The actor who played ‘professional Irishman’ in life

Malachy McCourt 1931–2024

Redheaded and jocular, IrishAmerican actor Malachy McCourt often felt he was in the shadow of his black-haired, academic older brother Frank McCourt, the celebrated author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Angela’s Ashes. “I was blamed for not being my brother,” he said. But he cultivated a successful career of his own as a young man in New York in the 1950s, scoring a role in an offBroadway play in a cold audition that led to a decades-long career in stage, film, and TV. Like his brother, he, too, later wrote a best-selling memoir about his troubled childhood, spent in desperate poverty in New York and in Limerick, Ireland. “It was assumed we’d be low-class the rest of our lives. But who can you blame?” he said in 1988. “Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.” Born in Depression-era Brooklyn, McCourt grew up in Ireland, where his family returned when he was 3. His alcoholic father abandoned the family of seven kids to destitution, and by age 15, McCourt had left home to work odd jobs in England. In 1952, with $200 Frank had sent him, Malachy followed his brother back to New York, where he became “something of a professional Irishman,” said The New York Times. He opened a namesake Irish pub, acted in plays and soap operas, and wrote memoirs. He even ran for New York governor in 2006, as a Green. His knack for storytelling made him one of the “most gregarious and beloved exemplars of the Irish-American experience,” said The Irish Times. Once, in the middle of a performance of his and Frank’s autobiographical play A Couple of Blaguards, their mother stood up in the audience and shouted “It wasn’t like that! It’s all a pack of lies!” McCourt didn’t deny his tendency to embellish. “Truth is,” he once said, “I couldn’t do anything at all but tell stories and lies.”