Gerard Murphy obit

Gerard Murphy obituary

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Gerard Murphy, who has died of prostate cancer aged 64, was a rare sort of full-hearted actor, always on the front foot. He could flood a theatre with passion and squeeze the juice out of the most recalcitrant prose. Barrel-chested and large- (but not big-) headed, he looked and sounded like a rampaging farmer, with his distinctive carrot-coloured hair and stinging, musical, sardonic, Northern Irish vocal inflections. He once said that acting was like a drug and that doing it was an "inexplicable fusion of need and possession". The ferocity of his acting was all part of his intellectual valour; he loved debating at school and university, and could stand up and argue with anyone, usually having the last word.

He made several films, including Waterworld (1995) and Batman Begins (2005), and appeared in lots of television, most recently in the BBC's Spooks. However, his province was the stage, where his flame burned with magnificent intensity over four decades, from the Glasgow Citizens theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he was an associate artist, to the Royal Exchange in Manchester, the West End and the Almeida in Islington.

A key figure for several years in the Citizens company, alongside such remarkable peers as Ciarán Hinds, David Hayman, Suzanne Bertish, Sian Thomas, Gary Oldman and Rupert Everett, he then switched successfully, and unusually, to the RSC – the Citizens was temperamentally and artistically opposed to everything the RSC stood for. He opened the new Barbican theatre as Prince Hal in Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 in 1982 and appeared in the first RSC season at the Swan theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, four years later.

The oldest of three children, Murphy was born and raised in Newry, County Down. His father, Peter, served in the merchant navy, and his mother, Dympna, was a teacher and librarian. Murphy was educated at the Abbey Christian Brothers' grammar school in Newry and Queen's University Belfast, where he studied music, psychology, literature and anthropology.



In Belfast, he hung around the Lyric theatre. He had already appeared in school and amateur productions in Newry, and he always played piano and guitar. He walked on in the RSC's Coriolanus, with Nicol Williamson, directed by Trevor Nunn at the Aldwych, and took a small role in David Rudkin's Cries from Casement, starring Colin Blakely, in an RSC production at the Place in London.

But he emerged most powerfully at the Citizens between 1974 and 1977, as Piraquo in a spaghetti western kitsch version of The Changeling by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley; in the British premiere of Mikhail Lermontov's Maskerade (the rewriting of Masquerade was deliberate), a salon world of fops and gamblers updated to the 1890s with lashings of Rachmaninov; and as a touching Miss Prism in an all-male The Importance of Being Earnest.



The Citizens in this period under Giles Havergal, Philip Prowse and Robert David MacDonald, was the most exciting, most "European" theatre in the land, slashing and re-energising the classics with style, verve and sexy actors, a very long way from most British theatre and the bourgeois earnestness of the founding father of the Citizens, James Bridie.


Their credo was articulated in MacDonald's Chinchilla (1977), directed by Prowse, in which Murphy played the Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev (known as "Chinchilla" because of a white flash in his dark, satiny hair), hunched and dying in a fur coat on the Venice Lido, while replacing Vaslav Nijinsky with Léonide Massine in his personal and professional affections at the Ballets Russes. On a bare white stage with waves lapping, music playing and boys dancing, this was the most beautiful aesthetic presentation of an aesthetic statement imaginable. Murphy's Diaghilev spoke for the Citizens itself in his "passion for reform, passion for power, passion for beauty, a thirst to show, a lust to tell, a rage to love".

Chinchilla was revived, with Murphy still as Diaghilev, at the 1979 Edinburgh international festival. In the same year in Glasgow, he played Macbeth opposite Hayman as Lady M in a stripped-back, spartan version of Shakespeare's tragedy, one of Murphy's finest (and favourite) performances. In almost the last RSC season at the Aldwych in 1980, he was Johnny Boyle opposite Judi Dench in Nunn's exquisite naturalistic revival of Seán O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock; and in the Barbican Henry IV in 1982 his Falstaff was Joss Ackland and his father, Henry IV, was Patrick Stewart (their deathbed scenes were electrifying).

He teamed once more with Prowse and MacDonald, as director and translator respectively, on Phedra, in true-to-Racine rhyming alexandrines, at the Old Vic in 1984; he was a grizzled, growling Theseus to Glenda Jackson's stupendous, sex-raddled incestuous queen. When Prowse directed a season at Greenwich theatre in the same year, he was a blood-curdling, murderous Brachiano in The White Devil by John Webster.

Staying with his predilection for extravagant roles and theatre, he went on to play Oberon, Petruchio and Oedipus in RSC productions in Stratford-upon-Avon, London and on tour, and directed not only a double-bill of Jean Genet plays in the Pit of the Barbican, but also Simon Russell Beale as Marlowe's Edward II at the Swan in 1990.

Born in 1948 in Newry, County Down, Northern Ireland, Murphy began his career on stage with the Glasgow Citizens Theatre. He branched out into television work with roles in Z-Cars, Doctor Who, Minder, Heartbeat, Father Ted, Dalziel and Pascoe and The Bill. He narrated the BBC Radio version of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

His film roles include the pirate and spy "The Nord" in Waterworld, and as the corrupt High Court Judge Faden in Batman Begins.

Onstage, Murphy portrayed Hector in Alan Bennett's The History Boys, a role previously played by Richard Griffiths, in a national tour co-produced by the West Yorkshire Playhouse and Theatre Royal, Bath and directed by Christopher Luscombe.

In addition, he played Salieri in a 2007 production of Amadeus directed by Nikolai Foster.Although suffering in 2012 from spinal cord compression due to prostate cancer, Murphy appeared in Glasgow Citizens Theatre's production of Krapp's Last Tape by Samuel Beckett.

Murphy died on 26 August 2013 in Cambridge, of prostate cancer, which he had battled for more than two years.He was 64.