No wonder the Israelis were confused about Dublin’s lord mayor. Even close political colleagues of Micheál Mac Donncha are not aware that he was once a child film star, who played a young version of Marty Feldman in a 1977 movie shot in Ireland.
The Sinn Fein councillor managed to attend a conference in Israel last week after officials mistook his title in Irish — ard mheara — as his first name. Similarly, his role in The Last Remake of Beau Geste has gone unnoticed because the then 12-year-old was listed in the credits as Michael McConkey, his birth name.
Yesterday, Mac Donncha explained that he later switched to using an Irish-language variant of his family name.
“My father [Billy McConkey] was from Howth, and there were a lot of people of that name in Howth,” said the lord mayor.
Asked how he landed a part in the Feldman-directed movie as a schoolboy, he said: “It was a bit of a mystery, really, how I got the role. Someone suggested me, and they got in contact — simple as that. I had no previous acting experience.”
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In a review of the film, one critic later marvelled: “Where they got a child version of Marty Feldman, I’ll never know, but it works.”
The Last Remake of Beau Geste was Feldman’s directorial feature debut, and he afterwards praised the Dublin lad who played a younger version of his character. “He’s never really acted before,” said the star, as quoted in Marty Feldman: The Biography of a Comedy Legend by Robert Ross. “I think he’s a very good actor.”
Feldman even considered making a “family comedy” with the youngster. “It depends whether he wants to or not. I asked if he wanted to act and he answered very seriously. He said, ‘If I’m any good.’ He’s a very sensible child, unlike me when I was 11.
“If he wants to be an actor he’ll be a very good actor, I think. But I like his approach to it. I’d love to make a picture where he plays my son, in fact.”
Mac Donncha’s career path instead headed into republican politics, and he became editor of the republican newspaper An Phoblacht in 1990. “I may have been tempted to do further acting afterwards, but it just didn’t happen,” he said yesterday.
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Dublin’s lord mayor does not recall getting a fat Hollywood fee at the time, saying his payment included a black-and-white television set. “The movie was a bit of a flop,” he said. “I don’t think it would have been on in the cinemas very long. It didn’t take off.”
Loosely based on the novel Beau Geste by PC Wren, the movie got mixed reviews, despite a stellar cast, which included Ann-Margret, Spike Milligan, Peter Ustinov and Sinéad Cusack. Feldman and Michael York played adopted twin brothers Beau and Digby Geste, who join the French Foreign Legion. A send-up of the adventure-film genre, it featured bawdy humour and innuendo.
Mac Donncha doubts his schoolmates at St Fintan’s CBS in Sutton would have been taken to the cinema to see it. “[My scenes] were filmed in Adare Manor in Limerick, and we stayed in Clare. It was done over a week or so,” he said.
Mike Murphy, the RTE broadcaster, got a small role as a country yokel, and the RTE Archives website has a five-minute film of him being directed by Feldman for his scene.
Other parts of the movie were shot at Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin, at Ardmore Studios in Bray, and in Madrid.
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Co-opted onto Dublin city council in 2011, Mac Donncha was elected lord mayor last June. Last week, after managing to get past Israeli security, he attended a conference in Ramallah sponsored by the Palestinian Authority. It was held against a backdrop of Haj Amin al-Husseini, a Muslim leader who collaborated with the Nazis.
In a statement on Friday, Mac Donncha said he had not known who al-Husseini was, and “completely reject any notion that I am in any way anti-semitic”.
Additional reporting: Laoise Neylon