Cork’s original Oscar star… who became a scientist of world renown

Move over Cillian Murphy… because we can reveal the identity of a Cork actor who had a brush with Oscars fame 68 years before you lifted the famous statuette.

Cormac Gallagher was the star of a film called Three Kisses shot in Cork which was nominated for Best Short at the 1956 Academy Awards.

We featured the film in the 2023 Holly Bough, ahead of Murphy’s Best Actor win in March for his role in Oppenheimer – and issued an appeal for the unknown teenage actor in Three Kisses to come forward.

Now we can reveal that the young fella in 1956 was Cork schoolboy Cormac Gallagher, who went on to attain world renown not in the sphere of acting – but as one of Ireland’s foremost experts in another field entirely: psychoanalysis.

Yes, in an example of life kind of mirroring art, Cillian Murphy won his Oscar for playing a great scientist – while Cormac went on from starring in an Oscar-nominated film to being a renowned scientist himself.

That only tells half the story of the life of Cormac – now 86 – who became a Jesuit priest for 35 years after leaving Cork, then left that calling to marry the love of his life,

Early life 

Cormac Gallagher was born in Montenotte in 1938. He was christened Cornelius Vincent but always called Cormac.

His parents were Christina and George, a garda stationed in MacCurtain Street. Cormac’s grandfather Cornelius Buckley was a county councillor and secretary of the North Infirmary Hospital. Cormac had an older sister, Grace, a younger sister, Bernice (Ber), and a brother, George, who died at 60 in 2013 of cancer.

Ber, who lives in London, said theirs was a happy childhood.

“Mum was a wonderful cook, and we lived in a very modern house with a lovely garden where my father grew vegetables and flowers. Every week, we visited our grandfather, uncle and aunt who lived in Fairfield on the outskirts of the city, which was a bit of a trek for us – very few people had cars at that time and no bus went anywhere near the house so there was a lot of walking.”

The family moved in with their grandfather in Fairfield when the children were small, and Bernice said: “We lived opposite the actual field next door to Sullivans Public House and near Sweeney’s Farm – I understand that area now is very different with lots of houses.”

Cormac went to North Monastery Primary School. “He walked there every day, which was well over a mile,” said Ber. “He was a very bright student and got a scholarship into the Senior School.”

Cormac was a fine footballer and played in defence for St Nicks and was in the Cork Minors team that defeated Clare in the Munster Championship in May 1956, by 0-13 to 0-2.

In 1955, aged 17, he landed the part of his almost-namesake, Colm Gallagher, in Three Kisses, shot by America’s famous Paramount Studios.

Cormac recalled: “There was no audition. I was called into the principal’s office in the North Mon and he said to me, in Irish, that there was some ‘amadaniocht’ (foolishness) taking place and did I want to participate. My mother always said I got the role because I had the whitest shorts!”

Until then, Cormac had only acted in walk-on parts in school plays – “but I was never a star”, he its.

He says: “The filming of Three Kisses took about a week and I was paid £10. I can’t for the life of me recall the name of the girl who acted opposite me.”

The summer after the Leaving Certificate, he and three friends, went to work in London, and Cormac got a job selling ice creams and Tanora in Waterloo Station. 

“An English guy came over to me and said, ‘I’ve seen you in a film’,” recalled Cormac, chuckling at this brief brush with fame.

His sister Bernice said Cormac’s appearance on the big screen was a big deal at a time when cinemas were hugely popular – there were almost a dozen places showing films in Cork city at the time

She recalled: “We were excited when Cormac came home from school one day to tell us that he had been selected to play a part in a film called Three Kisses. We didn’t realise at the time that he had one of the main parts until we went to see it in the Capitol Cinema – my parents were very proud of him.”

In the nine-minute film, which can be viewed on the Irish Film Institute archive, Colm Gallagher lives in the fictional Cork village of Ballykilly. 

His hurling skills catch the eye of real-life Cork hurling coach Jim ‘Tough’ Barry and he is picked for the Cork senior team in a match at Thurles. Many great Cork hurlers of the day such as Paddy Barry, Mick Cashman, and Jimmy Brohan appear in the film.

The light-hearted short is also a romance, as we see Colm courting a camogie player his own age, and chastely kissing her three times in the film.

The Irish Independent at the time praised Cormac’s performance as “completely natural before the camera”, although the Cork Examiner felt the film offered its target market of the USA an outdated view of the Emerald Isle.

Nonetheless, the US market lapped up the film, and it was nominated for Best Short in the 1956 Academy Awards, losing out to an American documentary called Survival City, about a mock town in Nevada built to test the effects of a nuclear bomb.

Big Oscar winners that year included Ernest Borgnine, Jack Lemmon, Frank Sinatra, James Dean, and Katharine Hepburn, but – as we revealed in the 2023  Holly Bough – many of the Cork hurlers who appeared in Three Kisses did not even realise it had been nominated.

Remarkably, that was also the case with Cormac. “I only found out the film had been nominated for an Oscar when I saw it in theHolly Bough!” he said.

He and his wife, Jean Kilcullen Gallagher, are based in Dublin and came upon the Holly Bough article when they attended his sister Grace’s funeral in early January 2024 at The Church of the Real Presence, Bishopstown, and a member of the congregation mentioned the story to them.

Crossroads 

In 1956, at a crossroads in his life, Cormac decided to turn down a place at UCC and entered the Jesuit Order of priests in Rathfarnham.

His sister Bernice recalled: “My parents were very happy with his decision but we all missed him so much and we visited him often. Cormac was ordained in 1972 which was a very proud time for all the family, it was such a lovely occasion.”

During that time, he embarked on a degree in Maths and Physics at University College, Dublin, which he completed in 1962. He then completed a degree in Philosophy at Louvain in Belgium.

By the mid-1960s, Cormac was working as a maths teacher in Limerick but, as a result of his developing interest in psychology, he enrolled on an MA in it at Fordham University in New York, which he completed in 1967.

In 1969, Cormac was asked to go to Paris to follow a programme in Spirituality and Psychology that was heavily influenced by a psychonalyst/psychiatrist called Jacques Lacan. He was very taken by Lacan’s work and got permission to stay on after the programme to do an analysis. He also undertook a PhD in Psychoanalysis (through French) from the Sorbonne.

Two years later, Cormac signed up for a psychology course in Paris and, in 1974, the Corkman brought Lacan’s teaching to Ireland and is seen as a pioneer of psychoanalysis in this country, at a time when such research was frowned upon by the Catholic Church.

As well as his leadership roles in the Jesuits, he worked as Director of the School of Psychotherapy at St Vincent’s University Hospital until retirement in 2006, co-founding an MSc in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at UCD in 1984, becoming a member of the Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in 1986, and founding the Association of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Ireland in 1993.

In his free time, he translated the weekly seminars of Lacan which covered a period of 30 years.

In 1990, after 35 years as a Jesuit, Cormac left the priesthood and married Jean. The two had met 17 years earlier when he was based in Paris.

In 2018, the School of Psychotherapy at St Vincent’s University Hospital and UCD School of Medicine held a two-day international conference in his honour.

As for Three Kisses, it vanished into cinematic memory until 2002, when the only known copy resurfaced and was donated to the Irish Film Institute by Los Angeles-based collector Paul Balbirnie.

You can see the film here: https://ifiarchiveplayer.ie/three-kisses/