Click each image for more information "If you're brought up in a working-class home and you go to a posh school, you do learn a certain amount about the English and class and that has obviously been a help in what I do. It has left me with a feeling that although I've been brought up in English society, I'm not completely of it." |
BORN IN BERKSHIRE COUNTY on March 24, 1945, Patrick G. Duggan was raised in the village of Pangbourne in the Thames Valley, 45 miles west of London. His mother was born in County Dublin and emigrated to England to work as a cook for an Anglo-Irish family in 1932. His father, also from an Irish family, settled in Pangbourne as secretary of the bursar at The Nautical College of Pangbourne. His parents became acquainted while walking to mass in the village every Sunday; they married in 1936 and remained in rural Berkshire to raise a family. With the advent of war, Malahide's father joined the army. Following his return, both parents worked two jobs in order to ensure the best possible education for their three children through Catholic private schools. After St. Anne's Primary School, Malahide attended Douai School (1958-1962), a Catholic boarding school in Berkshire administered by Benedictine monks whose teachings imparted a basic philosophy: seldom agree, never deny, and always distinguish. The experience also inspired a keen awareness of class distinction and the discriminatory effect of accent and use of language. |
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"It's no wonder I grew up with a fascination with accents. [Irishman] George Bernard Shaw said that 'everytime an Englishman opens his mouth, he makes another Englishman despise him'. I learned this the hard way and have put it to use ever since." By age eight, Malahide had begun developing and perfecting the range of Irish,
English, and other accents which have become a hallmark of his acting career. |
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After he left teaching, Malahide survived by taking a variety of jobs including door-to-door sales of English bone china to U.S. forces in Germany (an experience later used when he wrote The Writing on the Wall). Despite his talent and interest in the stage at university, Malahide viewed the theatre as clique-ridden and pretentious, an opinion based largely on his experience within student circles. A chance discussion with a lighting designer at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, however, revealed to him the practicality of the occupation and convinced him that it was possible to work intelligently in the theatre. In 1969 at the age of 24, he became stage manager at the Byre Theatre in St. Andrews. |
THE BYRE THEATRE WAS LITERALLY a converted cowshed with a 14-foot-wide stage and a new stage manager, totally without experience, who doubled as carpenter, electrician, sound recordist, prompter, and set painter. As his experience grew, Malahide was also given stage roles and by the end of the season, was a member of the acting company. While stage manager, he perfected what he called the butler's exit: "Just before the end of each scene, whatever character I was playing had to invent some pressing reason to walk offstage so I could close the act." In 1970, during a three-month break between seasons, he worked as assistant flyman at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London's West End.
The New Byre Theatre opened in 1970 with Malahide as artistic director and actor in plays
by Chekhov, Stoppard, Coward, Miller, and Shaw. In 1972, Malahide made his London debut at the Young Vic Theatre in The Great Northern Welly Boot Show and applied to become a director at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh. He was instead hired as an actor. |
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"I took on the job thinking of it as a trainee directorship but was immediately offered huge parts...I didn't have to design the sets, record the music, light the stage, or hire and fire the company. All I had to do was act." |
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During his first acting season at the Royal Lyceum, Malahide was lauded for an extraordinarily vivid and remarkable performance as the lead in Look Back in Anger. For the next six years, he played leading roles in works by Shakespeare, Pinter, Shaw, Beckett, and Chekhov at the Royal Lyceum with three seasons at the Edinburgh Festival. He began to appear regularly in television dramas, starring as a newspaper reporter in The Standard, a 13-part series, and made his film debut as Conway in Sweeney II. In 1979, Malahide moved to Bristol, approximately 120 miles west of London, and joined the Bristol Old Vic Repertory. He also took a small role in the first episode of Thames TV's Minder, beginning five seasons in the hugely successful series which dominated the ratings throughout the early 1980s. As D.S. Albert "Charlie" Chisholm, Malahide parodied the classic plodding, tight-lipped, and flint-brained police officer obsessed with the apprehension of one man. He was originally hired for only a half day's work; however, writers Leon Griffiths and Tony Hoare recognized the comic potential in Malahide's creation of the character and quickly expanded the role. His weaseling and mean-spirited portrayal provided the perfect foil for Arthur and Terry giving Malahide a cult following and recognition on a national level. |
