Chloe Newsome was born in 1976 in Sheffield. She played ‘Vicky McDonald’ in 1998. Other roles include the film “The Jealous God” in 2005.
Brittish Actors
Chloe Newsome was born in 1976 in Sheffield. She played ‘Vicky McDonald’ in 1998. Other roles include the film “The Jealous God” in 2005.
John Thomson was born in 1969 in Salford. He played in “Cold Feet”, “Men Behaving Badly” and “Coronation Street”.
Josef Locke was born in 1917 in Derry. A famous singer in Britain during the 1940’s, his songs include “Goodbye” from “The White Horse Inn” and “Here My Song, Violetta”. He appeared in a few movies including “What A Carry On” in 1939. He died in 1999.
Stephen Dixon’s obituary in “The Guardian”:
“Goodbye, goodbye – I wish you all a fond goodbye.” As he strutted the stage, his glorious tenor soaring to the back of the “gods” in the north of England’s variety theatres, Josef Locke’s tearful and adoring audiences sang along and waved their handkerchiefs in time to the music. Locke, who has died aged 82, was an Irish superstar, the Tom Jones of his day – earning £2,000 a week when £100 was a good wage for a music-hall artist.
His voice could have taken him to the world’s great opera stages, but he chose the more raffish life of a variety bill-topper, specialising in sentimental ballads such as Hear My Song, Count Your Blessings and I’ll Take You Home Again, Cathleen, invariably closing his act with stirring audience galvanisers like Blaze Away or Goodbye. He was handsome, immaculately tailored and flamboyantly rogueish, with a trim moustache and a twinkling eye for the ladies.
Locke based himself in Blackpool, also home to his good friend, the comedian Frank Randle. Together they caroused, brawled and drank through the night, got up to various romantic escapades and lost fortunes on the horses. It was, in fact, Locke’s offstage antics that created the legend around him – he happily squandered his vast earnings, and in 1958 fled back to Ireland with the Inland Revenue hot on his heels. The day a warrant for his arrest for unpaid taxes was issued in Blackpool, he was in Kildare, paying 790 guineas for two horses. He named one of them The Taxman.
The story was told, charmingly but fancifully, in Peter Chelsom’s 1992 film Hear My Song, in which Locke was played by Ned Beatty. For the premiere, the 75-year-old singer was persuaded to return to England, where he sang Danny Boy to Princess Diana. When Chelsom first mooted the project to Locke, he found the singer only too willing to add to his legend – at one point the director had to track him down to a bar in Spain after he disappeared without signing the contract for clearance rights.
Josef Locke was born Joseph McLaughlin in Derry, Northern Ireland, the son of a butcher and cattle dealer, one of 10 children. He sang at churches in the Bogside as a child, and after a rudimentary schooling joined the Irish Guards, later serving with the Palestine police before returning to Ireland in the late 1930s. He then became a policeman and, performing semi-professionally, was known as “the Singing Bobby”. He sought advice about an operatic career from the greatest Irish tenor of them all, John McCormack, who told him that his natural showmanship might serve him better on the popular stage. Again on the advice of McCormack, Locke went to London to see impresario and bandleader Jack Hylton, who, impressed, booked him into the Victoria Palace. It was Hylton who renamed him – Joseph McLaughlin was considered too long for variety bills.
After some success in London, where he made his first recordings in 1947, Locke signed with Lew and Leslie Grade, who realised that his over-the-top style and penchant for sentimentality might go down better on the northern variety circuit, and steered him to stardom. Locke delighted in the world of variety, revelling in his celebrity, wearing only the best clothes and driving the fastest sports cars, always accompanied by a glamorous companion.
He also appeared in films for John E Blakeley’s Manchester-based Mancunian company, starring with other music-hall stalwarts like Randle, Tessie O’Shea and Jewel and Warriss. Some critics were sniffy about what they saw as the misuse of a fine voice. “The Londonderry tenor did indeed possess a fine organ,” wrote one, “ruined by undisciplined bawling and a delivery drenched in sentimentality.”
