Lalor Roddy (born 30 November 1954) is an Irish actor, described by The Irish Times theatre critic Fintan O'Toole as "surely the finest Irish actor of his generation".[1]
As an young man, he left for the United States to play football.[3] Upon his return to Northern Ireland, he majored in psychology at the University of Ulster.[3] Roddy had been working as a psychologist in England until he returned home to Ireland at the age of 33 to take up acting.[1]
In the theatre
In 1988, together with Tim Loane and Stephen Wright, he founded the Tinderbox theatre company in Belfast, which produced two plays by Harold Pinter.[4] The two plays were produced on the very modest budget of £75 each.[5] In 1989, the Tinderbox company received a cheque from the playwright Samuel Beckett, described as the "ultimate endorsement" in the world of Irish theatre.[4] From 1989 to 2000, the Tinderbox company hosted an annual Festival of New Irish Playwriting intended to present "artistically dangerous" new plays.[4] The intention behind the Tinderbox was to challenge the sectarian hatreds in Ulster that led to 'the Troubles' of Northern Ireland, and create a theatre company that would "despite the system" put on new plays that might bring people together.[6] Roddy was one of the co-artistic directors of the company.[6] The Tinderbox company came to be, in the 1990s and 2000s, one of the leading theatre companies in Belfast.[5]
Roddy's performances in Belfast attracted attention of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and he played roles in the RSC's productions of Billy Roche’s Amphibians and James Robson’s King Baby.[1] In 1998, he played with the RSC for a full season at the company's home in Stratford-upon-Avon.[1] Roddy starred in two plays with the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, namely Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme and In a Little World of Our Own.[1] For the latter play, he won the ESB/Irish Times Award for best supporting actor.[1]Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, with its sympathetic portrayal of Protestant Ulstermen serving in the British Army during the First World War, the leader of whom is a repressed homosexual, was described as a "landmark" play in Dublin, and Roddy's performance in the play did much to enhance his reputation.[2]In a Little World of Our Own, whose subject were Ulster Unionists involved in a paramilitary group, was described as an important production.[2] Roddy noted that Gary Mitchell, the playwright who wrote In a Little World of Our Own, was Protestant while Frank McGuinness, the playwright who wrote Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, was a Catholic.[2] In 2004, he was nominated in the ESB/Irish Times Theatre Awards for best actor for his performance in The Weir.[1]
In 2004 and again in 2014, he acted in the controversial play Defender of the Faith by Stuart Carolan, set in 1986 on an isolated farm in County Armagh, where a family that supports the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) suspects that one of them might be an informer for the Crown.[2]
Television and film work
Through primarily a theatre actor working throughout Ireland, Roddy is best known internationally for work in film and television, having appeared in over sixty films and television episodes. One of his best known roles on the screen is also one of his briefest, namely as the assassin who tried to kill Bran Stark in The Kingsroad episode of Game of Thrones. In 2013, he told the Irish journalist Hilary Fennell: "Being a professional actor means holding onto your own persona despite edging towards someone else's."[3] In 2018, he starred in Séamus, a short film written and directed by the American filmmaker Gursimran Sandhu.
Radosavljević, Duška (2013). The Contemporary Ensemble: Interviews with Theatre-Makers. London: Routledge. ISBN978-1136283543.
Grant, David (2014). "Insider Knowledge: The Evolution of Belfast's Tinderbox Theater Company". In Duggan, Patrick; Ukaegbu, Victor (eds.). Reverberations across Small-Scale British Theatre: Politics, Aesthetics and Forms Reverberations across Small-Scale British Theatre: Politics, Aesthetics and Forms. London: Intellect Ltd. pp. 19–40. ISBN978-1783202973.