| " The world according to Chisholm operates on fixed rules, good order, and discipline; when it goes wrong, he cannot cope. Arthur Daley has come to symbolize everything that is wrong with the modern world - he has become Chisholm's personal obsession. Chisholm believes the world was better off 20 years ago before suspended sentences and community policing. It all sends his blood pressure soaring." |
| AS THE CHARACTER OF CHISHOLM continued to develop, Malahide made numerous other television appearances and stunned theatre critics as Captain Andrei Vuhkov in Barry Collins' two-and-a-half-hour monologue Judgement at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1981. He was awarded The Festival Times Award for Best Solo Performance and received rapturous reviews of his flawless, compelling, and brilliant performance. Malahide played a Russian army captain who is left with seven other officers in a locked cell during WWII by the retreating Germans. He and one other cellmate, who is declared insane, survive by killing and feeding from their comrades with each ritualistic death determined by drawing lots. |
Vuhkov chillingly recreates his confinement and the horror and degradation of his actions before his judge and jury - the audience. He struggles to convince them that the means of survival can justify the most barbaric ends. Malahide was described as coldly rational, compelling, and unrelenting in his control over the audience. Based on a true experience, the play transcends the concepts of survival and cannibalism and challenges both society's dependence on norms and the accepted predictability of human behavior. Judgement played beyond the Fringe at the Liverpool Playhouse, Mickery Theatre, and Dublin Theatre Festival with Malahide's performance consistently receiving the highest critical acclaim. "Everything in the creation of the atmosphere falls to
Patrick Malahide, who delivers the 94-page monologue in a meticulous and truly inspired
performance...without doubt this is the most important and imposing theatrical happening
on Merseyside this year." "No praise would be too high for
Malahide's performance. He has all the necessary technical equipment: vocally varied but
restrained, crystal clear in exposition and feeling, and the physical portrayal, never
exaggerated, says much that the words leave out. The best solo show I've seen this
Festival." "Malahide captures impeccably the
perfect combination of slightly wild, but indubitably sane, rationality. Consistently
enthralling, his delivery never lags, never becomes monotonous. All our sentimental
notions of human dignity are swept away |
"Once in a while a theatrical experience explodes on the scene
with such force that the spirit is stirred and utterly stunned. Malahide, with his searing
earnestness and integrity, magnetized one's attention throughout the entire
monologue." "Malahide's flawless acting has complemented fully the author's
brilliant script." |
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MALAHIDE AGAIN DAZZLED audiences and critics in G.F. Newman's documentary-style play Operation Bad Apple in 1982 at the Royal Court and Crucible Theatres. Based upon an actual investigation of the Metropolitan Police, the controversial work accuses the entire law and order establishment of taking bribes, receiving stolen property, profiteering, and general pervasive corruption. Malahide's portrayal of DCI Terry Sneed was described by critic Benedict Nightingale as "all sneering cynicism and know-it-all contempt as the human viper eventually promoted to overall charge of the snakepit." Malahide also guest-starred in Dying Day, The Black Adder, Charlie, and appeared as himself in a television documentary of the history of the Byre Theatre, Please Keep Your Feet Off The Stage. In 1985, he appeared in his second film, The Killing Fields, co-starred in Bill Forsyth's gentle comedy Comfort and Joy, and played Mr. Jingle, his favorite role, in the BBC's eight-part adaptation of Dickens' The Pickwick Papers. Despite the quantity of roles and continuity of his acting career, Malahide began to experience a growing frustration as an actor because "I felt there were areas of me that weren't being used." He began writing under the name of Patrick Duggan and submitted to The Sunday Times a half-hour film script written especially for their movie competition. Legs! Legs! Legs!, a comedy about mini-rugby, was highly commended and fulfilled a promise Malahide made to himself at age 20 that he would begin writing by the time he reached 40. |
| P.G. DUGGAN |
