Alistair Cooke

The renowned journalist/writer/commentator Alistair Cooke,died about four years ago.He was over 90 years old .He had 'retired' from his ''day-job'' less than a year before his death.He had been a journalist all his working life;having spent 60 years presenting his radio-letter ''Letter from America'' in which he managed to inform and entertain his listeners with his news stories .

These stories were able to link local news with national and indeed, international, news .Sometime after his death a story broke about a pharmaceutical company effectivly robbing graves in order to use the bones of the deceased in a manufacturing process.Alistair Cooke's bones were among those taken.
This ,of course, was very upsetting for his and the families of the other departed .

But ,in a way,how wonderfully appropriate that ,the mortal remains of ,probably, the world's longest serving working journalist, should be still making headlines years after his death at the age of 90 plus.

Not directly connected but with a similar appropriatness is the story of our own(?) Micheal MacLiammore and to a lesser extent Hilton Edwards.They lived for the theatre and have left a marvellous legacy of theatrical events.the Gate,Oscar Wilde,and Hilton Edwards' involvement in what is now RTE.(refer to the double biography ''The Boys'').
MacLiammore was seen by his peers as one of the best Irish stage actors ever.We,the non-theatre-going public, did not know, until after both he and Hilton Edwards had died ,that he was not Irish at all.Not only was he not Irish but he was 'very'English(Alfred Willmore)and almost everything about his life and background was invention.

As in the case of Alistair Cooke ,how appropriate that this dedicated actor should have spent all his life in Ireland playing a part,as far as his Irish origins and (for most of us) his sexual -orientation were concerned,on a 24/7 timescale...,and many years after his death we should still be impressed by the fact that an actor named Alfred Willmore convinced us that a man called Michael MacLiammore really existed..