The prolific and versatile Irish actor, Dan O'Herlihy, has died in Malibu at the age of 84. In a career that spanned more than 60 cinema and television films, he was nominated for an Oscar in 1955 for his intense portrayal of the title role in The Adventures Of Robinson Crusoe, directed by the great Spanish film-maker, Luis Buñuel.
A tall, imposing figure who oozed gravitas on screen whenever required, O'Herlihy was born where he will be buried, in Wexford on May 1st, 1919. He studied architecture at the National University of Ireland and worked as a theatre set designer before turning to acting with the Abbey Players and Radio Éireann.
His first cinema roles came in 1947, in Carol Reed's riveting Irish thriller, Odd Man Out, and Irish director Brian Desmond Hurst's film of Daphne du Maurier's Hungry Hill.
Moving to the US, O'Herlihy joined Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre, and Welles cast him as MacDuff in his 1948 film of Macbeth. O'Herlihy followed it with the starring role of Alan Breck in the Robert Louis Stevenson adaptation, Kidnapped, and he had made another nine movies before Buñuel cast him as Robinson Crusoe.
O'Herlihy ably rose to the challenge that film posed, spending a considerable amount of time on screen on his own, and he was rewarded with an Academy Award nomination as best actor. The Oscar went to Marlon Brando for On The Waterfront, but the nomination paid dividends for O'Herlihy, whose work schedule became busier as a result.
In 1958 he featured in Douglas Sirk's superb melodrama, Imitation Of Life, and two years later he was back in Ireland to join Robert Mitchum in the cast of A Terrible Beauty. In the first half of the 1960s O'Herlihy began to develop an enduring parallel career on US television with roles in the series The Travels Of Jamie McPheeters and The Long Hot Summer.
He went on to play many real-life characters, including Marshal Ney in Waterloo (1970), President Franklin D. Roosevelt in MacArthur (1977), and the title role in the TV film, Mark Twain: Beneath the Laughter (1979). He also played the menacing villain in Hallowe'en III: Season Of The Witch (1983), a benign lizard-like alien in The Last Starfighter (1984), and the sinister corporate executive known as The Old Man in the hugely successful RoboCop movies in the late 1980s.
O'Herlihy seemed as much at home among the impeccable cast of John Huston's wonderful swansong, the James Joyce adaptation, The Dead (1987), as he was among the ensemble cast of David Lynch's entertainingly enigmatic 1990s TV series, Twin Peaks, which also featured his actor son, Gavan O'Herlihy.,
His brother, Michael O'Herlihy, who was 10 years younger and forged a successful career as a TV director in the US, died in 1997. He is survived by his wife, Elsie Bennett O'Herlihy, five children, 10 grandchildren and one great-grandson.
Dan O'Herlihy: born May 1st, 1919; died February 17th, 2005