By Lisa Van Dusen

August 4, 2026

Some deaths are bigger than a body, a city, or a country.

Glen Hansard, of all people, would likely chafe at that notion, believing with all his heart as he seemed to through his music and his life that we’re all, every last one of us, of equal value.

The outpouring of global grief and fondness for Hansard, who died at 56 in a motorcyle accident in Dublin last week, was surely more than he’d have expected, and more than the deaths of many actors or musicians would unleash in this time of social media saturation.

The ginger kid who played the gangly guitarist Outspan Foster in Alan Parker’s adaptation of Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments based on an accidental audition and resurfaced almost unrecognizably grown up and filled out as the romantic lead in Once 16 years later embodied a worldview that, as it turned out, had moved the world.

Hansard was as beloved for the music he made in the streets and pubs of Dublin as for the film that made him famous.

Once, easily the most effortlessly charming film of this century, is about a Grafton Street busker — a real-life role Hansard played for five years as a teenager — who falls in love with a newly arrived Czech pianist selling roses to support her mother and daughter. She also sings, and their exquisite collaboration is born the first time they try out a duet of his “Falling Slowly”, which won the Oscar for best song in 2008, on the showroom floor of a piano store.

As a singer, Hansard’s voice was deceptively quiet as it climbed toward that trademark, anthemic crescendo he must have perfected to turn heads back when he had to across from Bewley’s — that keening banshee Bono wail that contained more of Ireland than all the trees at Ancestry.com and could make a missed signal sound like a crime against humanity.

“Glen wanted to know — to really know — what was going on,” his younger brother Richard said in his eulogy at Dublin’s St. Patrick’s cathedral on Tuesday. “He wanted to know everything, your weakness, your struggles, who you were. He wanted to know the mist and gist of all, of how he could help. And he had a way of making you feel like you mattered.”

How could someone like that not be shockingly, terribly notable for his absence.

As a musician, a writer, an actor, a member of one of the most distinctive cultural ecosystems in the world with among the richest creative legacies that time and war and famine and longing and struggle and therapeutic craic have wrought, Hansard had a platform. That platform gave him power to use as he saw fit, and he used it to entertain, move, respect, immortalize and love people.

“I’ve always felt that if I ever got cynical, I would have to stop making music,” he once said, “because I’d just be poisoning the air.”

Not everyone would use the power of a global platform the way Glen Hansard did, by famously eschewing fame for art, by seeing and making beauty in the world, and by making truth — in music, in words — his brand without even trying.

It’s there to be seen and heard in his work with The Frames, with Marketa Irglova in Once, and in The Swell Season, their band. It’s there in the scenes of his annual Christmas Eve busk on Grafton Street to raise money for Dublin’s homeless, and in the words of both the people who knew him in the church Tuesday, and the ones who felt like they did outside it.

We spend so much time, every day, being reminded of how much difference one man can make in the world. In the past week, the death of Glen Hansard proved that those words can be true for a whole other kind of power.

Policy Editor and Publisher Lisa Van Dusen has served as Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, Washington Columnist for the Ottawa Citizen, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and as an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.