Frank Grimes (born 1947) is an Irish stage and screen actor.
Grimes was born in Dublin. He achieved his first major success as the young Brendan Behan in the 1967 stage adaptation of Behan’s autobiography, Borstal Boy, at the Abbey Theatre.[1] When the production moved to Broadway, Grimes was nominated for a Tony Award for best actor.[2]
In 1970 the Italian director, Franco Zeffirelli, offered Grimes the lead role of Francis of Assisi in his biopic, Brother Sun, Sister Moon. However, director and actor fell out over how the part should be played and Grimes was replaced by Graham Faulkner.
In the early 1970s, Grimes moved to London where he came to the attention of director Lindsay Anderson. Anderson offered him a part in his production of David Storey‘s play The Farm, the success of which established Grimes’ reputation in British theatre.
Grimes’ most significant film role to date is the part of Major Fuller in Richard Attenborough‘s A Bridge Too Far (1977). However, he is probably best known, in his native Ireland at least, for his performance as Father O’Connor in RTÉ‘s drama series, Strumpet City. In 1981, Grimes received a Jacob’s Award “for his detailed and exceptionally convincing portrayal” of the young priest.
Frank Grimes continues to work in television, films and theatre. Recent TV appearances include the recurrent role of Barry Connor in Coronation Street. In 2013 he appeared as Mrs McCarthy’s husband in the Father Brown episode “The Mayor and the Magician”.
The Independent obituary in 2025.
Coronation Street actor Frank Grimes, who has been hailed “one of Ireland’s greatest actors”, has died, aged 78.
The actor, who played Barry Connor on the ITV soap, died on 1 August after a “very short illness”.
His death was announced by the Irish Cultural Centre in London, who said on Friday (8 August): “It’s with deep sadness and heavy hearts that the ICC has to regretfully inform you that the great Irish actor Frank Grimes suddenly sadly passed away surrounded by his wife and family.
“We are so sad to have to say goodbye to Frank, but we are also so blessed to have known him, to have worked with him and seen him perform.”
Grimes, who also appeared in Mrs Brown’s Boys, starred in Coronation Street from 2008 until 2015. His character was the husband of Helen Connor (Sorcha Cusack) and father of Paul (Sean Gallagher), Liam (Rob James-Collier) and Michelle Connor (Kym Marsh).
Grimes’s first hit arrived in 1967 when he played the young Brendan Behan in a stage version of his autobiography Borstal Boy.
He received a Tony nomination for the role when the production moved from Ireland’s Abbey Theatre to Broadway.
The actor was also set to star in Romeo and Juliet director Franco Zeffirelli’s 1972 film Brother Sun, Sister Moon – a film about Francis of Assisi – but was replaced by Graham Faulkner after falling out with the filmmaker.
His film credits include Richard Attenborough’s 1977 war film A Bridge Too Far, in which he played Major Fuller, as well asThe Outsider (1979) and The Whales of August (1987)w
The Irish Cultural Centre remembered Grimes as “warm-hearted, full of Dublin wit and charm in abundance”. I
“He had a beautiful sparkle in his eyes. We know that Ireland has lost one of its truly great actors, the vintage of which is so rare and may never ever be matched again.
We send our sincere condolences to his wife Ginnette, his daughter Tilly, his son Andrew, his seven grandchildren and to all his extended family.
“We also send our condolences to all of Frank’s friends and loved ones – may Frank sleep easy now and Rest In Peace.”
The guardian obituary in august 2025.
When he burst on to the stage of the new Abbey theatre in Dublin in 1967, Frank Grimes, who has died aged 78, was acclaimed as the finest young actor of his generation. That first impact was made as a 19-year-old in a revival of Frank O’Connor’s The Invincibles, a controversial piece about the assassination of the chief secretary of Ireland, and his deputy, in 1882.
But it was as the young Brendan Behan in Borstal Boy (1967) that Grimes hit the big time. Behan’s rollicking autobiographical novel was adapted by Frank McMahon, with Niall Toibín as the older Behan relating the story of the renegade roisterer on a bare stage.
It was a smash hit in Dublin, Paris and then on Broadway in 1970, where Tomás Mac Anna’s production won the Tony award and Grimes was voted most promising actor by 20 New York critics.