However, Locke’s (mainly female) public thought otherwise, and there was no sign of a diminution in his popularity when he suddenly vanished back to Ireland. Twenty years later, a masked singer, sounding uncannily like Locke and billed as “Mr X”, made some appearances in British clubs, and it was thought that he had returned incognito. It turned out not to be the case, although on one occasion he was flown into Britain to appear on This Is Your Life – and then flown straight out again before the taxman could catch him.
The success of the film Hear My Song – Chelsom used the “Mr X” story as the basis for his heart-warming fantasy – brought Locke back into the limelight, and an album of his old recordings became a bestseller. The tax business now long-forgiven, he continued to sing, mostly in Ireland, until fairly recently, then retired. He lived the latter part of his life near Clane, Co Kildare, and is survived by his wife, Carmel, and a son.
• Josef Locke (Joseph McLaughlin), singer, born March 23 1917; died October 15 1999
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Locke, Josef (1917–99), singer and entertainer, was born Joseph McLaughlin 23 March 1917 at 19 Creggan St., Derry city, one of ten children of Patrick McLaughlin, butcher and cattle dealer, and Annie McLaughlin (née Doherty). Educated by the Christian Brothers and awarded for his singing at local feiseanna, he performed at St Eugene’s cathedral. Family business difficulties forced him to leave school at 14 and take casual jobs till enlisting underage (16) in the Irish Guards. Serving in Egypt, McLaughlin was the regiment’s youngest sergeant at 18. He sang with the regimental band, whose BBC concerts were his earliest broadcasts. His vocal range was extraordinary and he continued singing throughout his short police career, initially in the Palestine police and latterly in the RUC, which he joined in 1938 on his return to Northern Ireland. ‘The singing bobby’ grew disillusioned with policing and availed himself of opportunities to advance his growing celebrity, including voice instruction in Italy.
As the second world war restricted foreign travel he successfully auditioned in Belfast about 1941 for the visiting Dublin entertainer and producer Jimmy O’Dea (qv). He played Gaylord in ‘Showboat’ at the Gaiety Theatre and sang at the Theatre Royal, both Dublin venues owned by Louis (qv) and Max Elliman (qv). The wartime absence of foreign artists placed Irish names in higher demand, but McLaughlin’s income remained less than he was prepared to accept. Similarly, O’Dea’s fit-up theatre circuit of rural Ireland in the early 1940s, alternating between performance and menial drudgery in unsatisfactory venues, frustrated his desire for stardom. McLaughlin’s critically acclaimed work for the Dublin Grand Opera Society, first as Pinkerton in Puccini’s ‘Madama Butterfly’ and as Enzo Grimaldi in Ponchielli’s ‘La Gioconda’ at the Gaiety, encouraged his ambition. Advised by tenor Count John McCormack (qv) who was little impressed with his outings in grand opera, McLaughlin moved to a war-weary London in 1945. Beginning at the Victoria Palace, he established himself in variety with the legendary Jack Hylton and his band, but deliberately extended his repertoire to include religious and popular operatic selections, rousing anthems for which his clear, piercing voice was suited. Further advised, reputedly by Hylton, to shorten his name for billboard display, Joseph McLaughlin became ‘Josef Locke’ from about this time.
For a new star he had phenomenal popular appeal, unquestionably the product of his powerful voice and passionate delivery but also of his magnetic stage presence and physical energy. His deep eyes and military bearing, complete with turned moustache, gave him the appearance of a large and likeable rogue, which remained with him for life. His Derry accent was audible in performance as he earned fame and fortune in England, particularly the north, in the late 1940s. Nor did he abandon his roots in other ways, including his ‘Irish’ repertoire, which typically featured ‘Galway Bay’ and ‘I’ll take you home again, Kathleen’.
Locke easily blended into his new surroundings. From 1946 he began a long annual engagement in Blackpool’s Opera House holiday shows, living locally as proprietor of a garage and public house on the proceeds of his lucrative career. In 1947 he started in pantomime in Liverpool and toured Australia with Blackpool co-star George Formby. He had recently begun recording his lifelong standards, notably ‘The holy city’ and ‘Hear my song, Violetta’, which became one of his signature numbers (anglicised by Harry S. Pepper from a German original), generally known as ‘Hear my song’ with a tango rhythm both attractive and infuriatingly difficult to dispel. Similarly, ‘Goodbye’ and his most dramatic standard, ‘Blaze away’, remained in the ears of audiences long after the singer had left the stage. Few artists outside grand opera could claim such an entrancing effect on listeners, and Josef Locke compensated for his merely ‘popular’ status with an income whose size both surprised and drew the hostile attention of the Inland Revenue. His agents Leslie and Lew Grade, who had conducted him through his British career, later assisted in regularising his chaotic tax situation.
