Raconteur wrote of the Irish experience
Malachy Mccourt, a New York raconteur who excelled at playing himself — an Irish bartender with a predilection for the drink — before writing a best-selling memoir that picked up his family’s bleak immigrant story where his brother’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Angela’s Ashes left off, died March 11 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 92.
His son Conor confirmed the death but did not provide a specific cause. He added that his father was listening to a recording of Will Ye Go Lassie Go by the Chieftains, a traditional Irish folk band, when he died.
In summer 2022, Malachy Mccourt entered hospice care but lived longer than his doctors ever imagined and was released that November. He returned to hosting a radio show.
“Every day I wake up at 91, I am happy without a coffin over my head,” he told the New York Times.
As an actor, talk show guest and broadcaster, Mccourt was a boisterous and entertaining counterpart to his more dour and literary-minded brother Frank, a high school English teacher whose 1996 memoir about growing up dirt poor in Ireland became a publishing phenomenon.
Before Angela’s Ashes, Malachy was the only Mccourt brother — there were four — not toiling in relative obscurity after arriving in New York by steamship, one by one, beginning in 1949. With red hair and a bushy beard, Mccourt became a popular bartender in an Irish neighbourhood along Third Avenue in Manhattan, eventually partnering with an entrepreneurial couple to open a saloon named after him — Malachy’s.
In 1956, he befriended a writer for The Tonight Show, who told host Jack Paar that he should have the bartender on to display his Irish wit. He made his first of multiple appearances in 1958. TV commercials for Imperial Margarine and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups followed, along with small roles in sitcoms and movies and guest spots on Merv Griffin’s talk show. His most prominent on-screen role was as a bartender on the ABC soap opera Ryan’s Hope.
Following the success of Angela’s Ashes, Hyperion paid Mccourt $650,000 to write A Monk Swimming, a title inspired by the author once mishearing “Blessed art thou amongst women’’ — from the Hail Mary prayer — as “Blessed art thou, a monk swimming.” The book begins with Mccourt’s 1952 arrival, at age 20, in New York and covers his early years as, in his words, an “alcoholic tornado.”