"My writing has made me a better, more relaxed actor. I love the research and with my feel for detail, I think I should have been an historian. As a writer, I also enjoy being in control of my creativity; actors are constantly dependent upon the director's decision." IN LATE 1985, MALAHIDE WAS approached by a production company interested in producing a film about terrorism. He developed an idea about a secret anti-terrorist arm of NATO which was commissioned by Anglia TV three years later. As writer P.G. Duggan, Malahide became an accredited correspondent to NATO, meticulously researching each member nation in Brussels and writing an in-depth four-part political drama entitled Soft Targets. He pursued the project for ten years; the resulting series, The Writing on the Wall, was co-produced in 1996 by Little Bird, BBC, and Tatfilm in association with Ryan Films, Malahide's own development company. As executive producer as well as writer, Malahide gained the control and latitude to develop an idea from conception through script and production. P.G. Duggan also wrote Reasonable Force, a BBC Screen 2 film about police corruption and the now disbanded Police Special Patrol Group. The 1988 production was described by critics as one of the finest recent pieces of television writing. |
| THE SINGING DETECTIVE: A TRIPLE ROLE |
"I set out to make the
whole thing a detective story about how you find out about yourself, how an event has
lodged inside you and affects how you see things. Out of this morass of evidence and
clues, we can start to put up this structure of self." THE SIX-HOUR PRODUCTION of Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective exploded on the television screen with a level of innovation and creativity rarely seen on film. The story centers on detective fiction writer Philip Marlow, played by Michael Gambon, who suffers from debilitating psoriasis and, throughout his slow recovery in the hospital, focuses on a mental rewrite of one of his early books - The Singing Detective. Lying helpless and unable to light a cigarette or even hold a pen, Marlow's active and fevered mind combines memories, fantasies, imagination, fears, and reality through a process of free association which one psychiatrist has described as the first example of a successful self-analysis ever recorded. Marlow recreates the reality of the hospital room, moving in and out of consciousness until reality and illusion become indistinguishable. Malahide portrays three distinct roles - three manifestations of the same dark driving force. Raymond is the Forest of Dean miner who seduces Marlow's mother and becomes the root of Marlow's villains; Mark Binney is the 1940s fictional murderer; and Mark Finney becomes the extension of Binney in Marlow's present - the imagined lover of Marlow's wife who plots to steal the film rights to Marlow's book. Shots are intercut so rapidly that the effects are almost subliminal: layer upon layer of thought process is presented visually with the use of 1940's popular music to enhance meaning and underscore the intrusion of the past on the present. Each scene provides a clue to the realization of the self as the film spirals inward. Both Michael Gambon and Malahide were nominated for BAFTA Best Actor Awards for their outstanding work in this brilliant detective story of the mind. "Potter understands the process of writing. Other writers allow themselves to put it all together in a linear form. He finds it more interesting in its unsimplified state, where everything flies off at tangents. At the same time, he's got a wonderful grip on what's entertaining." "For me, writing is partly a cry of the
soul. But at the same time, I'm bringing back the results of a journey that many people
don't get the chance to make, to whatever hinterland it is where all those figures jibber
and jeer and fly at you." "With Magnus, my style of acting had to be slightly heightened because he is a man of mystery and magic. You can't do specific research for such a complex character; you just have to respond intuitively to the man." The casting of Magnus involved weeks of poring over the actor's directory. An impasse was reached until Producer Deidre Keir and Director Mike Varady saw a still of Malahide from The Pickwick Papers. Because he looked so completely different from his roles in Minder or The Singing Detective, they immediately contacted Malahide's agent.
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"Malahide's performance in the premiere of Nick Dear's new play...was a tour de force of energy, wit, and pathos...a demanding, rich, and wordy monologue of endless delights."
- Louise Jury
THE CLANDESTINE MARRIAGE |
"It is the wittiest script I have read for some time. I have a very strong feeling that, as the New Vic is going to be closed for some time, we should finish with a note of defiance, with a new play by a young English writer and a world premiere." THE WORLD PREMIERE OF Nick Dear's In the Ruins in 1989 starred Malahide as King George III in a demanding 90-minute monologue at the Bristol Old Vic, New Vic Studio, and Royal Court Theatre. Critics and audiences were unanimous in their praise of his trademark understatement, sensitivity, and restraint in portraying the 80-year-old blind, deaf, and delirious king. Accompanied only by a silent page and a harpsichord, Malahide created "a very sad, very funny, and...deeply moving portrait of loneliness and delusion - [it was] beautifully and sensitively acted" (David Harrison, Bristol Evening Post). He learned the play in less than two weeks as an appropriate farewell tribute to the Bristol New Vic Studio upon its closing for lack of public funding.
