Shutdown and socially distant, Budapest is still Budapest, the city we love and the city we live in. For all of us, our immediate surroundings are our home – literally. In this latest Budapest blog, we raise a glass to a colourful Londoner and long-term local, whose memorial drink-up must now take place at a later date.
Among the current flurry of postponements and cancellations, one is of particular and poignant relevance to Budapest’s long-entrenched expat community: the memorial drink-up for Mark Phelan. The larger-than-life London actor and bon vivant passed away earlier this year, before the coronavirus pandemic swept Europe.
Scheduled for the Ellátoház tomorrow, Saturday, 21 March, the event is now being slated for 21 April. This Facebook page will keep everyone informed on developments. A cremation ceremony will be held in private.
For everyone who knew him – and few expats passing through Budapest over the last 25 years didn’t chance upon this affable barfly – Big Mark was part of the furniture. Orbiting the classic hangouts of the day – he practically lived in the Sixtus, God rest its soul, for eons – this gruff, rotund Cockney also carved himself out an ever-more successful career in film and TV.
Sketches from his life, up to 2014 at least, can be found here, in an interview with Mark We Love Budapest ran back in the day. His was a path illuminated by Budapest – “…I knew I’d found my place,” as he says – and one many of us fellow travellers have traipsed down.
Stars warmed to him for his down-to-earth honesty in a milieu otherwise characterised by false smiles and backstabbing. Some would even allow themselves (fools!) to be led astray on forays into the deepest realms of Budapest revelry, somehow making it back on set, very much worse for wear, at the crack of dawn. One of Big Mark’s many, many bar tales had him waking up wrapped around someone’s plant pot with UK comedian Keith Allen’s mobile phone in his pocket.
For the rest of us who propped up a bar counter with him – or watched him perform as part of hilariously outré local rap act the Homeless Millionaires – Big Mark was a constant and amiable presence. Between jobs, he could be spied in the most foreboding reaches of the Vittula, holding court or working his way through another Facán in solitary fashion, a Dickensian figure in a world of Jarmuschian nighthawks.
Those tempting in-betweens shortened by increasingly prestigious film work, Houdini by way of good example, Phelan still remained in character. He remained, in fact, Big Mark, whether being applauded by Oscar-winning Adrien Brody or pontificating over Chelsea's flimsy back four.
Let’s hope that drink-up happens as he would have wished – perhaps those of us who knew him could raise a glass in our own way at some point tomorrow.
In the meantime, here’s a public information video (PG!) to remember him by.
As the man says, “Be a gentleman and buy her a f***ing drink first!”
Farewell, Big Mark.
