Gabriel Byrne(1950–)

Gabriel James Byrne was born at the Coombe Lying-In Hospital, Dublin on 12 May 1950, eldest of six children of Daniel Byrne, a Walkinstown plumber and Guinness brewery worker, and Eileen Gillen, a nurse. The household was lower-middle-class Catholic working-class Dublin: small council semi-detached house on the Walkinstown estate on the south-western edge of Dublin, the father at the Guinness brewery at St James's Gate from morning to evening, the children in the small parish school at the local St Peter's Walkinstown. He was schooled at the Christian Brothers School in Synge Street (the same school that had produced George Bernard Shaw and Cornelius Ryan in the previous generations) and at twelve was sent on a scholarship to the Holy Cross College, an English Catholic minor seminary at Ystrad Mynach in Glamorgan, on a five-year programme intended to prepare him for ordination as a Catholic priest. He left the seminary in 1965 at fifteen on the mutual conclusion of the staff and himself that the religious vocation he had been there for was not the calling.

He came home to Dublin at fifteen, finished his Leaving Certificate at the O'Connell School at North Richmond Street, and at seventeen took the BA Honours degree course in Archaeology and Spanish at University College Dublin. He took the degree in 1972 at twenty-two, taught archaeology and Spanish at the Adelaide Road girls' Catholic Marian School at Ballinteer in south Dublin for three years from 1972 to 1975, and worked in his spare hours at the Project Theatre Company at the fringe theatre at 39 East Essex Street, Temple Bar, in the unpaid amateur-acting student company that the Dublin theatre director Jim Sheridan was running through the period. Sheridan and the Project Theatre Company gave him the technical apprenticeship in stage acting; by 1975 he was acting in the Project's pub-back-room productions twice a week alongside the day-job at the Marian School.

He gave up the teaching post in 1975 at twenty-five and moved into full-time stage acting at the Project. The breakthrough at the Dublin theatre came across 1976 to 1978 with the Patrick Mason productions of *The Cherry Orchard* and *Hamlet* at the Project. He moved to the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1978 at twenty-eight, played small repertory parts across the 1978 and 1979 seasons, and was cast in his first major film role as the young O'Connell Street IRA volunteer Pat in John Boorman's *Excalibur* (1981) on the recommendation of the Dublin Project director Garry Hynes. *Excalibur* was the break of his film career; from it he moved to the lead in the John Mackenzie thriller *Defence of the Realm* (1986), the supporting role in Costa-Gavras's *Hanna K.* (1983), the Coen brothers' Tom Reagan in *Miller's Crossing* (1990), and the framing-accomplice Dean Keaton in Bryan Singer's *The Usual Suspects* (1995).

The thirty years between *Miller's Crossing* and the present day have run as a continuous working leading-character career across British, American and Irish cinema and television. *Cool World* (1992), *Little Women* (1994), *Stigmata* (1999), *Spider* (2002), *Vanity Fair* (2004), and the long HBO television series *In Treatment* (2008-10), in which he played the psychiatrist Paul Weston for forty-three half-hour episodes across two seasons and won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a TV Drama in 2009. He also worked across the period as a stage actor: the Hickey in Eugene O'Neill's *The Iceman Cometh* at the Almeida Theatre in 1998, the title role in Brian Friel's *The Faith Healer* on Broadway in 2006, the Mr O'Connor in Lloyd Wright's *Walking with Ghosts* at the Gielgud Theatre in 2019 (the stage adaptation of his own memoir of the same title).

He married the American actress Ellen Barkin in 1988; the marriage produced two children (Romy and Jack) and ended in 1999. He met the producer Hannah Beth King at a charity event in New York in 2010; they married in 2014. He has worked across the post-2000 period as a public advocate of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, having disclosed in 2010 that he had been sexually abused by a Christian Brother at the Walkinstown school and subsequently at the Holy Cross seminary at fourteen. The disclosure was a contribution to the wider Irish Catholic Church reckoning of the post-Ryan and post-Murphy Report decades. He has been Cultural Ambassador of Ireland since 2014 and has lived in Brooklyn, New York since 2010. The Byrne name in the Irish-side catalogue is the patronymic *Ó Broin* (descendant of Bran, the raven), the Leinster-and-Wicklow surname of the medieval *Uí Broin* line that was the Catholic-and-Gaelic family of the Wicklow Mountains and that gave its name to a substantial portion of the modern Wicklow-and-Dublin south-side country; he carried the Walkinstown variant of it into the foundation of post-1980s Irish-and-international character-actor cinema.