A man of many parts – Brian Maye on actor and director Godfrey Quigley

Godfrey Quigley, who was a stage and screen actor, theatre manager and director, was a founding member of the Dublin International Theatre Festival in 1957, which is still going strong, though now known as the Dublin Theatre Festival. He was born 100 years ago on May 5th.

His father, Eugene Patrick, was from Co Sligo and was awarded the Military Cross during the first World War, after which he served in the Palestinian Police under the British Palestine Mandate. This was why Godfrey was born in Jerusalem; his mother, Lilian Broderick, was American. The family returned to Ireland when he was 13 and he attended Belvedere College in Dublin. He intended doing law at Trinity College but Archbishop McQuaid had banned Catholics from studying there, so instead he served four years in the RAF during the second World War. It was hard to find employment back in Dublin after the war and, taking the advice of a friend, the actress Marie Kean, he enrolled in the Abbey School of Acting under Ria Mooney. Although he was a late entry into acting at 24, “over a career spanning some 40 years, he established himself as one of the most noteworthy Irish actors of the post-war generation,” according to Lawrence White, who wrote the entry on him in the Dictionary of Irish Biography.

He appeared in all the main Dublin theatres and toured Ireland before setting up the Dublin Globe Theatre based in Dún Laoghaire. Although its budget was very limited, it featured such acting talent as Denis Brennan, Jack McGowran, Michael O’Herlihy, Milo O’Shea and Maureen Toal and “challenged the artistic stasis then gripping the Abbey under the straitlaced management of Ernest Blythe by staging innovative new Irish plays, such as Madigan’s Lock (1958) by fledgling playwright Hugh Leonard, and works from the international repertoire, especially contemporary American drama,” according to Lawrence White.

With Brendan Smith and others, Quigley launched the Dublin International Theatre Festival in 1957 and experienced great success at the Abbey playing James Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night in 1959. That same year the Globe co-produced, at the Gaiety Theatre, an adaptation of JP Donleavy’s novel The Ginger Man, which starred Richard Harris. Public protests and Catholic Church pressure caused the play’s withdrawal after three performances.

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Sickened by what he saw as this pointless conservatism, Quigley closed the Globe and for some years worked on stage and in film and television in London.

He returned to Dublin for the 1964 theatre festival, where he directed the first production of Eugene McCabe’s The King of the Castle. The play’s uncompromising naturalism in dealing with sexuality and greed in rural Ireland provoked further controversy.

Quigley continued to act and direct in Dublin, mainly during the theatre festivals, appeared in the West End and with the Royal Shakespeare Company and also toured in America and South Africa. Marcella, a stage musical he wrote as an adaptation of Brinsley McNamara’s play Look at the Heffernans!, was performed at the 1973 theatre festival.

He had roles in more than 20 films in the 1970s and 1980s, including as a prison chaplain in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and as Captain Grogan in the same director’s Barry Lyndon, and as Rita’s father in Educating Rita.

The dramatists Hugh Leonard and Tom Murphy provided him with some of his best later stage roles, particularly Leonard’s The Patrick Pearse Motel (1971), Time Was (1975) and Irishmen (1975). In Murphy’s The Gigli Concert at the Abbey in 1983, he played the challenging lead role of the alcoholic and afflicted builder who desperately wants to sing like Gigli, for which he won the Harvey’s Award for best actor of the year. An outstanding final role was that of Dada, the obnoxious father of an Irish family in Coventry, in Murphy’s A Whistle in the Dark, which he played in Dublin in 1986 and London in 1989.

With his wife, actress Genevieve Lyons, he had one daughter but the couple were separated for many years. He lived in Dublin for a long period with another actress, Liz Davis, and she took devoted care of him when he suffered from Alzheimer’s disease until his death on September 7th, 1994.

“Though lacking subtlety in his acting, Quigley could command the stage with his large, often hunched physique, florid complexion and resounding voice. At his best in unsympathetic roles, he could convincingly convey bluster, lechery or simmering wrath,” according to Lawrence White, who also described him as “a nimble-witted man”.