Mary-Rose McMaster
Born: November 10th, 1926
Died: November 10th, 2018
The Irish actress, Mary-Rose McMaster, who died on her 92nd birthday on Saturday November 10th in San Francisco, was the only daughter and second child of the renowned Shakespearian actor-manager Anew McMaster and his wife Marjorie, nee Wilmore, who was also the sister of the actor Michael MacLiammoir. With her passing, the curtain has finally dropped on a significant chapter in Irish theatre history.
Mary-Rose McMaster was born in the Rotunda hospital in Dublin in 1926 and was destined to tread the boards from an early age: at 12 she acted with her older brother Christopher as Fleance in Macbeth. Her brother later gained prominence as a successful director of Granada TV's long-running soap opera Coronation Street in the 1960s.
Her mother was, in reality, the de facto manager of her father's theatre company. Marjorie was strongly rooted in the English theatre, having toured for an extended time period due to her diminutive size with Noel Coward and her younger brother (then known as Alfred Wilmore ) in JM Barrie's hit stage play Peter Pan, acting as his tutor and chaperone.
McMaster herself was initially shy and reluctant to go on stage. Years later, she realised that her self-consciousness was really “fairly normal” for someone who existed “in a milieu of unusual and amusing people”. However, despite struggling with low self-esteem ( exacerbated no doubt by her having a brother who “could read a part once and know it perfectly”) she eventually blossomed into a very talented actress playing the leading roles of Desdemona, Juliet and Ophelia.
Closing bows
In her recent memoir A Life Remembered: A Memoir of Anew McMaster (Carysfort Press/Peter Lang) she recalled how, following a matinee performance of Macbeth by her father and the iconic Mrs Patrick Campbell "the then reigning queen of the English theatre", she was carried protesting on to the stage of the Abbey Theatre for the closing bows. Her work vividly traces her touring life and times in Ireland, England and Scotland, and even further afield, in Australia.
It also provides a social history of Irish theatrical life with her parents from the 1940s to the late 1950s and is replete with many first-hand glimpses of the country towns of Ireland which she describes were as familiar and nostalgic to her as “a beloved neighbourhood would be to someone brought up in a more conventional way”.
Apart from her uncle, Michael MacLiammoir and his partner Hilton Edwards, of Dublin Gate Theatre fame, Mary-Rose McMaster also worked with the playwright Harold Pinter (whose first job in the theatre was with McMaster in Ireland) along with many other luminaries of the acting fraternity, such as Burgess Meredith, Paulette Goddard, Orsen Welles, Patrick Magee and Seamus Locke.
Directing and producing
It was also in her parent's theatre company that she was destined to meet her husband, the San Francisco-based actor, the late Jack Aranson. They moved to America and successfully toured the US as a husband-and-wife team acting with him in the part of Kathleen, the wife of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, in the play Dylan. They eventually formed their own production company and settled in Mill Valley north of the Golden Gate Bridge where they performed together for many years.
She semi-retired from the theatre in the mid-1980s and turned to directing and producing plays. Before completely retiring, she acted in an adaptation of Michael MacLiammoir's I Must be Talking to My Friends. Appropriately her last performance in Ireland was in this work of her uncle's in the Athenaeum theatre in Enniscorthy where her parents first opened their touring company in Ireland in 1927.
A devout Catholic, devoted mother and lover of animals, she was always possessed of a gentle and cheerful outlook and never lost her interest in Irish life, culture and politics. She is survived by her four children: John, Jenny, Brigid and David, her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.