Malachy McCourt, an Irishman in New York, writer and actor - who penned a best-selling memoir about his family’s sombre immigration story in follow-up to his brother’s Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography Angela’s Ashes - died on 11 March in a Manhattan hospital. His death was confirmed by his wife, Diana, to The New York Times. He was 92.

As an actor, talk show guest and broadcaster, McCourt was a boisterous and riotous counterpart to his stern and literary high-brow brother Frank, a high school teacher whose 1996 memoir about growing up impoverished in Ireland - after his younger sister and twin brother died in early childhood - won him a Pulitzer Prize, among widespread acclaim.

In 1952, McCourt emigrated from Ireland with a ticket paid for by his brother, then a public school English teacher. Malachy left Limerick when he was thirteen, after his father deserted the family and left his mother, Angela, to raise the four of their surviving seven children. The McCourts, Malachy later wrote, were “not poor, but poverty-stricken.”

After arriving in New York, McCourt became a popular bartender in an Irish neighbourhood along Manhattan’s Third Ave, eventually partnering with an entrepreneurial duo to open a pub named after him, Malachy’s.

At these establishments, McCourt drank with customers and charmed them with tales of Ireland. In 1956, he met and befriended a writer for The Tonight Show, who told then-host Jack Paar that he should have a bartender on to display his Irish gift of the gab. McCourt made his first of multiple late night appearances in 1958.

TV commercials, small roles in sitcoms and films and guest spots on Merv Griffin’s talk show soon followed. Perhaps his most well-known on-screen role was as a bartender on the ABC soap opera Ryan’s Hope. Stints as a radio and television host on local stations around New York also followed. On his Channel 9 programme, he booked big-name guests including Muhammad Ali and feminist author Betty Friedan, but was fired by the station after 10 days following viewer complaints about his fierce criticisms of the Vietnam War.

Malachy Gerard McCourt was born on 20 September 1931 in Brooklyn, New York. His father, whom Malachy is named after, had fled to New York from the British due to his involvement in the Irish Republican Army. His father met his mother, Angela Sheehan, after he was released from jail for a truck hijacking.

The McCourts returned to Ireland during the Depression, following the death of a 7-week-old daughter, when Malachy was 3 years old. It would be 20 years before McCourt would return to New York.

The story of the McCourt family’s emigration from Ireland became the subject of Frank McCourt’s lauded memoir Angela’s Ashes, which also saw a film adaptation. Following the widespread success of his brother’s book, Malachy was offered a handsome sum of $650,000 to write A Monk Swimming - the title inspired by Malachy mishearing a line from the Hail Mary “Blessed art thou amongst women.” The memoir begins with McCourt’s 1952 arrival, at age 20, in New York and covers his early years as a dishwasher, longshoreman on Fire Island and, in his own words, “an alcoholic tornado.” The book became known as a riotous counterpart to his brother’s solemn memoir. Frank died in 2009, following a cancer battle, at age 78.

In 2006, he ran for governor of New York as the ticket's Green Party candidate. His environmental agenda and harsh opposition to the Iraq War managed to garner McCourt 1 percent of votes, qualifying for a distant third place, the state elected Eliot Spitzer.

In summer 2022, McCourt entered hospice care but miraculously lived past his doctor’s expectations, being released the following November. He returned to hosting a radio show, as well as to his Upper West Side apartment, where he lived for nearly 60 years.

Late in life, Mr. McCourt recalled driving through a rainstorm in Ireland decades earlier. He spotted an old man walking and offered him a lift.

“When he got out,” Mr. McCourt told The New York Times, “he said: 'Thank you sir for your kindness. May you have a happy death.’”

The phrase clearly struck a chord with him.

‘‘When you think about it, a happy death means you had a happy life,” he said. “And I think I have.”