Locke’s first broadcast since the Irish Guards’ BBC concerts was on radio in 1949 in ‘The Happydrome’. Other engagements included television, then in its infancy. He appeared on screen in ‘Rooftop rendezvous’, in ‘Top of the town’, and in the Frankie Howerd show. Within a decade Locke was a star of every medium. His brief film career at the turn of the 1950s (Holidays with pay, Somewhere in politics, and What a carry on) was inauspicious but for his opportunity to earn lasting fame for the songs he included. Allegedly for being excluded from a special Royal Variety Performance held in Blackpool in 1955 (he had already played the London Palladium), he sold up and relocated to the US. Unhappy in America, Locke returned to Blackpool. By 1958 the UK revenue inspectors clearly suspected tax evasion, complicated by the inexact science of gambling on horses. Locke worked undaunted till tax notices turned into an arrest warrant. Going to ground, he eventually reappeared in Ireland as a farmer, publican, and racehorse owner. From this safe distance he settled his British tax liabilities.
Settling in Clane, Co. Kildare, Locke sought to recreate an international career, taking in Dublin’s Olympia Theatre and other Irish venues. By 1970 he faced bankruptcy and was fined in the Dublin district court for removing company registration documents. Although his star faded, notwithstanding musical engagements and occasional record releases, a special 1984 RTÉtelevision tribute on Gay Byrne’s ‘Late late show’ restored some of its lustre. In 1992 the unexpected success of Peter Chelsom’s semi-biographical fantasy film Hear my song, starring Ned Beatty as Josef Locke, revived his career to include a place in Britain’s top ten pop listing. Attending the film’s London premiere, Locke famously received an ITV ‘This is your life’ tribute. Genuinely amazed at his renewed popularity, Josef Locke lived out his remaining seven years in Clane with his fourth wife, Carmel Dignam. By his previous marriages he had had six children. He died at a Clane nursing home 15 October 1999 and was cremated at Glasnevin cemetery. In 2005 a bronze memorial bust, designed by Terry Quigley and sculpted by Maurice Harron, was unveiled in Derry.
Philip B. Ryan, Jimmy O’Dea, the pride of the Coombe (1990), 94, 96, 186; Philip B. Ryan, Noel Purcell: a biography (1992); Colin Larkin (ed.), Guinness dictionary of popular music (2nd ed., 1995), vi, 2530–31; Gus Smith, Irish stars of the opera (1994); Kevin Rockett (ed.), The Irish filmography; fiction films 1896–1996 (1996); Ir. Times, Daily Telegraph, Independent (London), 16 Oct. 1999; Sunday Independent, 17 Oct. 1999; ODNB; information from Harbour Museum, Derry
Fiona Victory was born in Dublin. Her father was the RTE Orchestra Conductor Gerard Victory. She came to prominence in RTE’s “Brackenn” opposite Gabriel Byrne in 1980. Her other TV work includes “Nanny”, “Bergerac” and “Shine On Harvest Moon”.
“Shine on Harvey Moon” page:
She had great success in Ireland before coming to England where she worked extensively for the touring Paines Plough Theatre Company based in Lancaster and for the Michael Bogdanos Company at the Young Vic in London. On television she featured in Resnick with Tom Wilkinson. She made a great impression in a four parter ‘The Hanging Gale’ a drama set at the time of the Irish Famine. Her fils include ‘Return to Oz and ‘Champions. Last year she returned to the stage to play the title role in ‘The House of Bernarda Alba’ in Coventry. Before that she played the widow Queen in ‘The Playboy of the Western World’ in Liverpool. Kenneth Cranham & Fiona played Oberon and Titania together at the Edinburgh Festival and the Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre. Fiona won best actress award for her performance in the one woman show as ‘Kitty O’Shea’ at the Abbey Theatre in the Dublin Theatre festival in 1990.
