Sinead Cusack, actor
I first met Donal when I was 16, with my father and his uncle, Fr Leo McCann. I was at a very impressionable age, and I just thought he was extraordinarily witty and amusing company. I didn't know about his talent then but I was very taken with him. He was three years older than I was, and very easy to talk to.
There were periods in our lives when he was incredibly difficult to communicate with because he was going through such hell in his life. At the time of our first meeting, however, he was wonderfully forthcoming.
I went to see him subsequently at the Queen's Theatre and when I saw him walk on stage - I don't exaggerate at all - it seemed to me as if all the light in the theatre had concentrated on him. He seemed to draw the attention of the audience in an extraordinary way into his character and what he was doing. He had an ability to make an audience just focus on him completely. I think it was his fantastic concentration and complete habitation of the character he was playing.
We didn't become friends until I joined the Abbey myself and then we became close. We were in and out of each other's lives pretty well until he died. There were long periods of time when I didn't see him and he might drop me a quick line with a drawing or a poem. He was a wonderfully witty correspondent when he did write, which wasn't often. His letters always made me laugh.
Donal was a very disturbing presence. When I say that I'm not denigrating him; I'm saying that he made you re-evaluate, he made you re-think. He had such a strange and quirky mind.
It is very difficult for me to describe the quality he had on stage and the quality he had in life, except to say it was disturbing, it was dangerous. You never knew where you were. He could go from extraordinary sweetness to vile temper. You simply did not know where you were, but throughout all the years I always knew that Donal would be on my side in a scrap and I would be on his. At times he was incredibly curmudgeonly and difficult. But I always enjoyed his company.
Bob Quinn, film maker
What often struck me was a deep and seething anger at himself and at the world for not taking more care. That may be the reason why he was fastidious to the point of psychopathology in his work. It was why his presence on stage and on film was so intimidating. He had seen the abyss in certain formative experiences of early life.
What he did was not acting. It was real. It was why we were all privately afraid of him. It was why directors handled him with great care, why actors circled him nervously, why audiences watched, fascinated. This was a man in whose dangerous presence, off and onstage, we spoke deferentially, fearful lest we say the wrong thing.
Yet he could also be the mildest and gentlest person imaginable. Yes, he was frequently seen as a bully. It could be justified on his grounds that everybody should be as fanatic about perfection as he. But when he met his artistic equals on stage, the ensemble playing was electric.
To meet him in preparation for a role was to be sucked into a single-mindedness that was alarming. Every word in his scenes - including the other characters' lines - was absorbed into his interpretation, which was probably why writers loved him.
The young McCann I knew was outrageously handsome. His brown eyes and Jack Nicholson smile were fly traps.
Susan Hampshire might testify to that. So might Sinead Cusack, Maggie Fegan and others of his leading ladies. He was suspiciously tentative about his experiences acting with Anjelica Huston but he said he loved working with Billie Whitelaw. Thirty years ago I brought a young French woman - whom I fancied - to see him in the Abbey panto, in which he played James Bond. One pint after the show I had lost her to Donal . . .
He was an erudite conversationalist, extremely well-read and a brilliant user and punner of words. The trouble for a media interviewer was that he thought before he spoke. Andy O'Mahony will testify to that. I heard a radio interview between them. The pauses before answering were of Pinter/Beckett duration. Cliff-edge stuff. Nowadays such pauses would be edited out. But you couldn't have a showbiz-type interview with McCann.
John Lynch, writer/director
Donal and I struck up an early friendship in a way that there was no going back from whenever we met over the years. He was working as a copy boy in The Evening Press. "I work for the slaves in The Press, the subeditors, you know."
Because he had a press card he got in free to see The Beatles when they appeared in the Adelphi Cinema that year and I remember that he was quite proud to have interviewed the Famous Four for a few minutes. "I asked John Lennon if he believed in God," Donal told me. "He looked at me as if I didn't exist for what seemed like an awful long time, turned away and mumbled in his best Liverpoolese, `I don't know'."
I think Donal was shocked by Lennon's uncertainty but it didn't stop him doing a brilliant impersonation of John Lennon to my attempt at Ringo Starr in the Christmas pantomime that year.
It was around this time, I remember, that Donal always had a small bottle in his back pocket which looked to me like water. "Vodka," Donal told me, "to loosen up the women." It is easy now with hindsight to understand this as the beginning of the slippery slope in which vodka was to play a major part in the confusion and destruction that was to blight his personal life and his career and which finally made it impossible for Donal and me to have any kind of meaningful relationship. At the end of his drinking days he was drinking vodka from a pint glass and joking, "This water is terrible stuff". But in these early days, he was great fun, life was full of promise and we were both dedicated to greatness in art. Donal fancied himself as a painter as well as an actor and was constantly sketching.
Fame and fortune were never part of our aspirations then and throughout his successful career the shallow trappings of the business never interested him. Money was for putting on horses and buying drink and that was that. He was always falling in love and fancied all the girls in the pantomime chorus. In fact, he proposed marriage to a few of them and for the next few years seemed to be constantly getting engaged. He introduced me to his intended so often I lost count.
Joe Dowling, director
Great talent is not always a blessing and can be the source of real insecurities and emotional trauma. In Donal's case, the introverted nature of his personality, a brooding and tortured imagination and a highly attuned sense of self combined to create a unique approach to every part he played. He had the ability to take a character imagined by the writer and without changing a word, make it sound and feel like his own creation.
Lines sounded newly minted every time he spoke them and the originality of his interpretation often surprised even the author . . .
No matter who plays it in the future, for me, forever, Donal will be Frank Hardy, the eponymous faith healer of Brian Friel's masterpiece. It was a performance where character and actor became one as the evening wore on. The character, one of Friel's most complex figures, lives in a temporary and fickle world that every actor knows well. Travelling in an old battered van with his manager and wife (or mistress), offering his services as faith healer to the desperate souls in remote villages in Scotland and Wales, he lives with the constant fear that his gift or talent will desert him and that he will not be able to "perform". Weaving fantasies with fact, his monologues recount incidents from the strange journey that leads to his death. It was a perfect part for Donal McCann. It combined intelligence, sensitivity, spirituality, excessive behaviour and the awareness that talent cannot be trusted, that the performance doesn't always happen on demand. He understood it instinctively and, from the beginning of rehearsal, played it to perfection.
Working as director on that play with him over many years, it was inspiring to watch him grow into the role so completely. The last performance in London's Royal Court Theatre stands out in my memory as one of the greatest nights of theatre I have witnessed. As Frank Hardy made his way downstage for the final moment of epiphany, delicately removing an imaginary piece of fluff from his coat, certain that he was going to his death, the focus of the entire audience was on his every tiny gesture. The stillness in the theatre was a palpable demonstration of the collective experience that makes live theatre a unique event. In that moment, I understood the nature of his theatrical greatness. A complete concentration on the character, his ability to hold our attention fully and the magic within him to communicate his thoughts and feelings clearly to the audience, made it a moment to hold onto forever.
Garrett Keogh, actor
Garry [Hynes] was directing Tom Murphy's Famine, and the word was that she had brought in a dietician so that the cast would lose weight and have a real experience of hunger. Donal suggested the poster should read: "Famine by Tom Murphy, Starving in Alphabetical Order . . ."
Donal McCann Remembered: A Tribute, edited by Pat Laffan and Faith O'Grady, is published by New Island Books on Monday. Price £8.99. All proceeds from the sale of the book go towards cancer research at St Luke's Hospital