Vincent Dowling

Life
1929-2013; b. Dublin, ed. St Mary's College and Rathmines College of Commerce; joined the Abbey Theatre company; played Christy Kennedy in The Kennedys of Castleross, the early RTE TV soap-opera; m. Brenda Doyle, an actress, 1952, with whom four daughters; divorced 1975, and m. Olwen O'Herlihy, with whom a son; appt. Artistic and Producing Director of The Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival, Cleveland, Ohio, 1976-84; dir. The Playboy of the Western World in 1982 for PBS [radio], winning the Ohio Valley Emmy, 1983; credited with discovering the actor Tom Hanks;

served as Visiting Professor at Wooster College, Ohio, 1986-87; fnd. Miniature Theatre of Chester (Chester Theatre Co.) in Massachusetts, 1990; a son (b.1966) with actress Sinéad Cusack was adopted and grew up as Richard Boyd Barrett, a politician; Boyd Barrett was adopted as an infant - made known in 2007; d. 8 May 2013; his papers are held at Kent State  and John Carroll universities; published an autobiography as Astride the Moon: A Theatrical Life (200); his book-reviews include a critique of Robert Welch, The Abbey Theatre (OUP [1999])

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Works
Astride the Moon: A Theatrical Life (Dublin: Wolfhound Press [2001]), 365pp.

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Commentary
C. L. Dallat
, review of Astride the Moon: A Theatrical Life in Times Literary Supplement, (11 May 2001) - remarks on author’s freedom from the usual theme of flight from fides, lingua and patria, the absence of childhood squalor à la McCourt, and the untroubled religious faith, despite a sex life … like that of modern Ireland as a whole; ‘The opportunity of lecturing well-heeled Yankee sons of the daughter of Houlihan (incl. Edward Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill) on the iniquities of life in the “British-held” North of Ireland, a territory of which, this account shows he knew little, was an unexpected late bonus.’ Further, ‘[he] earned a living in the middle years of the last century in the first state-subsidised theatre in the world, under a management that regarded the theatre as “a form of national defence”; calls the author a slightly leftish Dubliner and the contents of the book an account of stand-offs between him and the then director Ernest Blythe, a Northern Protestant, ex-IRA man and former finance minister [who] attempted to promote cultural orthodoxy by both auditioning actors, and printing their names, in Irish; ‘Dowling, never troubled by a second language, learned just enough to scrape through …’.

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