The above “Shine on Harvey Moon” page can also be accessed online here.
Helen Haye was born in 1874. She was a popular character actress in films in the U.K. in the 1930’s and 40’s. Her movies include “The 39 Steps” in 1935, “Riding High”and “Madonna of the Seven Moons”. She died in 1957.
IMDB entry:
Helen Haye was born on August 28, 1874 in Assam, India as Helen Hay. She was an actress, known for The 39 Steps (1935), The Skin Game (1931) and Hobson’s Choice(1954). She was married to Ernest Attenborough. She died on September 1, 1957 in London, England.
Roland Curram was born in 1932 in London. His first movie was in 1954 in “Up to His Neck”. Other movies include “Dunkirk” and “Darling” in 1965.
IMDB entry:
Roland Curram was born in 1932 in London, England. He is an actor, known for Darling(1965), Madame Sousatzka (1988) and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1980). He was previously married to Sheila Gish. Father of actresses Lou Gish and Kay Curram. Best known for playing Julie Christie‘s gay traveling companion in her Oscar-winning movie Darling (1965), Roland went on to play one of the greatest homosexual characters in British soap, the expatriate Freddie in the BBC’s shortlived series Eldorado (1992). Long married to British actress Sheila Gish, they eventually split up in the 1980s. She later married actor/director Denis Lawson and Roland came out of the closet. He subsequently met his longtime companion and they settled in Chiswick. His ex-wife died in March of 2005 of facial cancer, in which she lost an eye. Actress/daughter Lou Gish also died of cancer in February of 2006. Graduate of Bognor Regis Repertory Theatre, his acting peers there included Rosemary Harris and Michael Hawkins.
T.P. McKenna was born in 1929 in Co Cavan, Ireland. He began his acting career in Dublin at the famed Abbey Theatre. In 1959 he made the film “Shake Hands With the Devil” with James Cagney, Dana Wynter and Glynis Johns. He made his career in England and acted in most of the major television series of their time e.g.”The Sweeney”. “Blake 7” etc. He died in 2011.
Michael Coveney’s “Guardian” obituary:
Before he became a familiar face on television and cinema screens, the outstanding Irish actor TP McKenna, who has died after a long illness aged 81, bridged the gap between the old and the new Abbey theatres in Dublin. He appeared with the company for eight years during the interim period at the Queen’s theatre; the old Abbey burned down in 1951, the new one opened by the Liffey in 1966.
During that time he made his reputation as a leading actor of great charm, vocal resource – with a fine singing voice – and versatility. He was equally adept at comedy and tragedy, a great exponent of the best Irish playwriting from JM Synge and Séan O’Casey to Hugh Leonard and Brian Friel. The elder son in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night was a favourite, much acclaimed role.
It was Stephen D, Leonard’s skilful conflation of two James Joyce books, for the rival Gate theatre that in 1963 brought McKenna to London, where he stayed for more or less the rest of his career, appearing regularly on West End stages while reaching wider audiences.
He played barristers and detectives, conmen, police officers and a pope. His default mode was an imposing, authoritative geniality, and when he played a Nazi engaging in the casual slaughter of Jews in the TV mini-series Holocaust (1978), it was as hard to watch as it was to credit that this was the same actor who was so delightful as Harold Skimpole (“no idea of time, no idea of money”) in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1985) on BBC television.
For an actor, McKenna was an unusually modest and self-effacing man, and this trait lent a profound transparency and poignancy to those performances that touched on failure and disappointment, notably in Chekhov. You never saw the joins.
His family had settled in Mullagh, County Cavan, in the north of Ireland, in the 18th century. His great-grandfather, Nicholas McKenna, was an auctioneer, tradesman and farmer; his uncle, Justin McKenna, a notable politician; and his father, Ralph, also an auctioneer and merchant. Thomas – generally known in later life as “TP” – was the eldest of 10 children. He was educated at Mullagh national school and St Patrick’s college, Cavan, where he studied literature and discovered his acting and singing talent in Gilbert and Sullivan. He played Gaelic football, representing St Patrick’s in the final of the All Ireland colleges competition in 1948.
