MacLiammóir, Michéal

MacLiammóir, Michéal (1899–1978), Irish actor, designer, and dramatist, who as Alfred Willmore appeared on the London stage as a child. He then studied art, travelled widely in Europe, and in 1927 joined Anew McMaster's Shakespeare company. In 1928 he founded, with Hilton Edwards, the Galway Theatre (which he directed until 1931) for the production of Gaelic drama, and later the same year the Dublin Gate Theatre, which opened at the Abbey's experimental Peacock Theatre with Ibsen's Peer Gynt. In addition to acting in and designing over 300 productions for the Gate, including Denis Johnston's first play, The Old Lady Says ‘No!’ (1929), he acted in London, New York (where at the invitation of Orson Welles he played Hamlet in 1934), and on tour with the Gate company in Egypt and the Balkans. In 1960 came his first one-man show, on Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Oscar, and in 1963 he presented a second one-man entertainment I Must be Talking to My Friends; a third, Talking about Yeats, was first seen in 1965. He also wrote a number of plays, including Diarmuid agus Grainne (1929), seen in Irish and English; Ill Met by Moonlight (1946), seen in London in 1947; and Prelude in Kazbek Street, which received its première at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1973.