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.
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| 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.
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| Holocaust (1978) |
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.
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).
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| Early Portrait |
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.
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.
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| Nottingham Playhouse, 1967 |
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".
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| The Contractor (1969/70) Royal Court Theatre/Fortune London |
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.
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| Molly Sweeney (1994) |
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| TP at the Gate Theatre, Dublin |
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