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In addition to his run of the play as King George in 1989, Malahide also appeared in an episode of Central TV's Boon, as Uncle Adrian in Living with Dinosaurs, and in the 10-hour drama After the War for which he received particular acclaim as a sinister-comic disciplinarian schoolmaster who, according to television critic David Newnham, nearly stole the show. IN 1990, MALAHIDE narrated the four-part documentary Designs on Europe and co-starred with John Hurt and Martin Shaw in Granada Television's controversial docudrama Who Bombed Birmingham? (released by HBO in America as The Investigation: Inside a Terrorist Bombing). At the Bristol Old Vic, he played Astrov in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and Sterling in The Clandestine Marriage, both with Timothy West and Saskia Wickham. Malahide also co-starred with Ciaran Hinds, Donal McCann, and Saskia Reeves in the Irish film December Bride directed by Thaddeus O'Sullivan. His characterization of a repressed country vicar takes full advantage of Malahide's expertise in portraying restrained passion, stoicism, and self-righteous indignation. In 1991, Malahide moved to London and guest-starred
in Lovejoy, Smack and Thistle, a two-part episode of the
Ruth
Rendell Mysteries entitled Means of Evil, and the four-part BBC drama
Children
of the North. He was also offered the lead role in the earliest version of a
new West End play written by William Nicholson. In Map of the Heart, directed by
Peter Wood "I was fascinated by the idea of a man who is held hostage and recreates his home on a map as a method of survival. The internal dynamic of the play is the exploration of altruism and selfishness." Malahide next appeared in Force of Duty, Inspector Morse, the three-episode drama The Secret Agent with David Suchet, Ibsen's A Doll's House, and as the rakish Robert Dangerfield in the three-part mystery The Blackheath Poisonings in 1992. He was also completing the first two series of Ngaio Marsh's The Alleyn Mysteries for the BBC in the starring role. |
| RODERICK ALLEYN |
MALAHIDE'S INHERENT ELEGANCE, intelligence, and dignity defined his characterization of the mercurial and dashing Detective Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn, an aristocrat who ironically works for a living as a Scotland Yard detective. Ngaio Marsh's Alleyn is a hybrid of the mannered sleuths of the 1920s and 1930s and the realistic crime solvers of the 1940s. "What is interesting about [Alleyn] is that he turned his back on his own background and decided to do something which, in class terms, was really a step down. Alleyn's family and previous career are shrouded in mystery but he did work for the Foreign Office, speaks a couple of languages, and occasionally quotes Shakespeare, Tennyson, or Goethe. He decides to devote himself to his consuming passion - good, old-fashioned detection. He's not one of those toffee-nosed amateur sleuths; he's a professional police officer who sits somewhat uneasily in the hierarchy at Scotland Yard." "He has to be truly elegant - someone who has a top-class, well-tailored look, but done with sobriety. He's far too much of a gentleman to wear anything that looks too overtly expensive." Malahide, whose role model for Alleyn was former English Prime Minister Anthony Eden, imbues the soft-spoken detective with the warmth, grace, and vulnerability of the classic romantic hero. The actor's brilliance in understatement and subtlety both enhance Alleyn's elegance and air of mystery and suggest the depth and underlying tension that define every Malahide performance. The eight two-hour Alleyn episodes are set in Britain just after World War II; regular cast members include Belinda Lang as well-known artist and Alleyn's romantic interest Agatha Troy, and William Simons as Alleyn's partner Inspector "Brer" Fox. With the completion of Series III, the BBC ended the popular Alleyn Mysteries, a decision decried by television critics. Broadcast throughout the world in 1993 and 1994, the series brought increased recognition to Malahide, especially in America where his face and name were becoming familiar through Masterpiece Theatre's presentation of Middlemarch. |
