The genius of Micheal MacLiammoir lay less in the richness of his stage performances than in the invention of his own persona: "a flamboyantly Irish . . . and openly gay" virtuoso whose high pretensions and sheer audacity came to embody the grandeur of the Irish stage. Tracing the actor’s life from his birth in England through his career as founder and manager of the Gate Theater with Hilton Edwards, Donald Taylor Black’s penetrating portrait makes copious use of interviews, film clips, and taped performances. The final picture is that of a complex and contradictory figure whose genius helped shape the modern Irish stage.

In 1931, fifteen-year-old Orson Welles traveled to Ireland and wangled an acting job at Dublin’s Gate Theater. During his stay at the Gate, Welles met and befriended its founding managers, Micheal MacLiammoir and Hilton Edwards, who twenty years later would both perform in his film version of Othello (1952). It was partly to repay his friends that Welles appeared in Return to Glennascaul, a Gate production that Edwards directed and coproduced with MacLiammoir. Featuring many of the Gate actors, the film is an exquisitely written ghost story, beautifully shot and composed, in which Welles plays himself in typical tongue-in-cheek fashion.