As a schoolboy, he had seen the legendary Anew McMaster‘s touring company in Shakespeare and decided to go on the stage. But first he took his banking exams in Belfast, then worked for the Ulster Bank in Granard, Trim and Dublin, where he trained at the Abbey Theatre School. He made his debut at the Pyke in 1953, appeared with McMaster at the Gaiety in 1954 (playing Horatio in Hamlet and Albany in King Lear) before joining the Abbey.
McKenna played more than 70 roles for the Abbey at the Queen’s, a large, demanding theatre seating 900. One of the Gate theatre’s biggest modern successes was Stephen D at the Dublin Theatre festival of 1962. In the following year, McKenna came with it, and his fellow actor Norman Rodway, to London. Although he returned to Dublin in 1966 to play in the Abbey’s reopening production – Walter Macken’s Recall the Years, a curtain-raiser to a major revival of O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars – McKenna never liked the new theatre and revelled in the wider opportunities now open to him on British television and stage.
At the Royal Court in 1964, he played Cassius in Lindsay Anderson’s revival of Julius Caesar, then joined Stuart Burge and Jonathan Miller at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1968, playing the Bastard in King John, Joseph Surface in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, Trigorin in Chekhov’s The Seagull and Macduff in Macbeth. At the end of an exhausting season, he directed his first and favourite play, Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World.
Back at the Court in 1969, he was one of the two Irish contractors in David Storey’s The Contractor, directed by Anderson, and this role with his compatriot Jim Norton led to both of them being hired by Sam Peckinpah to appear in Straw Dogs (1971), his fourth major film, following Joseph Strick‘s Ulysses (1967) – he was Buck Mulligan – Tony Richardson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), and Charles Jarrott’s Anne of the Thousand Days (1969). McKenna had a soft spot for Peter Hall’s Perfect Friday (1970), a comedy caper with Stanley Baker, Ursula Andress and David Warner, and he also popped up tellingly opposite Richard Burton in Michael Tuchner’s Villain (1971), the first movie “inspired” by the Kray twins.
McKenna had married May White, literally the girl next door, who worked for Radio Éireann, in 1955, but he did not bring the family over to settle in London until 1972. Notable stage roles over the next two decades included Robert Hand in James Joyce’s only play, Exiles, directed byHarold Pinter at the Mermaid in 1970; a straitlaced puritan preacher inGeorge Bernard Shaw‘s The Devil’s Disciple for the RSC in 1976, a performance of coruscating charm opposite Tom Conti, John Wood, Zoë Wanamaker and Bob Hoskins; a beautifully modulated doctor in Max Stafford-Clark’s production of Thomas Kilroy’s take on The Seagull at the Royal Court in 1980; and the Duke of Florence, an acid-voiced, bleakly ruthless intelligencer, in Philip Prowse’s gorgeous staging of John Webster’s The White Devil at the National in 1991.
He returned to the Gate several times. The artistic director Michael Colgan said that his Uncle Vanya there in 1987 was the most moving performance of his tenure, while his Serebryakov in the same Chekhov play, a few years later, fitted equally well. His whiskey-sodden, disenchanted ophthalmologist in Friel’s Molly Sweeney (1994), a play about regaining sight but losing faith, was just as potent and memorable, and he played a wonderful double act with Niall Buggy in Pinter’s No Man’s Land in 1997.
And there seemed hardly a major television series he did not adorn, as a maverick Russian agent in Callan, or as various villains in Lovejoy, Minder and The Sweeney. He was the final suspect ever interviewed byJohn Thaw as Inspector Morse. His last major movie was Lawrence Dunmore’s The Libertine (2004), starring Johnny Depp in Stephen Jeffreys’s screenplay from his own theatre piece, and he last appeared on the London stage in 2005, as the disabled father in a National Theatre revival by Tom Cairns of Friel’s elegiac Aristocrats.
But with a fine, black-humoured Irish flourish, he saved his last gasp for a short, low-budget movie called Death’s Door (2009), in which he played a dying man in a grand old house confronted by a junkie career criminal played by one of the Irish theatre’s rising stars, Karl Sheils.
May died in 2007. McKenna is survived by four sons and a daughter, three brothers and five sisters.