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EDWARD CASAUBON |
"I took [the novel] away with me on holiday to the Seychelles. I wasn't allowed to get my face burned because of playing Casaubon so I had to cover it up with Austrailian surfers' cream. My wife Jo, who's a photographer, has some great shots of me made up like a tribal warrior in green and pink, with a black Aussie beach hat, and the rest of me is going brown while I'm asleep in the deck chair with Middlemarch open on my chest." "It was tiring but very enjoyable and it wasn't hard to leave Casaubon behind once I changed from his vampire-like outfits into Alleyn's rather dapper double-breasted suits." "Malahide is an
actor with edge. [His] characters specialize in the suggestion of tension, the sketch of
depth, usually dark. He has a look that withers like none other available today. These
considerable powers are presently operating at their most telling in Middlemarch." |
THE SHOWING OF MIDDLEMARCH in Great Britain in late 1993 placed novelist George Eliot on the best-seller list for the first time since her book was published in 1871. Andrew Davies adapted the 766-page classic Victorian novel into a six-part mini-series co-produced by the BBC and WGBH of Boston. Malahide was cast as the unmarried and aging religious scholar Edward Casaubon who is writing a ponderous history of mythology. He marries Dorothea Brooke, a young woman seeking an intellectual "guide who would take her along the grandest path." Following their marriage, however, Dorothea's idealism is crushed as she finds herself ensnared in Casaubon's limitations and subjected to his jealous, vindictive nature. Upon a reference in the novel, Malahide modeled Casaubon's appearance on that of British philosopher John Locke by shaving his crown "so that all you see is a head, a dome of intellect with long hair in the back." Despite Casaubon's black frock coats, deathly pallor, and social frigidity, Malahide's performance conveyed the gentleness, intelligence, and complexity that originally seduced Dorothea. "Casaubon's a fearful man. He has great ideas of his own destiny, but when he comes face to face with it, he's overcome by fear. The fear leads to suspicion and then the suspicion leads to bitterness. And he dies an embittered man. What I found so interesting was that George Eliot never condemns him, never pillories him even though he behaves so appallingly." "It takes a
fine actor to turn this grisly showpiece of the make-up person's art into a thinking,
breathing man, but Malahide does it. As Casaubon...he powerfully evokes the torments of
the scholarly clergyman who, as Eliot dryly writes, 'imagined that his
long, studious bachelorhood had stored up for him a compound interest of enjoyment and
that large drafts on his affection would not fail to be honored.' " "George
Eliot said she was like Casaubon because she was very lonely and she translated very heavy
books from German. She understood this thing of being smothered by research and books, and
not being able to live." The Middlemarch cast of 73 included Juliet Aubrey, Douglas Hodge, Trevyn McDowell, Jonathan Firth, Robert Hardy, Michael Hordern, Rufus Sewell, and Peter Jeffrey; Malahide described the eight-month shoot in Rome, Stamford, Dorset, and Somerset as similar to making three feature films back to back. Because he was filming the third series of The Alleyn Mysteries at the same time, Malahide would spend five weeks on location for Alleyn then rush off during two-week breaks between episodes to film his scenes in Middlemarch.
