Malachy McCourt (1931-2024) passed away just a week ago; it made sense to me save a little send-off to him for today, St. Patrick’s Day.
Malachy was not as well known internationally as his Pulitzer Prize winning brother Frank McCourt (1930-2009), author of the books Angela’s Ashes (1996), ‘Tis (1999), and Teacher Man (2005), and the stage play The Irish…and How They Got That Way (1997). Angela’s Ashes was made into a film in 1999. Few are the literary success stories to rival Angela’s Ashes. Everybody read it. Even I read it (though I’ve read thousands of books, you could probably count the number of CURRENT works I’ve read on one paw of a two-toed sloth.) The book is a tale of grinding poverty in Ireland during the author’s childhood, complete with an alcoholic, spendthrift father, and a tough, seemingly superhuman mother who holds the large brood together with grit and grim humor.
Early iterations of some of the material in the book first surfaced in the Off-Off Broadway two hander A Couple of Blaguards (1977) written and performed by Frank and his brother Malachy. Frank, an English teacher in the NYC school system, pursued the life literary and became world famous. Malachy, the more garrulous of the two, a natural raconteur, was a barkeeper. I confess I used to think of Malachy as the Billy Carter to Frank’s Jimmy, but this was because I thought the story began with Angela’s Ashes, when in reality it started nearly four decades earlier. The original Malachy’s opened in 1958, but there were various iterations throughout the decades. Richard Harris worked there! In time, Malachy became a local celebrity. (You’d be surprised at how local New York City can be, especially when sliced into subcultures). He was a personality on radio stations WMCA and WBAI. He was on Broadway in Mass Appeal (1981, as Milo O’Shea’s understudy); and Translations (1995, as Brian Dennehy’s understudy). He was a columnist in local neighborhood newspapers (“Sez I to Meself”), and wrote several books of his own, and (much like Al Lewis) became the Green Party candidate for Governor in 2006. He was an outspokenly left wing guy, a breath of fresh air when the entire country seemed to be tacking right.
Malachy was also an actor. He’d been a bit player in films and guest starred on TV since the 1960s. You can see him in movies like The Molly Maguires (1970), The Brink’s Job (1978), Q: The Winged Serpent (1982), Brewster’s Millions (1985), The January Man (1989), and The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990), and on TV shows like The FBI, Tales of the Unexpected, and The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. He was also a regular on soap operas like Ryan’s Hope and Search for Tomorrow, and played Honey Fitz in the mini-series JFK: Reckless Youth (1993).
A few months ago, a story went around that was both sad and characteristically hilarious: Malachy had been kicked out of hospice. We were sad to hear that was in hospice, but not surprised to learn that he was a difficult patient. He was 92 at the time of his passing, the last of the McCourt siblings to join their ancestors.
(Travalanche) 
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