Patrick Magee (actor)

Early life

He was born in Armagh, County Armagh, Northern Ireland. Born into a middle-class family, McGee was the first born of five children and was educated at St. Patrick's Grammar School, Armagh.

Stage career

His first stage experience in Ireland was with Anew McMaster's touring company, performing the works of Shakespeare. It was here that he first worked with Pinter. He was then brought to London by Tyrone Guthrie for a series of Irish plays. He met Beckett in 1957 and soon recorded passages from the novel, Molloy, and the short story, From an Abandoned Work, for BBC radio. Impressed by "the cracked quality of Magee's distinctly Irish voice," Beckett requested copies of the tapes and wrote Krapp's Last Tape especially for the actor. First produced at the Royal Court Theatre in London on 28 October 1958, the play starred Magee directed by Donald McWhinnie. A televised version with Magee directed by McWhinnie was later broadcast by BBC2 on 29 November 1972. Beckett's biographer Anthony Cronin wrote that "there was a sense in which, as an actor, he had been waiting for Beckett as Beckett had been waiting for him."

In 1964, he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, after Pinter, directing his own play The Birthday Party, specifically requested him for the role of McCann, and stated he was the strongest in the cast. In 1965 he appeared in Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade, and when the play transferred to Broadway he won a Tony Award. He also appeared in the 1966 RSC production of Staircase opposite Paul Scofield.

Film career

Early film roles included Joseph Losey's The Criminal (1960) and The Servant (1963), the latter an adaptation scripted by Pinter. He also appeared as Surgeon-Major Reynolds in Zulu (1964), Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964), Anzio (1968), and in the film versions of Marat/Sade (1967; as de Sade) and The Birthday Party (1968). He is perhaps best known for his role as the victimised writer Frank Alexander, who tortures Alex DeLarge with Beethoven's music, in Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange (1971). His other role for Kubrick was as Redmond Barry's mentor, the Chevalier de Balibari, in Barry Lyndon (1975).

Magee also appeared in Young Winston (1972), The Final Programme (1973), Galileo (1975), Sir Henry at Rawlinson End (1980), The Monster Club and Chariots of Fire (1981), but was most often seen in horror films. These included Roger Corman's The Masque of Red Death (1964), and the Boris Karloff vehicle Die, Monster, Die! (1965) for AIP; The Skull (1965), Tales from the Crypt (1972), Asylum (1972), and And Now the Screaming Starts! (1973) for Amicus Productions; Demons of the Mind (1972) for Hammer Film Productions; and Walerian Borowczyk's Docteur Jekyll et les femmes (1981).

Personal life

Magee married Belle Sherry, also a native of County Armagh in 1958. In February 1961, their twins, Mark and Caroline McGee, were born in London.

Death

Patrick Magee died in his London flat of natural causes on 14 August 1982 at the age of 60, according to obituaries in the Glasgow Herald and the New York Times.

In July 2017 it was announced that a Blue plaque would be unveiled in Edward Street, Armagh to mark Patrick Magee's birthplace.

Television