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| The near-simultaneous broadcasting of Middlemarch and The Alleyn Mysteries in 1994 offered two antithetical characters - Casaubon and Alleyn - which fully illustrate Malahide's considerable acting range, meticulous creation of characters, effective use of voice, and signature suggestion of tension and depth. |
| PATRICK MALAHIDE / P.G. DUGGAN |
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WHILE MIDDLEMARCH WAS being televised in America in 1994, Suri Krishnamma's Oscar Wilde-inspired film A Man of No Importance was released. Shot in Dublin, the film stars Albert Finney, Brenda Fricker, Rufus Sewell, Michael Gambon, and Malahide as Inspector Carson, an Ulster bus superintendent who cruelly taunts Finney's character about "the love that dare not speak its name." The character is based on Barrister Edward Carson, an Ulsterman, who prosecuted Oscar Wilde in 1895 at the Old Bailey. Malahide again co-starred with Gambon in Nicolas Roeg's Two Deaths, a dark and haunting film set in Romania on the night Ceausescu fell, and appeared as Ebenezer Balfour in HBO's adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped with Armand Assante and Michael Kitchen. Roles in two Renny Harlin action films followed with Malahide cast as villainous Governor Ainslee in Cutthroat Island and as the corrupt head of the American secret service in The Long Kiss Goodnight. In 1997, he played similar antagonists in two more American films, Til There Was You with Dylan McDermott and The Beautician and the Beast with Timothy Dalton. On location in Edinburgh, Malahide co-starred with Billy Connolly in Deacon Brodie, a BBC production based on the true story of master cabinet maker and town councilor William Deacon Brodie who was hanged in 1788 for attempting to rob the city custom and excise offices. Malahide played Brodie's adversary, Bailie Creech, a sinister and unscrupulous pedophile. In London, he debuted at the Royal National Theatre as Elizabethan poet-politician Edmund Spenser in Mutabilitie, a new play by Frank McGuinness. Set in Ireland in 1598, the play explores Spenser's growing uncertainty regarding his determination to cleanse Ireland of "heathen superstitious Rome" and "reform it to the true faith" personified by the virgin monarch for whom he is writing the epic Faerie Queene. "Spenser is one of the most difficult parts I've tackled because of the terrible contradictions in the man. He favors converting the Irish by destroying their language and culture, but that means going against his nature as a poet. The strain is like piano wire tightening throughout the play, driving him from his wife and children." IN 1998, MALAHIDE co-starred with Sam Waterston and Mia Farrow in The Family Channel's TV movie Miracle at Midnight and appeared in two American films, U.S. Marshals with Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Downey, Jr., and Heaven with Danny Edwards and Martin Donovan. Early in 1999, Lost at Sea: The Search for Longitude was televised with Malahide playing John Harrison in a Nova/Horizon production based upon Dava Sobel's very successful and popular scientific book. He completed several feature films including Ordinary Decent Criminal; Fortress II; Captain Jack; The World is Not Enough; and All The King's Men, a film for television. Malahide has also written three scripts: Purdah, a full-length feature film; Pleas and Directions, a TV movie based on a true story; and The Collar, a dramatic television series. In 2000, Malahide had cameo roles in two feature films: Quills and the critically acclaimed Billy Elliot. The following year, he appeared in Captain Corelli's Mandolin; The Final Curtain, with Peter O'Toole; The Abduction Club; the popular two-part television historical drama Victoria and Albert; and The Rocket Post, which was filmed in the Outer Hebrides. In February 2002, Malahide starred in Sebastian Barry's Hinterland, a stage play co-produced by the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and the Royal National Theatre in London. He played Johnny Silvester, an aging Irish former Prime Minister under investigation for corruption. The play, which centers on power, human frailty, and fatherhood, opened in Dublin, went into repertoire in London and toured in Bath, Oxford, Cambridge, and Liverpool. Malahide's performance was lauded by critic Fintan O'Toole as "extraordinary... creating an utterly convincing amalgam of ruthlessness and sentimentality, inflated self-regard and emotional fragility, bluster and breakdown." John Peter of The Sunday Times wrote that "Malahide gives a towering performance;" Mark Lawson "believed that Patrick Malahide [playing Johnny Silvester] could have run a country." BBC/RADIO broadcast a 60-minute version of Malahide's play Pleas and Directions on Radio 4 in October 2002. Starring Emma Fielding and Ken Cranham, it was directed by Patrick Rayner. Pleas and Directions, based on the actual 1997 gang rape of a woman in London, is controversial and stunning in its direct yet sensitive portrayal of an emotionally charged story. The play in its entirety is published in the Winter 2003 edition of Arete (for back issues contact this tri-quarterly publication at www.aretemagazine.com ). Malahide also appeared as Headmaster Ralston in the BBC's revival of Goodbye, Mr. Chips with Martin Clunes and Victoria Hamilton. In Search of the Brontes, a BBC television production in 2003 costarred Malahide as Patrick Bronte, father of the Bronte sisters. "This was a fascinating project. The Brontes' father was born Patrick Prunty in County Down in Northern Ireland, an area I know well. The brilliant son of poor farm workers, he went on to Cambridge University where he changed his name to the grander 'Bronte'. Pilloried in biographies as an authoritarian ogre, recent research reveals a passionate man and a single father committed to social reform on behalf of his parishioners and to a proper education for his children at all costs." Malahide's moving portrayal unearthed "the warmth beneath the flinty exterior" of the father who outlived all of his children. The production, written and directed by Samira Osman, also starred Victoria Hamilton, Elizabeth Hurran, Alexandra Milman, and Patricia Routledge. Another 2003 television role was that of Sir Montague Depleach in Poirot: Five Little Pigs with David Suchet, Rachel Stirling, Marc Warren, and Gemma Jones.
