T P McKenna
   HOME





T P McKenna
Thomas Patrick McKenna (7 September 1929 – 13 February 2011) was an Irish actor. He had an extensive stage and screen career. Career Early years Thomas Patrick McKenna was born at Mullagh, County Cavan, Ireland, in 1929 and educated at Mullagh School and St Patrick's College, Cavan. Known from borth as 'T.P.', he was named for an uncle and his grandfather before him, he was the eldest of the ten surviving children of Raphael McKenna, an auctioneer and merchant, and his wife May. It was an American step-grandmother that would give him his first imterest in acting, later at boarding school he would become 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 member of the school's Gaelic Football squad, representing St Patrick's in the final of the All Ireland colleges competition in 1948. Despite realising he wished to pursue a life on the st ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Mullagh, County Cavan
Mullagh (; ) is a town, civil parish and townland in County Cavan, Ireland. As of the 2022 census, the town's population was 1,651. It lies in the south-east of the county, at the junction of the R191 and the R194 regional roads near the towns of Virginia and Bailieborough. St Kilian and churches The town has a heritage centre dedicated to St Kilian, who was born in Mullagh c 640 and was martyred in Würzburg in Franconia in northern Bavaria, Germany, in circa 689. The centre also has an exhibition related to ogham script and the development of illuminated manuscripts. The Catholic church, a Victorian neo-Gothic structure located 400m from the village on the Virginia Road (R194), is named in memory of its patron, Saint Kilian. It was built in the late 1850s. Ruins of an earlier church, known as the ''Teampeall Ceallaigh'', remain in what is now part of the Church of Ireland grounds located approximately 600m along the same road. Development Mullagh's population has see ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Gaiety Theatre, Dublin
The Gaiety Theatre is a theatre on South King Street in Dublin, Ireland, off Grafton Street and close to St. Stephen's Green. It specialises in operatic and musical productions, with occasional dramatic shows. History In April 1871, the brothers John and Michael Gunn obtained a 21-year licence to establish "a well-regulated theatre and therein at all times publicly to act, represent or perform any interlude, tragedy, comedy, prelude, opera, burletta, play, farce or pantomime". In favour of the Gunn's licence application was that, unlike the existing theatres, they were not proposing to promote local drama which had acquired something of a reputation with the Dublin Castle administration for stirring up nationalist sentiments. The city centre site was 17 metres wide on King Street and 42 metres deep towards Tangier Lane. The Gunns employed the experienced theatre architect C.J. Phipps. One of the theatres Phipps had recently completed in 1868 in London was the Gaiety and its ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?
''Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'' is a play by Edward Albee first staged in October 1962. It examines the complexities of the marriage of middle-aged couple Martha and George. Late one evening, after a university faculty party, they receive unwitting younger couple Nick and Honey as guests, and draw them into their bitter and frustrated relationship. The three-act play normally takes just under three hours to perform, with two 10 minute intermissions. The title is a pun on the song " Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" from Walt Disney's '' Three Little Pigs'' (1933), substituting the name of the celebrated English author Virginia Woolf. Martha and George repeatedly sing this version of the song throughout the play. ''Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'' won both the 1963 Tony Award for Best Play and the 1962–1963 New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play. It is frequently revived on the modern stage. The film adaptation was released in 1966, written by Ern ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


George Cole (actor)
George Edward Cole (22 April 1925 – 5 August 2015) was an English actor whose career spanned 75 years. He was best known for playing Arthur Daley in the long-running ITV comedy-drama show ''Minder (TV series), Minder'' and Flash Harry (St Trinian's), Flash Harry in the early ''St Trinian's'' films. Early life Cole was born in Tooting, south London. He was placed for adoption at ten days old and adopted by George and Florence Cole. They lived in Tooting, moving five miles away to a council flat in Morden when Cole was five years old. The senior George suffered from epilepsy, a double hernia, and the after-effects of gas poisoning during the First World War. He had several jobs which were curtailed by his ill-health, including pulling a heavy roller for Tooting council. In Cole's opinion, the exertion contributed to his father's death. Cole attended secondary school in nearby Morden. He left school at 14 to be a butcher's boy and had an ambition to join the Merchant Navy (Unit ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Alistair Sim
Alastair George Bell Sim (9 October 1900 – 19 August 1976) was a Scottish actor. He began his theatrical career at the age of thirty and quickly became established as a popular West End performer, remaining so until his death in 1976. Starting in 1935, he also appeared in more than fifty British films, including an iconic adaptation of Charles Dickens’ novella ''A Christmas Carol'', released in 1951 as ''Scrooge'' in Great Britain and as ''A Christmas Carol'' in the United States. Though an accomplished dramatic actor, he is often remembered for his comically sinister performances. After a series of false starts, including a spell as a jobbing labourer and another as a clerk in a local government office, Sim's love of and talent for poetry reading won him several prizes and led to his appointment as a lecturer in elocution at the University of Edinburgh in 1925. He also ran his own private elocution and drama school, from which, with the help of the playwright John D ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Hugh Leonard
Hugh Leonard (9 November 1926 – 12 February 2009) was an Irish dramatist, television writer, and essayist. In a career that spanned 50 years, Leonard wrote nearly 30 full-length plays, 10 one-act plays, three volumes of essay, two autobiographies, three novels, numerous screenplays and teleplays, and a regular newspaper column. Life and career Leonard was born in Dublin as John Joseph Byrne, but was put up for adoption. Raised in Dalkey, an affluent suburb of Dublin, by Nicholas and Margaret Keyes, he changed his name to John Keyes Byrne."Playwright with full mastery of his craft"
''The Irish Times'', obituary section, 14 February 2009, retrieved 16 February 2009
Weber, Bruc

