T.P. McKenna

Thomas Patrick McKenna was born at Mullagh, Co. Cavan, Ireland, in 1929 and educated at Mullagh School and St Patrick's College, Cavan. There he became a protégé of Fr. Vincent Kennedy who featured him in the annual productions of Gilbert & Sullivan operas. He was a noted treble and sang in Cavan Cathedral, but later would also become a keen member of the school's Gaelic Football squad representing St Patrick's in the final of the All Ireland colleges competition in 1948.

After leaving school he joined the Ulster Bank in Granard, Co Longford, and worked in banking for the next five years. However, he remained set on becoming an actor and when he received a posting to Dublin he soon made a mark on the city's amateur scene appearing with the Rathmines & Rathgar Operatic Society, and the Dublin Shakespeare Society. His employers were not impressed by his extra curricular activities and in 1953 he was posted to the remote town of Killeshandra in County Cavan. McKenna refused to go and resigned his position.

McKenna made his stage debut at the Pike Theatre in Dublin in 1953 as John Buchanan in Tennessee Williams' Summer and Smoke. He played a season at the Gaiety Theatre with Anew McMaster's Shakespearean company, and was a member of The Gas Theatre Company directed by Godfrey Quigley.

Through family contacts he sought an interview with the managing director of the Abbey Theatre, Ernest Blythe. Despite Blythe's concerns that "his nose was too long and he would grow fat". he eventually become a permanent member of the company in 1954 and would remain there for the next eight years performing over seventy roles.

In 1963 he secured a short leave of absence to go to London (St. Martin's Theatre) with the Gate Theatre's production of Stephen D, an adaptation of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Hugh Leonard which had been a hit of the 1962 Dublin Theatre Festival. The play was well received by the London critics, leading to offers of further other stage work there including "O'Keefe" in J. P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man (Ashcroft, Croydon), Lindsay Anderson's revival of Julius Caesar (1964) for the English Stage Company and 1965 as the Burglar (Aubrey "Popsy" Bagot) in Shaw's Too True to be Good (Garrick) opposite Alistair Sim and George Cole.

He joined Stuart Burge's company at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1968 playing Trigorin in The Seagull and Sir Joseph Surface in Sheridan's The School For Scandal, both directed by Jonathan Miller. In 1969 he created the role of Fitzpatrick in David Storey's The Contractor directed by Lindsay Anderson at the Royal Court Theatre, London. The production later transferred to the Fortune Theatre and ran for over a year. In 1973 he took on the role of Andrew Wyke opposite his friend Donal Donnelly in the Irish premiere of Peter Shaffer's Sleuth. The production played to acclaim at the Opera House, Cork, and at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin where it broke box office records.

He returned to the RSC in 1976 for Shaw's The Devil's Disciple, directed by Jack Gold in a production to mark the American bicentennial celebrations, as the revolutionary pastor Reverend Anthony Anderson.

McKenna was married to May White, literally the girl next door, from 1956 until her death in 2007. They had five children.

McKenna died on 13 February 2011 at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, London, at the age of 81 following a long period of illness. He was buried alongside his wife at Teampall Cheallaigh Cemetery in his native County Cavan.

His performance as Henry VIII in the film Monarch was re-released in cinemas in 2014.