Dan O’Herlihy, Partisan of the Irish Pen

There’s a special pleasure in talking with Irish performers. Never a worry about the monosyllabic answer or the grunted, ambiguous response. Instead, there’s talk, a silvery shower of it, a cascade of names, times, fragments of anecdote, a leaping romp through other lives and places and happenings until, somehow, you have the dazed impression that William Butler Yeats, James Joyce and Orson Welles are doing a jig just round the corner, with John Huston looking on with a skeptical grin.

I once remarked of the late and lovely Irish actor Ray McAnally (“The Mission,” “A Perfect Spy”) that saying he talked was like calling Versailles a house. Much the same can be remarked of Dan O’Herlihy, now a resident of Malibu but by way of County Wexford and the Abbey Theatre, a well-schooled, well-traveled, well-liked character actor.

“I knew Ray,” O’Herlihy said over a glass of imported water not long ago. “The last time I saw him, he said, ‘Ah, it came early to you, the luck, Danny boy, and it’s come late to me but it’s come, and I haven’t had a day off in two years.’ I said, ‘Shouldn’t you slow up?’ He said not while the luck’s running so fine. But he’d had a bypass, and not long after we spoke he dropped dead mowing his lawn.”

O’Herlihy had started out to be an architect, but he joined the dramatic society at the National University of Ireland and it was life-changing. He caught the eye of the Abbey and was off to the greasepaint. He also worked at the Gate Theatre, where he played the lead in the first production of Sean O’Casey’s “Red Roses for Me.”

In one four-year stretch O’Herlihy appeared in 60 plays that each, by design, had a one-week run. His film break came when Carol Reed cast him in “Odd Man Out,” that excellent 1947 political thriller with James Mason as a man on the lam.

When he came to this country, O’Herlihy worked for a time with Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre, playing Macduff in the stage and screen versions of “Macbeth,” with Welles, naturally, in the title role. (Honoring stage superstition, O’Herlihy avoided saying the title. It’s “the Scots play.”)

He and Welles had a long and occasionally teasing relationship. Once Welles, preparing “King Lear,” wired O’Herlihy complaining that he was up to his neck in Method actors, and would Dan come back and join the cast? O’Herlihy, who had another commitment anyway, wired that he would be delighted to come back and play Lear, but he wondered what Welles would be playing. Edgar, perhaps?

O’Herlihy won an Academy Award nomination as best actor for the title role in “The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,” which Luis Bunuel made in Mexico in 1952. Since then O’Herlihy has been all over the lot, here and in Ireland, where he lived again from 1970 to ‘75, making films and doing stage work as well.

He appeared in John Huston’s last film, “The Dead,” that most Irish of films, shot on a sound stage in the Simi Valley. Just lately he is to be seen reprising his role as the Old Man in “RoboCop 2.”

He also writes, and has done the script for a one-man show called “Five Men With a Pen,” in which he will be Yeats, Shaw, Twain and himself and will talk about James Joyce. As a student actor, O’Herlihy had seen Yeats at the Abbey, and will recite a good deal of Yeats’ poetry, as well as some of Twain’s comments on the doing of his autobiography, not least about the pleasures of lying.

O’Herlihy will also be doing a new play, “The Woman in Black,” opening in Chicago in October and later coming to Los Angeles. That will be a homecoming. After all the travels, he and Elsie, his wife of 40 years, live in the award-winning house their architect son designed for them above Malibu.

“I don’t live here for the work. You can work anyplace there are boards or a camera,” O’Herlihy said. “I live here because I love it. All that sun and, ah, to be sure, that lovely money.”