[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man
''A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'' is the second book and first novel of Irish writer James Joyce, published in 1916. A ''Künstlerroman'' written in a modernist style, it traces the religious and intellectual awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's fictional alter ego, whose surname alludes to Daedalus, Greek mythology's consummate craftsman. Stephen questions and rebels against the Catholic and Irish conventions under which he has grown, culminating in his self-exile from Ireland to Europe. The work uses techniques that Joyce developed more fully in '' Ulysses'' (1922) and ''Finnegans Wake'' (1939). ''A Portrait'' began life in 1904 as '' Stephen Hero''—a projected 63-chapter autobiographical novel in a realistic style. After 25 chapters, Joyce abandoned ''Stephen Hero'' in 1907 and set to reworking its themes and protagonist into a condensed five-chapter novel, dispensing with strict realism and making extensive use of free indirect speech that allows th ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (born James Augusta Joyce; 2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the twentieth century. Joyce's novel ''Ulysses (novel), Ulysses'' (1922) is a landmark in which the episodes of Homer's ''Odyssey'' are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, particularly stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection ''Dubliners'' (1914) and the novels ''A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'' (1916) and ''Finnegans Wake'' (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, letters, and occasional journalism. Born in Dublin into a middle-class family, Joyce attended the Jesuit Clongowes Wood College in County Kildare, then, briefly, the Congregation of Christian Brothers, Christian Brothers–run O'Connell School. Despite the chaotic family li ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Stephen Dedalus
Stephen Dedalus is James Joyce's literary alter ego, appearing as the protagonist and antihero of his first, semi-autobiographic novel of artistic existence, ''A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'' (1916), and as a major character in his 1922 novel '' Ulysses''. Stephen mirrors many facets of Joyce's own life and personality. Joyce was a talented singer, for example, and in ''Ulysses'' Leopold Bloom notes the excellence of Stephen's tenor voice after hearing him sing Johannes Jeep's song "Von der Sirenen Listigkeit". In '' Stephen Hero'', an early version of ''A Portrait'', Stephen's surname is spelled "Daedalus," a more obvious allusion to the mythological figure Daedalus, a brilliant artificer who constructed a pair of wings for himself and his son Icarus as a means of escaping the island of Crete, where they had been imprisoned by King Minos. Buck Mulligan makes reference to Stephen's mythic namesake in Ulysses, telling him, "Your absurd name, an ancient Greek!" His sur ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Gate Theatre
The Gate Theatre is a theatre on Cavendish Row in Dublin, Ireland. It was founded in 1928. History Beginnings The Gate Theatre was founded in 1928 by Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLiammóir with Daisy Bannard Cogley and Gearóid Ó Lochlainn. During their first season, they presented seven plays, including Ibsen's Peer Gynt, O’Neill's The Hairy Ape and Wilde's Salomé. They offered Dublin audiences an introduction to the world of European and American theatre as well as classics from the modern and Irish repertoire. It was at the Gate that Orson Welles, James Mason, Geraldine Fitzgerald and Michael Gambon began their acting careers. The company played for two seasons at the Peacock Theatre The Peacock Theatre (previously the Royalty Theatre) is a West End theatre in the City of Westminster, located in Portugal Street, near Aldwych. The 999-seat house is owned by, and comprises part of the London School of Economics and Political ... and then moved to the 18t ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Ernest Blythe
Ernest William Blythe (; 13 April 1889 – 23 February 1975) was an Irish journalist, politician and managing director of the Abbey Theatre. He served as Minister for Local Government from 1922 to 1923, Minister for Finance from 1923 to 1932 and Minister for Posts and Telegraphs and Vice-President of the Executive Council from 1927 to 1932. He was a Senator for the Labour Panel from 1934 to 1936. He served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Monaghan North from 1918 to 1922 and as a Teachta Dála (TD) for the Monaghan constituency from 1921 to 1933. Early life Blythe was born to a Church of Ireland and unionist family in the townland of Magheraliskmisk, Maghaberry, County Antrim, in 1889. He was the son of James Blythe, a farmer, and Agnes Thompson. He was educated locally, at Maghaberry Cross Roads primary school. At the age of fifteen he started working as a clerk in the Department of Agriculture in Dublin. Seán O'Casey invited Blythe to join the Irish Republican ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]