• Thomas Patrick McKenna, actor, born 7 September 1929; died 13 February 2011
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
T.P. McKenna was born in 1929 in Co Cavan, Ireland. He began his acting career in Dublin at the famed Abbey Theatre. In 1959 he made the film “Shake Hands With the Devil” with James Cagney, Dana Wynter and Glynis Johns. He made his career in England and acted in most of the major television series of their time e.g.”The Sweeney”. “Blake 7” etc. He died in 2011.
Michael Coveney’s “Guardian” obituary:
Before he became a familiar face on television and cinema screens, the outstanding Irish actor TP McKenna, who has died after a long illness aged 81, bridged the gap between the old and the new Abbey theatres in Dublin. He appeared with the company for eight years during the interim period at the Queen’s theatre; the old Abbey burned down in 1951, the new one opened by the Liffey in 1966.
During that time he made his reputation as a leading actor of great charm, vocal resource – with a fine singing voice – and versatility. He was equally adept at comedy and tragedy, a great exponent of the best Irish playwriting from JM Synge and Séan O’Casey to Hugh Leonard and Brian Friel. The elder son in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night was a favourite, much acclaimed role.
It was Stephen D, Leonard’s skilful conflation of two James Joyce books, for the rival Gate theatre that in 1963 brought McKenna to London, where he stayed for more or less the rest of his career, appearing regularly on West End stages while reaching wider audiences.
He played barristers and detectives, conmen, police officers and a pope. His default mode was an imposing, authoritative geniality, and when he played a Nazi engaging in the casual slaughter of Jews in the TV mini-series Holocaust (1978), it was as hard to watch as it was to credit that this was the same actor who was so delightful as Harold Skimpole (“no idea of time, no idea of money”) in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1985) on BBC television.
For an actor, McKenna was an unusually modest and self-effacing man, and this trait lent a profound transparency and poignancy to those performances that touched on failure and disappointment, notably in Chekhov. You never saw the joins.
His family had settled in Mullagh, County Cavan, in the north of Ireland, in the 18th century. His great-grandfather, Nicholas McKenna, was an auctioneer, tradesman and farmer; his uncle, Justin McKenna, a notable politician; and his father, Ralph, also an auctioneer and merchant. Thomas – generally known in later life as “TP” – was the eldest of 10 children. He was educated at Mullagh national school and St Patrick’s college, Cavan, where he studied literature and discovered his acting and singing talent in Gilbert and Sullivan. He played Gaelic football, representing St Patrick’s in the final of the All Ireland colleges competition in 1948.
As a schoolboy, he had seen the legendary Anew McMaster‘s touring company in Shakespeare and decided to go on the stage. But first he took his banking exams in Belfast, then worked for the Ulster Bank in Granard, Trim and Dublin, where he trained at the Abbey Theatre School. He made his debut at the Pyke in 1953, appeared with McMaster at the Gaiety in 1954 (playing Horatio in Hamlet and Albany in King Lear) before joining the Abbey.
McKenna played more than 70 roles for the Abbey at the Queen’s, a large, demanding theatre seating 900. One of the Gate theatre’s biggest modern successes was Stephen D at the Dublin Theatre festival of 1962. In the following year, McKenna came with it, and his fellow actor Norman Rodway, to London. Although he returned to Dublin in 1966 to play in the Abbey’s reopening production – Walter Macken’s Recall the Years, a curtain-raiser to a major revival of O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars – McKenna never liked the new theatre and revelled in the wider opportunities now open to him on British television and stage.
At the Royal Court in 1964, he played Cassius in Lindsay Anderson’s revival of Julius Caesar, then joined Stuart Burge and Jonathan Miller at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1968, playing the Bastard in King John, Joseph Surface in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, Trigorin in Chekhov’s The Seagull and Macduff in Macbeth. At the end of an exhausting season, he directed his first and favourite play, Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World.
Back at the Court in 1969, he was one of the two Irish contractors in David Storey’s The Contractor, directed by Anderson, and this role with his compatriot Jim Norton led to both of them being hired by Sam Peckinpah to appear in Straw Dogs (1971), his fourth major film, following Joseph Strick‘s Ulysses (1967) – he was Buck Mulligan – Tony Richardson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), and Charles Jarrott’s Anne of the Thousand Days (1969). McKenna had a soft spot for Peter Hall’s Perfect Friday (1970), a comedy caper with Stanley Baker, Ursula Andress and David Warner, and he also popped up tellingly opposite Richard Burton in Michael Tuchner’s Villain (1971), the first movie “inspired” by the Kray twins.
