Thursday 10 March 2011

TP McKENNA - A BIOGRAPHY

(Biography adapted from obituary in the The Times)

TP McKenna was a prolific and versattile character actor who performed regularly on stage, film and television for 50 years.  One of the most gifted of Irish actors of his generation to make his career in England, he made his stage debut at the tiny Pike Theatre in Dublin in 1953 as John Buchanan in Tennessee Williams' Summer and Smoke before successfully branching out into film appearing alongside everyone from Richard Burton (in Anne of the Thousand Days, 1969) and Dustin Hoffman (Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs 1971) to Johnny Depp (The Libertine 2004).

Few Irish actors were to become as qualified as McKenna to play all the leading character parts, from Shaw and Shakespeare to Ibsen and Chekov.  He was undoubtedly one of Ireland's most accomplished Joycean actors with a reputation in classical Irish drama from Synge to O'Casey.

Love Story: Give My Love
to the Pilchards ATV (1965)
McKenna, though, was not content to master only the stage.  In the 1960s he appearedin a variety of popular television dramas including The Avengers, Dangerman, The Saint  and Adam Adamant.  In the following decades he was in a host of television staples such as The Sweeney, Minder, Blakes 7, Casualty, Doctor Who, Lovejoy and Inspector Morse.

McKenna's lengthy filmography ranges from his earliest appearances in three 1959 films, Broth of a Boy, Home is the Hero and Shake Hands with the Devil  to The Girl with Green Eyes (1964), Ulysses (1967), Charge of the Light Brigade (1968),  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1977), Britannia Hopsital (1982) and The Libertine.
Holocaust (1978)
He had an early, uncredited role in the IRA-Nazi drama A Terrible Beauty (1961) but despite a common mis-conception went on to appear only twice as a Nazi on film - as an SS commander in the US mini-series Holocaust  (with Meryl Streep) and when he played Himmler in the TV movie Scarlet and the Black, alongside Gregory Peck, Christopher Plummer and John Gielgud in 1983.

Thomas Patrick McKenna was born at Mullagh, Co.Cavan, Ireland, in 1929 and educated at Mullagh School and St.Patrick's College, Cavan, where he performed in several Gilbert & Sullivan operas.  After leaving school he joined the Ulster Bank in Grannard, Co.Longford, and worked in banking for the next five years.  However, he remained set on becoming an actor and left to train for the stage at the Abbey School of Acting in Dublin.


Early Portrait
After his stage debut at the Pike,  McKenna played a season at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, with Anew McMaster's Shakespearean company, before spending eight years at the old Abbey in Dublin, the oldest national theatre in the British Isles where he played at least a hundred roles, including Jamie, his favourite role, in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey in Night (1962).

The play that brought him to London was Stephen D.  This was an adaptation by Hugh Leonard from James Joyce's autobiographical novels.  It tranferred to the West End from the Dublin theatre festival.  McKenna played Cranly, the argumentative student friend of Stephen Dedalus (Norman Rodway).  It moved to the St.Martin's in 1963 from the Dublin Gate.

McKenna stayed on when the London run ended and soon found work as the Irishman O'Keefe in J.P.Donleavy's The Ginger Man (Ashcroft, Croydon).  Then he went to the Royal Court Theatre in Lindsay Anderson's revival of Julius Caesar (1964);  the next year he took over as the Burglar in Shaw's Too Good to be True (Garrick).

Summoned back to Dublin for the reopening of the Abbey Theatre in 1966 he played in Recall the Years.  He was proud to be listed as one of the Abbey's honorary life members.  He went on to play George in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  and Ned in Eugene McCabe's play, Breakdown, at the subsequent Dublin theatre festival.  McKenna won the Dublin Evening Herald award as the year's best actor.

Nottingham Playhouse, 1967
Returning to England in 1968 he joined Stuart Burge at Nottingham Playhouse.  In a revival of King John, the usually disdained, dark play by Shakespeare, McKenna played with fine understanding Philip Faulconbridge, bastard son of Richard I, and was a powerful presence on the stage.

Jonathan Miller's thoughful revival of The School for Scandal  brought another lively performance by McKenna as Joseph Surface, and a compelling Tirgorin in Chekov's The Seagull.  He was a good Macduff to Barry Foster's Macbeath, and his debut as director of The Playboy of the Western World was, according to The Times, "better than the Abbey's own recent version".

The Contractor (1969/70)
Royal Court Theatre/Fortune London
Back at the Royal Court in 1969 McKenna played Fitzpatrick, a bitter-sweet Irishman, in David Storey's The Contractor, which moved into West End at the Fortune.  For the 1971-72 season he joined the RSC at the Aldwych.  He played Robert Hands in James Joyce's Exiles  and the Bishop in Genet's The Balcony.

In 1973 he spent some time in Dublin:  after Andrew Wyke in Anthony Shaffer's thriller, Sleuth, he directed Thomas Kilroy's The Death and Resurrection of Mr.Roche at the new Abbey Theatre.  In 1975 he played at Watford Palace in Don Taylor's Out on the Lawn  before rejoining the RSC as the Preacher in Shaw's The Devil's Disciple  (Aldwych).  Returning to Dublin in the mid-1970s as Captain Boyle in O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock, McKenna went on to play five parts in The Golden Cradle, taken from five plays by the Abbey Theatre.

Molly Sweeney (1994)
In the 1980s his parts included Gregers Werle in Ibsen's The Wild Duck (Guildford) and the Doctor in Chekov's The Seagull (Royal Court), as well as roles in Stewart Parker's Nightshade (Dulin theatre festival), Brian Friel's The Communication Cord (Hampseatd Theatre), Mary O'Malley's Talk of the Devil  (Watford), Ibsen's A Doll's House (Haymarket, Leicester), and the title role in Uncle Vanya  (Gate, Dublin).  He also directed O'Casey's Shadow of a Gunman  (Crucible, Sheffield).  In the 1990s his roles included Francisco in Webster's The White Devil  (National Theatre, London) and Gaev in The Cherry Orchard (Gate, Dublin, 1992);  he also appeared in Friel's Molly Sweeney (Gate & Almeida 1994).  In 2005, in a Chekhovian revival by Tom Cairns at the Lyttelton of Friel's 1979 play, Aristocrats, McKenna played - in a brief, doddering appearance - the father of five blighted children.

TP at the Gate Theatre, Dublin
McKenna appeared in The Avengers three times in the Sixties, alongside Honor Blackman, Diana Rigg and Linda Thornson.  He was also conspicuous in The Duchess of Malfi (1972), The Changeling (1974), To the Lighthouse (1982) and Bleak House (1985).  His later television appearances included Heartbeat (1992) and Ballykissangel (1996).

McKenna was married to May White, who predeceased him.  He is survived by four sons and a daughter.

T.P. McKenna, actor, was born on September 7, 1929.  He died on February 13, 2011, aged 81  

   

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