Desmond MacNamara, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetDesmond MacNamara
Irish artist
Date of Birth: 10-May-1918
Place of Birth: Dublin, Leinster, Ireland
Date of Death: 08-Jan-2008
Profession: sculptor, designer
Zodiac Sign: Taurus 
About Desmond MacNamara
- Desmond J.
- MacNamara (10 May 1918 – 8 January 2008) was an Irish sculptor, painter, stage and art designer and novelist.MacNamara was born in Mount Street, Dublin.
- After graduating from University College, Dublin and the National College of Art in Dublin in the early 1940s, he found a place as stage designer and prop maker for the Abbey Theatre and at the Gate Theatre in Dublin, working with the legendary duo Michael Macliammoir and Hilton Edwards.
- He was an uncredited art designer on Henry V (1944 film).MacNamara's sculptures are on display in the National Art Gallery of Ireland and at the Dublin Writers Museum.
- In the 1940s and early 1950s, he and his first wife ran what evolved into a literary salon on Dublin's Grafton Street. Major memoirs of the period cite MacNamara as a pivotal figure in Dublin's cultural underground.
- This post-war Dublin bohemian scene was immortalized in Donleavy's novel, The Ginger Man, where MacNamara appears as MacDoon, the Kangaroo-suited artist."Small dancing figure.
- It is said his eyes are like the crown jewels.
- A sharp red beard on his chin.
- A Leprauchaun for sure.
- Can't speak too loudly to Mac, else he might blow away." In the early 1950s, after a fire at the Abbey Theater, MacNamara moved to London.
- There he married his second wife, Priscilla Novy, a film studio script reader and children's novelist.
- They settled in West Hampstead and raised two sons, Oengus, an actor, and Oisin, an academic.
- He taught art at the Marylebone Institute, contributed reviews to the New Statesman and other periodicals, and published books on picture framing, the artistic uses of papier-mache, and on puppetry.
- Upon retirement from teaching, he added a biography of Éamon de Valera, aimed at young readers, and two seriocomic works of fiction.
- The Book of Intrusions (Dalkey Archive Press, 1994), which the Chicago Tribune critic called a "magnificent novel", appeared in 1994.
- MacNamara's final work of fiction was Confessions of an Irish Werewolf (2006).
- He died in Hampstead, aged 89.
Read more at Wikipedia