McKenna had married May White, literally the girl next door, who worked for Radio Éireann, in 1955, but he did not bring the family over to settle in London until 1972. Notable stage roles over the next two decades included Robert Hand in James Joyce’s only play, Exiles, directed byHarold Pinter at the Mermaid in 1970; a straitlaced puritan preacher inGeorge Bernard Shaw‘s The Devil’s Disciple for the RSC in 1976, a performance of coruscating charm opposite Tom Conti, John Wood, Zoë Wanamaker and Bob Hoskins; a beautifully modulated doctor in Max Stafford-Clark’s production of Thomas Kilroy’s take on The Seagull at the Royal Court in 1980; and the Duke of Florence, an acid-voiced, bleakly ruthless intelligencer, in Philip Prowse’s gorgeous staging of John Webster’s The White Devil at the National in 1991.
He returned to the Gate several times. The artistic director Michael Colgan said that his Uncle Vanya there in 1987 was the most moving performance of his tenure, while his Serebryakov in the same Chekhov play, a few years later, fitted equally well. His whiskey-sodden, disenchanted ophthalmologist in Friel’s Molly Sweeney (1994), a play about regaining sight but losing faith, was just as potent and memorable, and he played a wonderful double act with Niall Buggy in Pinter’s No Man’s Land in 1997.
And there seemed hardly a major television series he did not adorn, as a maverick Russian agent in Callan, or as various villains in Lovejoy, Minder and The Sweeney. He was the final suspect ever interviewed byJohn Thaw as Inspector Morse. His last major movie was Lawrence Dunmore’s The Libertine (2004), starring Johnny Depp in Stephen Jeffreys’s screenplay from his own theatre piece, and he last appeared on the London stage in 2005, as the disabled father in a National Theatre revival by Tom Cairns of Friel’s elegiac Aristocrats.
But with a fine, black-humoured Irish flourish, he saved his last gasp for a short, low-budget movie called Death’s Door (2009), in which he played a dying man in a grand old house confronted by a junkie career criminal played by one of the Irish theatre’s rising stars, Karl Sheils.
May died in 2007. McKenna is survived by four sons and a daughter, three brothers and five sisters.
• Thomas Patrick McKenna, actor, born 7 September 1929; died 13 February 2011
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online
Rhydian was born James Roberts in 1983. He came to fame in “The X Factor” in 1983.
“Classic FM” article:
We asked the Welsh singer, who shot to fame in X Factor in 2007, why he thought Wales produces so many great singers and whether he misses his homeland when he’s away.
Next month, Rhydian is embarking on a tour of UK arenas in Jeff Wayne’s musical The War of the Worlds, in which he plays Parson Nathaniel. He tells us about the role, for which he’s losing his trademark white hair.
Asked what it’s like performing in such large venues as the O2, and whether it requires different skills, Rhydian said “I’ve always been a larger than life character when I’m on stage and I think that helps.”
The above “Classic FM” article can also be accessed online here.
IMDB entry:
Born in Pontypridd, South Wales, in 1940 to a traditional coal-mining family, he began singing at an early age in church and in the school choir. Left school at 16 and was married, having a son a year later. He brought in money for his family from an assortment of jobs, singing in pubs at night. By 1963, he was playing regularly with his own group in the demanding atmosphere of working mens clubs. Gordon Mills, a performer who had branched out into songwriting and management went to see him. He became his manager and landed him a record contract in 1964. They made a great team and had huge international success with their second single, a song penned by Mr Mills — “It’s Not Unusual.” An avalanche of gold singles and albums followed. Mr Jones, a vocal powerhouse, has sustained his popularity for over three decades, and his recordings have spanned the spectrum of musical styles. Now lives with his wife Melinda in homes in Wales and California.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: BlackKnight1(vanessawhistler@ntlworld.com
Anyone who knows me are aware that I am a bit of a movie buff. Over the past few years I have been collecting signed photographs of my favourite actors. Since I like movies so much there are many actors whose work I like.