In a sense, his subsequent stage career, mainly in London in the 1980s, was something of a deflation, though he invariably cleaned up the best reviews in plays by David Storey and Chekhov, and, in 1984, as a mercurial Christy Mahon in JM Synge’s Playboy of the Western World on the Edinburgh fringe – all of these directed by Lindsay Anderson, who was Grimes’s mentor when he first moved to London in the 70s.
Latterly, Grimes was best known in the UK for his role as the unpredictable Barry Connor on ITV’s Coronation Street. Between 2008 and 2015, Grimes appeared in 55 episodes of the soap, with his wife, Helen, played in the first season by Sorcha Cusack and in later episodes by Dearbhla Molloy. He also appeared in episodes of Casualty, The Bill, Doctors and Mrs Brown’s Boys
in RTÉ’s Strumpet City (1980, shown on ITV in the UK), adapted by Hugh Leonard from James Plunkett’s novel, in which he played a beautifully modulated, mild-mannered Catholic curate in a chaotic Dublin under British rule before the first world war. The wonderful cast included Donal McCann, Cyril Cusack, David Kelly and Peter O’Toole.
Born in Dublin, the youngest and seventh child of Evelyn (nee Manscier) and Joseph Grimes, a Dublin train driver, Frank was educated at St Declan’s secondary school by the Christian Brothers, where he excelled at basketball, algebra and geometry. He trained at the Abbey and, after his success there, moved to London.
He began his collaboration with Anderson and Storey in two plays at the Royal Court, The Farm (1973), as the feckless only son returning to an outraged family gathering with news of his impending marriage to a divorced, middle-aged woman; and as an art student in Life Class (1974), with Alan Bates as the art teacher and Rosemary Martin the model. Both of Grimes’s performances were luminous, truthful and technically adroit.
He played the young Seán O’Casey for RTÉ in The Rebel (1973), a documentary drama by John Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy, and made his only appearance at the Royal Shakespeare Company in O’Casey’s masterpiece, Juno and the Paycock; Trevor Nunn’s 1980 revival at the Aldwych featured a mostly Irish cast headed by Judi Dench and Norman Rodway as Juno and Captain Boyle
3 Grimes’s Hamlet in 1981, directed by Anderson, was the first Shakespeare at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, since 1957, but it seemed tame and tight-lipped after Jonathan Pryce’s electrifying Royal Court version in the previous year.
He was back on track, though, in Anderson’s all-star cast in The Cherry Orchard at the Haymarket in 1983 (Joan Plowright as Ranevskaya, Leslie Phillips as Gaev), stuttering out Trofimov’s revolutionary rhetoric before apologetically concluding that, when the day dawns, he would be there – “or … I shall show others the way”.
In 1987 at the Old Vic, in Anderson’s revival of a 1928 American comedy, Holiday, by Philip Barry, with Malcolm McDowell and his then wife Mary Steenburgen alongside, Grimes was another memorably reluctant rabble-rouser, drunkenly excoriating the American rich, said Michael Billington, with “a felt-tipped dagger”.
Two years later, at the National Theatre, he was a friendless academic in psychological meltdown as Colin Pasmore in The March on Russia, Storey’s own adaptation of his 1972 novel Pasmore. Another minefield of a domestic drama, it was directed by Anderson in the manner of one of his and Storey’s earlier family reunion collaborations, In Celebration (1969). In an impeccably acted production, Grimes was both participant and observer at the celebratory rites of a family at odds, if not war with each other.
Grimes played supporting roles in several notable films, including Richard Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far (1977), and in Anderson’s The Whales of August (1987), starring Bette Davis and Lillian Gish as two elderly sisters on the Maine coast. He also appeared in Britannia Hospital (1982), the third of Anderson’s blistering “Mick Travis” trilogy.
Grimes wrote several plays. Anderson directed his first, The Fishing Trip, at the Croydon Warehouse in 1991 and, before the director died in 1994, was helping him prepare his own one-man show, The He and the She of It, expressing a lifelong obsession with, and devotion to, James Joyce.
Grimes married the actor Michele Lohan in 1968, and they had two sons, David and Andrew. After he and Michele divorced, he married the actor and art teacher Ginnette Clarke in 1984. Frank and Ginnette lived in New York from 1982 to 1987, after which they settled in Barnes, west London.
His son David died in 2011. Grimes is survived by Ginnette and their daughter, Tilly, by Andrew, and by seven grandchildren, Emily, Hedy, Martha, Reuben, Toby, Monti and Oskar, and two siblings, Eva and Laura.