always a scrawny one, a bit tetched in the head? That’s the niche occupied by MacGowran. For all I know he helped create it. He had a huge honker of a nose, looked underfed, struggled with alcoholism all his life. But many considered him a comic genius to rival Chaplin. As a young man he had worked as an insurance agent while playing small parts with local Dublin companies, starting around 1940. Impressively he spent some time in Paris a decade later, where he studied with Etienne Decroux, who later taught Marcel Marceau. Who would have thought to do that at the time? But it was prescient, ahead of the curve, and it sure would come in handy later.

And now we will break his career down into chunks, using collaborations as an orgranizing principal where possible, because it’s kind of illuminating:

John Ford: MacGowran played the role of Ignatius Feeney in Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952), one of his earliest major credits. Later he would appear in Young Cassidy (1965), co-directed by Ford, which is a thinly veiled bio-pic about the life of Sean O’Casey. Speaking of whom:

Sean O’Casey: MacGowran made his London debut in The Plough and the Stars (1954). His Broadway introduction was in Juno (1959), a musical based on Juno and the Paycock. He played opposite Peter O’Toole in a 1966 London production of Juno and the Paycocok. He was starring in a 1973 Broadway revival of The Plough and the Stars at the time of his death.

Eugene O’Neill: MacGowran gained his first major critical plaudits for his performance as Harry Hopen in the 1958 London production of The Iceman Cometh, for which he was voted Best Supporting Actor of the Year, attracting special praise from Kenneth Tynan. He also starred in the 1963 production of Hughie and Others.

Samuel Beckett: The central creative partnership of his life.

I can’t stop looking at this photo! Not only do the two men resemble each other, with the same high sloping foreheads and bird-like beaks, but have you ever seen the super-serious Beckett SMILE? I’m pretty sure I haven’t. MacGowran plainly just made him laugh. Beckett is such an international artist, such a universal voice, yet it must never be forgotten that his Irish identity was key to his nature. The two men looked at each other and saw themselves.

The pair had met in 1957 when MacGowran appeared in Beckett’s radio play All That Fall. Their collaboration began in earnest shortly after when MacGowran stepped into the London production of Endgame. In 1964 he went to Paris in a version of Endgame co-starring Patrick Macnee directed by Beckett himself. He starred in Beckett’s 1959 radio play Embers, and was in the 1961 BBC production of Waiting for Godot in which his performance as Lucky was compared to Harpo Marx and the Mad Hatter (man, how I wish he’d played that role!). In 1962 he devised a one man show composed of fragments of various Beckett works which he presented in Dublin, later bringing it to London in 1965, New York in 1970, and back to Dublin in 1972, where he won an Actor of the Year award. Perhaps most significantly, Beckett wrote the television play Eh Joe (1966) specifically for MacGowran. The latter claimed that it was the only piece of his own acting with which he was satisfied. More on their artistic partnership here.

So — that’s obviously the beating heart and soul of MacGowran’s career but there’s much, much more, from the sublime to the ridiculous, starting with the latter:

He’s in Walt Disney’sDarby O’Gill and The Little People (1959).

Two cheesy horror films: Giant Behemoth (1959) and The Brain (1962). There’s one more horror film on his resume that’s less cheesy, but we’ll save it for the end, where it in fact belongs.

Then came:

One of my favorite movies of all time Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963).

Richard Brooks‘ 1965 adaptation of Lord Jim, with O’Toole.

David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago (1965).

Three by Roman Polanski: Cul-de-sac (1966), The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) and A Day at the Beach (1970).

Two with members of the Beatles: Richard Lester’sHow I Won the War (1966) with John Lennon, and Wonderwall (1968), with music by George Harrison.

Michael Powell’s Age of Consent (1969)

The hilarious Bud Yorkin comedy Start the Revolution Without Me (1970) with Gene Wilder and Donald Sutherland.

Burgess Meredith’s appalling The Yin and The Yang of Mr. Go (1970, released 1974).

Peter Brook’sKing Lear (1971), as the Fool to Paul Scofield‘s Lear.

MacGowran’s last screen performance was as Burke, the drunken British movie director who gets thrown out the window in The Exorcist (1973). I’ll speculate that his early death (by influenza) is among the reasons we don’t witness that spectacle in the film (after all, we witness so MUCH in that movie). But perhaps not. The fact that we don’t see it puts us in the same boat as the characters in the movie, leaving us uncertain as to what happens, fueling the tension.

Imagine dying from flu in 1973! What an unlucky, downtrodden, Irish way to go. MacGowran had been born during the famous outbreak in 1918, when such deaths were so common that it was compared to the plague. But deaths by flu have continued to happen right along, they’re simply rare. And it’s more certainly that than the Satanic Curse that many attribute his death to that effected his premature departure.

MacGowran was only 54 when he passed. Another couple of decades of that epic personality and genius talent would have been nice. I bet he’d have been especially grateful for elevation to star status on at least a few occasions so that folks might remember his name! Would that it had come to pass.

For more please see my booksNo Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous,and Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube. Jack MacGowran was neither in vaudeville nor in silent comedies, but I hope you can see why the topics would be relevant.