Seventeen years after his death, the ashes of Michael Quinn McAloney, the producer who brought the Abbey Theatre's production of Brendan Behan's Borstal Boy to Broadway, have been laid to rest in Dublin's Glasnevin Cemetery.
A Dublin 4 native, McAloney was educated at Belvedere College and went on to win a Tony award for best play for Borstal Boy.
His grandfather, a jockey, began exporting racehorses to Greenwich, Connecticut, before some of the family settled there.
McAloney had a very successful career as an actor, starring on Broadway in The Winslow Boy and Witness for the Prosecution.
“He became a producer because he liked to be the boss,” says his son Holt McCallany. “But he had a poet’s heart and loved Ireland.”
Glasnevin tour
McCallany said that a few years ago he took the tour of Glasnevin Cemetery and the guide, Paddy Gleeson, asked if they wanted to see the grave of Brendan Behan.
“As we stood at the grave I told him my father’s connection with the great man, as I told him the story I knew that his remains belonged in that graveyard.”
McCallany has followed in the family business, acting in a number of films, most recently Monster Trucks and Jack Reacher.
"There is no way that something like Borstal Boy could happen now," he said, adding that back then it was "a huge risk, a massive cast, an unknown writer, but dad believed in the play and he risked nearly everything to put it on".
On Saturday a few old theatre comrades gathered at Glasnevin Cemetery to bury McAloney’s ashes in a plot his son acquired for him.
A small piece of Irish theatre history came home for good.