The Flood of tributes, many of them verging on adulation, which marked Donal McCann's death would have been impossible during his lifetime. He simply would not have allowed them. At his funeral Mass a friend was quoted as saying: "We would not have been able to hold this event if Donal had a say in it."
Many tributes made much of his humility. Jack Kroll's quote in Newsweek that McCann had an ego "one-twentieth of the size of a Hollywood bit player's" was the most repeated remark. Kroll's judgment was right, but only partly so. Not only had Donal McCann an undersized ego but he was very active indeed in cutting the egos of others down to size.
On only one recorded occasion did he readily accept adulation. That, not surprisingly, was for an achievement outside acting. While filming in Dripsey Castle in Cork strange things happened. McCann was convinced the place was haunted. The still pictures would not come out no matter where they were developed.
This particular "ill wind" was to the good of the actors and the crew, and ended with McCann putting a bet of £1,000 on a horse. "The spirits of Dripsey ensured we got an extra week's work," he recalled. "I celebrated by putting a grand on a horse. It won at five to one. I remember arriving at the set. The crew all bowed pompously. The carpenters made a Papal throne to carry me round in."
The theatre and racing were in the family. His father, John McCann, was a playwright, a punter and a politician. He was a TD and twice Lord Mayor of Dublin. He died at the greyhound track in Harold's Cross. Donal McCann was taken to the theatre and to the races from an early age. A cutting, now sere with age, from the Irish Press of April 4th, 1962 reads: "Donal McCann (18), son of the playwright, John McCann, stars in his father's play Give me a bed of Roses, with members of the Terenure College Past Pupils' Dramatic Society on Friday, Saturday and Sunday next." A great stage career had begun in the shadow of a well-known father.
The influence of his mother, Margaret, led him to ask to be buried at her home place in Monaseed in Co Wexford where he had spent his youthful holidays. This connection had made him one of those rare Dubliners, a man who oozed the humour of his city but appreciated the rural ways as well.
His old school and the Carmelite priests who had encouraged his acting talent and helped form his character hosted his funeral Mass and witnessed a deepening of his spirituality as death approached.
The tributes from which Donal McCann would have shrunk in his lifetime were richly deserved. He gave all of his professionalism, all of his immense talent, to every role he played, from his early days in the Abbey to his appearances in London and Broadway and elsewhere on stage, in film and on television. The list of parts he played included almost all of the classic male leads of the Irish theatre as well as character roles in movies ranging from the early Disney romp The Fighting Prince of Donegal to that of an expatriate Irish doctor in Out of Africa. There were, however, four performances which stood out for their unparalleled brilliance. His Captain Boyle in the 1980s production of O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock at the Gate was astounding. In the old days in Juno it was all about, as he put it, "putting your foot down like an elephant on the laugh line". McCann changed all that. It was, he said, about "getting the right people, eliminating the negative and keeping the positive, getting an idea and following it through if it's right and leaving it if it's not right. When you do it like that with Juno and the Paycock it's a mystery to you that no one has done it before."
The wonderfully calm and understated Gabriel in John Huston's film of Joyce's The Dead, in itself perhaps the greatest short story ever written, brought McCann acclaim on a world-wide basis and, on the stage, his stark portrayals of two tormented men, Frank Hardy in Brian Friel's Faith Healer and Thomas Dunne in Sebastian Barry's The Steward of Christendom, copper-fastened his position as one of the greatest actors in the world.
There was a very dark side to McCann and he unleashed it in those last two roles. A fierce battle with alcohol was finally won but not without scrapes with the law. Indignant at someone who described him as a "hellraiser", he responded with some justification that the only one he really damaged was himself.
Often introverted and sometimes truculent, he was also an extremely generous and tolerant man. He found it impossible, however, to tolerate pretentiousness. In such cases his tongue could be as sharp as an executioner's axe.
With journalists, and he was once a journalist himself, he could be tetchy to say the least. In one famous interview each answer was shorter and sharper than the next. He brought it to a devastating end when asked what would make his life complete: "Death obviously," was his reply.
Death has now completed McCann's "life" - he hated the word career - in which he achieved fame in TV series such as The Pallisers on BBC only to retreat into relative obscurity for a period before letting his talent loose again. His life was less celebrated than it should have been outside Ireland mainly due to his sporadic performances away from home. In Ireland, where mediocre actors have at times been described as great, he was far and away the best. If he typically attributed his successes to others, few believed him. An honorary doctorate from Trinity College to Donaldus, Franciscus, Johannes McCann, was about the highest honour a sound and unpretentious Republic could, in 1997, have offered its greatest acting son. In the UK he would probably have been "Sir Donald" or even "Lord McCann of Haydock Park". He would, of course, have hated that sort of thing.
Donal McCann: born 1943; died July, 1999