Gabriel Byrne(1950–)

Gabriel James Byrne was born at the Coombe Hospital, Dublin on 12 May 1950, eldest of six children of a Walkinstown plumber and Guinness brewery worker and a nurse. He was schooled at the Christian Brothers School in Synge Street and, on a scholarship, at a Catholic seminary in Glamorgan, which he left at fifteen, the religious vocation not the calling.

He came home, finished his schooling in Dublin, and took a BA in Archaeology and Spanish at University College Dublin in 1972. He taught archaeology and Spanish at a south Dublin girls' school for three years while acting in his spare hours with the Project Theatre Company that Jim Sheridan was running in Temple Bar, the company that gave him his technical apprenticeship in stage acting.

He gave up teaching in 1975 for full-time stage acting at the Project, with the Patrick Mason productions of The Cherry Orchard and Hamlet, then moved to the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1978. His first major film role was in John Boorman's Excalibur (1981), the break of his film career, from which he moved to Defence of the Realm (1986), the Coen brothers' Tom Reagan in Miller's Crossing (1990), and Dean Keaton in Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects (1995).

The thirty years since Miller's Crossing have run as a continuous leading-character career across British, American and Irish cinema and television: Little Women (1994), Stigmata (1999), Spider (2002), Vanity Fair (2004), and the HBO series In Treatment (2008 to 2010), in which he played the psychiatrist Paul Weston for forty-three episodes and won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a TV Drama in 2009. He worked across the period as a stage actor too: Hickey in O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh at the Almeida, the title role in Friel's Faith Healer on Broadway, and Walking with Ghosts at the Gielgud, the stage adaptation of his own memoir.

He has been Cultural Ambassador of Ireland since 2014 and a public advocate for survivors of institutional abuse, work that has been a contribution to the wider Irish reckoning of the period. He has lived in Brooklyn since 2010. The Byrne name, the Leinster patronymic Ó Broin of the Uí Broin line of the Wicklow Mountains, he carried from Walkinstown into the front rank of post-1980s Irish and international screen acting.