Malahide played D.I. Brennan in the two-part psychological thriller Amnesia with John Hannah, Jemma Redgrave, and Anthony Calf in 2004. The Ecosse Films production was written by Chris Lang and directed by Nicholas Laughland. In 2005, Malahide appeared in Sahara with Matthew McConaughey, Penelope Cruz, and William H. Macy. Directed by Breck Eisner, the feature film was shot in Spain and Morocco. He made a guest appearance in the Ricky Gervais BBC-TV comedy Extras and costarred with Damian Lewis, Jodhi May, and Robert Lindsay in another BBC production - Friends and Crocodiles. The two-part, four-hour historical drama Elizabeth I followed, with Malahide starring as Sir Francis Walsingham in a steller cast including Helen Mirren, Jeremy Irons, Hugh Dancy, Ian McDiarmid, and Toby Jones. Released in the U.K. in 2005, the series was widely acclaimed.
IN MARCH 2006, MALAHIDE and Jeremy Irons opened at the Duke of York's Theatre in Embers, Christopher Hampton's "beautifully compressed adaptation" of the classic novel by Hungarian writer Sandor Marai. The play centers on two friends - former soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian empire at the turn of the 20th century - who meet after 41 years. What follows is "akin to eavesdropping on a therapist's session, during which unwelcome questions about sex and adultry, lies and truth are faced." The play, directed by Michael Blakemore, received a five-star review from The Sunday Times critic John Peter who described Irons as giving "the best and most subtle stage performance of his career... But this is not a one-sided play. I've never seen such a moving, sustained piece of wordless acting as Malahide's." Malahide's character Konrad "is guilty of a crime of the soul; and Malahide's face registers, in a way that's both unshowy and harrowing, the silently shifting emotions of shame, anger, pride, resignation and humility." IN THE SUMMER OF 2006, Malahide played the role of President Dwight D. Eisenhower in a BBC three-part drama/documentary entitled Suez - A Very British Crisis. Directed by Louise Hooper, the television production also starred James Fox as Harold Macmillan. This was followed by a dramatic new five-part thriller for the BBC/HBO entitled Five Days in which Malahide portrayed John Poole, grandfather in a family suffering a breakdown upon the vanishing of one of its members. The series boasted a large cast and exceptional screenwriting by Gwyneth Hughes. Malahide then played the role of gangster Derek "Chopper" Hadley in New Tricks, a BBC comedy drama written by J. C. Wilsher and directed by Juliet May. He also guest starred as love-lost lawyer Sir Leonard Richards in the BBC 2 series Sensitive Skin written and directed by Hugo Blick. IN 2008, MALAHIDE CO-STARRED in a remake of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, adapted for the screen by Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock. Directed by Julian Jarrold, the film also featured Michael Gambon, Emma Thompson, and Matthew Goode. Malahide played Charles Ryder's father who is referred to by his son as having "greater reserves to draw on and a wider territory for maneuver... he fought for the sheer love of a battle, in which indeed he shone." Into the Storm: Churchill at War chronicles the British prime minister's life and career at the end of the war. Malahide starred as Major-General Bernard Montgomery in a Hugh Whitemore teleplay directed by Thaddeus O'Sullivan. This feature, which continued the storyline of The Gathering Storm, was nominated for three Golden Globe Awards, Critics Choice Award, and numerous Emmy Awards. The 2008 television series 10 Days to War marked the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq through eight dramas written by Ronan Bennett. Directed by David Belton for the BBC, Episode One featured Malahide as Sr Jeremy Greenstock, then Ambassador to the UN. Another BBC drama, a remake of the John Buchan novel, The 39 Steps, co-starred Malahide as Professor Fisher. With a screenplay by Lizzie Mickery, the tense thriller was directed by James Hayes and the cast included Rupert Penry-Jones, Lydia Leonard, and David Haig. IN 2009, Malahide guest-starred as Landry in three episodes of the second television season of the BBC's Survivors created by Adrian Hodges. In another multi-episode TV series, Law & Order: UK, he appeared as the stern and rigid Robert Ridley QC in episodes entitled "Care", "Samaritan", and "Confession" with costars Jamie Bamber, Bradley Walsh, Ben Daniels, and Freema Agyeman. The BBC TV movie A Short Stay in Switzerland, written by Frank McGuinness, co-starred Malahide as Richard with Julie Walters, Stephen Campbell Moore, and Harriet Walter. IN WINTER 2010, MALAHIDE PERFORMED as Claudius in Director Nicholas Hytner's acclaimed National Theatre production of Hamlet. Following seven week's rehearsals, the play ran in London with an international live HD broadcast in movie theatres on December 9, 2010. Following the London run, the production toured Salford, Nottingham, Woking, Milton Keynes, Plymouth, and Luxembourg. The cast included Rory Kinnear as Hamlet, Ruth Negga as Ophelia, Clare Higgins as Gertrude, David Calder as Polonius, Ferdinand Kingsley as Rosencrantz, and James Laurenson as the Ghost and Player King.
