Cork ‘nerd’ professor who landed role in an Oscar-winning film

When Cork academic Niall Ó Murchadha was asked to take part in a promotional film for the university he was teaching at in the U.S, he could never have dreamed it would become an Oscar-winner.

But that plot twist is exactly what happened.

A doctoral student, Niall spent 1973 in the acclaimed ‘Ivy League’ institution Princeton University in New Jersey, honing his knowledge of physics, and his speciality, Einstein’s laws of relativity.

That year, two U.S directors were tasked with producing a short film called Princeton: A Search For Answers for the university’s admissions office as a recruitment drive. And they asked Niall Ó Murchadha to appear in it.

Many years later, the Corkman showed a review of the Princeton film to his UCC colleague, Patrick O’Shea. “It described him as ‘the nerd’, which to us physicists is a compliment!” said Professor O’Shea, who went on to be President of UCC.

The half-hour short won Best Documentary (Short Subject) at the 1974 Academy Awards, hosted by Burt Reynolds, Diana Ross, John Huston, and David Niven.

The statuette was presented by actors James Caan and Raquel Welch, to the Princeton film’s directors DeWitt Sage and Julian Krainin.

More than 50 years on, the film, which can be seen on YouTube, gives an insight into the life of Princeton University in the early 1970s - but it is far from a dry piece of academia. It offers profound and inspirational vignettes of the educators as they enthusiastically and passionately discuss their love for music, literature, science, and architecture. Princeton is about “a lust to know”, the film says.

Professor Ó Murchadha, who died in 2021, makes his first appearance five minutes in and talks about arriving from UCC - “a very small college in Ireland where the physics department was three faculty members and I was the only undergraduate”.

His work, he says profoundly, is about asking: “What sort of universe are we in”, and he adds that success in the field is not about “the greatest ideas, but those who work hardest”.

“It’s you versus the world. You taking on everything and beating it. You, yourself, have this ability. When things go well, it appals me how great I feel. The whole thing rests upon you. It’s impossible to share how great it is when you do deliver.”

Later in the film, Professor Ó Murchadha expands on his work, stating that it is “a pursuit of the unknown, straining to find the furthest... our universe and our position in it”.

Despite its Oscar success, the undergraduates at Princeton gave it a terrible review and labelled the Corkman a ‘nerd’!

In their campus newspaper, The Daily Princetonian, on September 26, 1973, the headline punned on the title of the film, ‘Princeton: A search for a film’, and the reviewer claimed it failed as both a recruiting film and as an honest appraisal of college life.

“They don’t emphasise enough of the excitement of Princeton, the spontaneous moments, the experience of a student maturing amid other students... it presents a distorted view of Princeton.”

The review, wrongly in this writer’s eyes, goes on to dismiss Ó Murchadha “talking for five minutes on what it’s like to study physics and making very little sense”. Ouch!

Even worse, it concludes: “Like a salmon, the film returns to it starting point - the physics professor and the sky - to die.”

One wonders what happened to that young critic... but Niall went in to be one of the greatest scientists Cork has ever produced.

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Niall Ó Murchadha was born in 1946 in the Erinville hospital - one of seven siblings - and his family home on St Clare’s Avenue is still standing. He attended Scoil Glasheen and Sullivans Quay before entering UCC.

Both sides of his family had a passion for the Irish language and his father, Diarmuid, was headmaster of the Model School.

Niall went on to become a regular contributor on Raidio na Gaeltachta to discuss science, and had a life-long passion for Gaelic games.

He had already completed his degree in Physics at UCC when he left for Princeton, and returned to UCC in 1976.

That year, Patrick O’Shea joined UCC’s physics department and was one of many students and educators to be influenced by Niall’s brilliance. He said: “Niall was a wonderful storyteller, teacher, and scholar and helped me launch my career.”

Barry O’Connor, former CIT President, said: “Niall was a great guy - highly accomplished academically, passionate in everything he did - highly sociable and very witty with it.”

Paul Callanan, a professor in the Department of Physics at UCC said: “Niall was the most gifted of all the physicists at UCC. He had a vivid command of everything and some of the best students were in awe of him.

“He was so engaged with people, and he broke the mould - he was unique.”

Dan Kennefick, who studied for a Masters with Niall at UCC and now works at the University of Arkansas, said: “Niall was brilliant, enthusiastic, clever, patient - a remarkable person.

“If other physicists around the world had a particular problem they wanted to address, they would ask Niall.

“You always knew when he was in the building, you would hear him chatting to people. He was entertaining and great craic. People loved him.”

Niall was modest too, and it took a lot of persuasion before he agreed to a ‘Niall Fest’ in his honour at UCC in 2018, where scientists came from as far afield as China, with Kip Thorn, renowned Nobel Prize winner in Physics, among them.

“Niall refused to give a talk, but in the end, he got up and gave a typical tour de force speech,” says Dan.

After a lifetime in academia, the professor, a married father-of-two, passed away in Bishopstown in October, 2021.

The story of his Oscar connection came to light after we ran an article in 2024 about Cormac Gallagher being the schoolboy star of a film called Three Kisses shot in Cork, which was nominated for Best Short at the 1956 Academy Awards.