Cyril Cusack Began His Career In The Fit-Ups

shot before yelling, having sat on a clump of nettles. He travelled periodically to London with the company, and changed schools with each move, later claiming to have attended every school in Ireland. He loved the peripatetic life, the makeshift shows, and the melodramatic fare and made a point, throughout an illustrious career appearing in largely highbrow work, of celebrating his early influences: ‘My alma mater was the fit-ups and touring theatres’.

In 1923 he became a boarder at the Dominican College, Newbridge, Co. Kildare, and stopped touring. Momentarily seduced by the desire for a safer, more conventional career, he entered UCD (after a short period in the CBS, Synge St.) to study politics and law with the intention of applying for the bar. His friends included Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh and Frank Ryan who encouraged his republican beliefs – the trio were evicted from a lecture for making seditious comments. During holidays Cusack worked as an actor with various repertory companies, including Norwich and Windsor. Appearing in Brixton, he described how ‘something happened between myself and the audience – I suddenly realised that they liked me’. He left college without a degree and, after a year touring with his mother and O'Rorke round England and Ireland, made his debut in the Abbey in 1932, playing two small parts in A. P. Fanning's one-act ‘Vigil’. The diarist Joseph Holloway wrote perceptively of his soft, musical voice and great promise – the first of Cusack's almost invariably excellent reviews. At the Gate, Hilton Edwards and Mícheál MacLiammóir spotted his potential and gave him two seasons, but MacLiammóir later regretted that they gave him only juvenile parts and lost him to the Abbey. He played almost exclusively with the Abbey between 1933 and 1945, appearing frequently in major roles in over sixty-five productions.

Cusack was small, neat, graceful, and a natural scene-stealer to whom audiences responded warmly. Interaction with the audience mattered greatly to him and he placed theatre above film ‘because a film may be seen by six million, and a play by only 600, but the effect on the 600 may be truer and more lasting’. Patricia Boylan, a young Abbey actress in the 1930s, felt he was too dependent on the audience liking him and that this hindered him in playing unsympathetic roles, but she testified to his intensity and commitment, recalling how he once took a long walk with her, remaining the whole time in character. Such immersion in a part came close to the ‘method acting’ style popularised in later decades in America, and Cusack was an important bridge between the old-school Abbey acting and the newer generation. He greatly admired the older actors Barry Fitzgerald and F. J. McCormick, but he agreed with the English director Hugh Hunt that Abbey acting had become rhetorical and stylised, and he was instrumental in Hunt's drive to make it more naturalistic. His performance as Christy Mahon in Hunt's production of ‘The playboy of the western world’ (27 July 1936), which he described as ‘a fine balance of naturalism with the theatrical’ so enraged the Abbey director, F. R. Higgins, that he stormed into Cusack's dressing room and made a scene. The run continued – it was a commercial success – but immediately after the play was directed again, by Higgins, in more conventional Abbey style.

In 1955 his company presented the world premiere of the controversial new play by Sean O'Casey,  ‘The bishop's bonfire’, after Cusack visited O'Casey in Torquay to persuade him to showcase his new work in Dublin. The play (typically for O'Casey) was anti-clerical; Cusack, the devout, mass-going president of the Catholic Stage Guild, probably disagreed with its sentiments, but appreciated its pulling power. The performance, directed by Tyrone Guthrie, was condemned in advance by a small catholic action group, and this guaranteed audiences. Critics came from Britain and America, and on the opening night (28 February) 2,000 people had formed a queue down Grafton St., and police were called to keep order. The expected uproar began in the second act but was led by a small faction of the audience; the majority remained bemused. Cusack made a curtain speech – beginning in Irish, and switching to English on demand – in which he derided the ‘self-appointed defenders of God in the manger’ (Irish Press, 1 Mar. 1955). However, his ambiguous attitude towards the play – not a critical success, then or later – must have been apparent, because Conor Cruise O'Brien wrote that his speech was delivered ‘with the air of Ajax defending a damp Monday evening’ (New Statesman and Nation, 5 Mar. 1955).

Cusack was a complex and enigmatic character, even to himself – he remarked in one interview that his New Year's resolution was to find out who he was. Known for his whimsical charm and twinkling smiles, he could make cutting remarks in a deceptively light tone. A pious catholic, who entered the abortion debate on the Irish Times letters page to oppose abortion, he was also adulterous and was rumoured to have had an affair with Vivien Leigh, among others. His wife, the Derry-born actress Mary Margaret (‘Maureen’) Kiely (m. 1945), suffered through his infidelities, and the couple separated (after having six children, one of whom died at birth) about 1968, the year his girlfriend, Mary Rose Cunningham, gave birth to his fourth daughter. Cusack continued to preach family values and did not marry Cunningham until 1979, two years after his first wife's death.

His career in old age remained distinguished – he appeared in Jim Sheridan's My left foot (1989) and the following year Adrian Noble cast him opposite his three eldest daughters, Sinead, Sorcha, and Niamh, in Chekhov's ‘The three sisters’, which had a triumphant run at the Gate. He died of motor neurone disease at 41 Burlington Lane, Chiswick, London, on 7 October 1993 and was buried at Bohernabreena cemetery, Dublin. The dáil observed a minute's silence to mark his death.