DUBLIN, July 30 -- Every Christmas Eve for more than a decade, Glen Hansard took his guitar to Grafton Street. Not to play a concert. Not for a television appearance. To busk. To stand in the pedestrian flow of Dublin shoppers with a case open on the pavement and let passersby decide whether the music was worth a few coins. Whatever he collected, he gave to a homelessness charity and moved on.

He was, by that point, an Academy Award winner. He could have been on a stage in Madison Square Garden that evening. He chose Grafton Street instead.

Hansard died in the early hours of Wednesday after a single-vehicle motorcycle crash on Lucan Road on the western outskirts of the Irish capital. He was 56. Irish police confirmed a man in his 50s ha...