Head of Irish castle was quirky Brazilian
Lady Dunsany, who has died of COVID-19 at age 78, was chatelaine of one of the oldest inhabited houses in Ireland. But she was not a stereotypical grande dame of an ancient Irish castle; she was Brazilian, and idiosyncratic enough to qualify for the greatest Irish honorific — that of being “a real character.”
At the height of the anti-hunting debate in Britain she used a shotgun to chase the local hunt from lands around her house, Dunsany Castle, in County Meath. Her objection was not so much to hunting but to the hunt party, which she described as “full of pompous Irish pretending to be English.”
She was born Maria-Alice Villela de Carvalho in Rio de Janeiro on Jan. 27, 1942. Her father was an architect. Her mother came from a Portuguese family who were hereditary standard bearers to the kings of Portugal and who claimed descent from the explorers Vasco da Gama and Pedro Alvares Cabral, the founder of Brazil.
The death of her father when she was 17 left de Carvalho with a desire to succeed as an architect, and in her 20s she won first prize in a competition judged by the famed Oscar Niemeyer, designer of the planned city of Brasilia.
She married oncologist Jayme de Marsillac; they had a son and a daughter. The marriage did not last, but they remained friends.
In New York in the 1980s, Maria-Alice met and married the handsome 20th Lord Dunsany, the Hon. Edward Plunkett (known as Eddie). He was heir to one of the oldest titles in Ireland, the barony of Dunsany, granted by Henry VI in the 15th century.
The couple founded de Marsillac Plunkett Designers and Architects in New York, Plunkett providing design input and Marie-Alice the architectural. After her husband inherited Dunsany Castle in 1999, Maria-Alice set about a sympathetic restoration of its interior.
Misfortune had struck the family shortly before. A painting attributed to Van Dyck was stolen from the castle. It was returned after police found it being hawked on a side street in Montreal.
An even rarer family hereditament is the episcopal ring of an ancestor martyred at Tyburn Tree in London in 1681. St. Oliver Plunkett was the last to be hanged, drawn and quartered there over the plot to kill Charles II. The ring is said to have miraculous properties.
Lady Dunsany’s husband died in 2011, and she is survived by three sons and a daughter.