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Embers is "one of the major experiences of my
theatre-going life. [Malahide's face is] "the star of the evening. I have
rarely seen one work so expressively. It speaks volumes of pain, sexual
guilt that cannot be acknowledged, let alone mentioned. The eyes turn
haunted as if beset by ghosts, secrets, and memories."
"I've never seen such a moving, sustained piece of wordless acting as
Malahide's"
"...what's particularly intriguing
about 'Five Days' is the stylistic conceit itself. It ... builds to a fever
pitch in tracing the ripple effects of a three-month investigation involving
a young woman's abduction... This mini holds you in its thrall from beginning
to end.. A riveting ride, indeed."
"Patrick Malahide's cold, unremorseful and unrepentant Claudius is utterly
convincing as a man who would kill his brother, usurp the crown, and run a
state with a mixture of paranoia, steely control, mistrust, and snooping
that would put Richard Nixon to shame". "An excellent
actor, truly believable in every role I've seen him in. I am always
pleased to see Patrick on the cast list. A superb portfolio of work, one
of the U.K.'s most underrated but quietly superb actors. Cool website
too." |
| 2011 PRODUCTION AND COMPLETION |
2011 INVOLVED PRODUCTION and completion of important projects. The prequel to Inspector Morse, Endevour, aired over Christmas in the U.K. and as expected, was met with positive reviews. The television program starred Shaun Evans, Roger Allam, Jack Ashton, Michael Matus, and Malahide as Sir Richard Lovell, a deliciously nasty character. Much of the development of Malahide's character and plot line was edited from the American airing as well as the initial DVD, a disappointment to Malahide followers and a definite breach in the overall plot (The scenes have been restored in current DVDs). The program was directed by Colm McCarthy and brought Malahide back to Inspector Morse after 20 years (In 1992 he starred with John Thaw in Driven to Distraction).
In April, the second season of HBO's Emmy-winning drama Game of Thrones featured Malahide as Balon Greyjoy in two episodes. Sarah Hughes wrote in The Guardian, "Patrick Malahide was all malevolent power as Balon Greyjoy, stripping poor Theon of his swagger in minutes." George R.R. Martin wrote both Malahide episodes: What is Dead May Never Die and The Night Lands, the former directed by Alik Sakharov and the latter by Alan Taylor. Malahide's hard, ambitious, and ruthless character is the head of the House Greyjoy, Lord Paramount of the Iron Islands, and Lord Reaper of Pyke. GoT fans appear to be much impressed with what is described as Malahide's "brilliant work" that "far exceeded expectations based upon the books."
Hunted, an eight-part thriller produced by HBO and the BBC, features Malahide as Jack Turner, an East End gangster who has improved his circumstances. The project, months in production in London, was written by Frank Spotnitz, co-directed by S.J. Clarkson and James Strong, and is described as a smart, complex, and contemporary spy series.
|
BIOGRAPHY |
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Copyright
2011 by Sherry Gregory-Hansley.
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and co-starring 
