Word: liammoir
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Welles had the star quality of some tribal monster-god. Ten pounds at birth, he just kept growing, especially the head, Churchillian even in youth. But he had more. Before Sinatra, Welles was the Voice: "softly thunderous," Irish actor Micheal Mac Liammoir called it, "like a regretful oboe." Intimate, intimidating, sonorous, it almost mooed with mellowness...
...Importance of Being Oscar attempts to convey this variety of sentiment in the context of Oscar Wilde's life, with mixed results. Written by Micheal Mac Liammoir, the play presents a biographical sketch of the author interspersed with excerpts from Wilde's writing. The excerpts, taken from poetry, prose, and personal letters, are well chosen and demonstrate Wilde's insightful commentary on 19th-century European society. They also suggest the depth and vulnerability of Wilde's nature, his sensitivity to the events and people in his life...
DIED. Michéal Mac Liammóir, 78, renowned Irish actor, designer and playwright; of a pulmonary embolism; in Dublin. Blessed with what he called a "godawful gift of gab" and a deep streak of talent, Mac Liammoir designed and appeared in 300 productions at Dublin's Gate, a famed small innovative theater he helped establish in 1928. In the 1960s he popularized the one-man show by giving, on four continents, marvelous solo recitations of passages he had culled from Oscar Wilde, an act he called The Importance of Being Oscar, and from centuries of Irish literature...
Only less remarkable than how brilliantly Wilde could write is how badly, and at times Mac Liammoir seems to use the bad less for thinking it expressive of Wilde than for thinking it good. There is small effort to recall the most dazzling talker of modern times, and far too much to stress Wilde's scarred and suffering side-in whom the play-actor yet persisted...
...humor as when, standing handcuffed in the pouring rain, he murmured: "If this is how Her Majesty treats her prisoners, she doesn't deserve to have any." By omitting such touches and emphasizing Wilde's plangent side, and by himself-if often eloquent-being often florid, Mac Liammoir piles Pelion upon Oscar, and turns what he dubs a baroque and rococo story into a rather mawkish and Victorian one. In both men notable showmanship can become mere staginess...