 A notable Irish character player, on stage aged seven and film the following year (Knocknagow, UK/Ireland, d. Fred O'Donovan, 1918), he joined the Abbey Theatre in 1932, and first appeared on the London stage in 1936. Despite maintaining a busy stage career, he became a very recognisable film presence, especially in the postwar period, memorably in Powell and Pressburger's The Small Back Room (1949), as a stammering corporal, Gone to Earth (1950) as Jennifer Jones's clergyman husband, and, enjoying himself, as the duplicitous Chauvelin in The Elusive Pimpernel (1950). But even in much less distinctive films, he was distinctive: as a dipsomanic inmate of a dubious hospital in Man in the Road (d. Lance Comfort, 1956), his dissecting eye and verbal asperity command the attention. Too stocky for a leading man, he went on acting until his death, last appearing in Christine Edzard's As You Like It (1992) and Far and Away (US/Ireland, d. Ron Howard, 1992). He occasionally filmed in the US, first in Soldiers Three (US, d. Tay Garnett, 1951), and did much notable television, including his last, Memento Mori (BBC, 1992). Four of his children - Sinead, Sorcha, Niamh and Catherine - are actresses. Brian McFarlane, Encyclopedia of British Film
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