August 28
Published in On this Day listing- 1987 John Huston (81), film director, screenwriter and actor, whose last film, released that same year, was an acclaimed adaptation of James Joyce’s The Dead, died.
- 1814 Joseph Sheridan le Fanu, journalist and writer, notably author of the Gothic suspense novel Uncle Silas (1864), born at 45 Dominick Street, Dublin.
- 1987 John Huston (81), film director, screenwriter and actor, died. Huston directed over 40 films, many of which are regarded as classics, including The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and The African Queen (1951). Depressed by Senator McCarthy’s House Committee on Un-American Activities, which affected many of his friends, he moved in 1952 to Ireland, where he bought the derelict St Cieran’s, a Georgian manor house near Athenry, Co. Galway, on over 100 acres and restored it at great cost. Popular with the locals—he was a highly convivial character—and very much a man for the outdoors, he was master of foxhounds with the Galway Blazers. Over the following decade he took a great interest in the fledgling Irish film industry, successfully lobbying Taoiseach Jack Lynch—he gave him a tour of Ardmore Studios—to set up a committee of filmmakers and journalists to help promote a productive Irish film industry. As a result, the Film Act (1970) offered tax breaks to foreign production companies so long as they shot on location in Ireland. Huston, however, believed it more important that Irish filmmakers made films in Ireland. For many his greatest film was his last one, his adaptation of Joyce’s masterpiece The Dead (1987), which he directed from a wheelchair, using oxygen from a tube attached to a generator, while dying from emphysema. Released after his death to critical acclaim, it was described by his daughter Angelica, who starred with the late Donal McCann, as ‘his love letter to Ireland and the Irish’.
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