Biography
A prolific and much-admired actor on the Irish stage and in television, Niall Tóibin earned a Drama Desk Award for his performance as Brendan Behan in Borstal Boy, and would remain a mainstay of Irish theater productions while also enjoying a career in films, including "Ryan's Daughter" (1970) and numerous television series. Born in the Irish city of Cork on November 21, 1929, Tóibin was the sixth of seven children born to Irish-speaking parents, and began performing in his local church and with a drama society in his teenage years. After completing his studies at the North Monastery in the late 1940s, Tóibintook a job as a civil service clerk with the Deparment of External Affairs in Dublin. But he continue to act at the amateur level until 1953, when he left his civil service job and began a 14-year stint with the Radio Eirann Players, which broadcast live its productions to Irish listeners each Sunday night. While performing with the Players, Tóibin also began working in films and on television, beginning in 1967 with "O Duill," a miniseries for RTE. He left Radio Eirann that same year and divided his time between stage productions and screen work. The former included an acclaimed run in 1967 as the Irish poet and playwright Brendan Behan in Frank McMahon's play Borstal Boy at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin; Tóibin would remain with the play when it transferred to Broadway in 1970, and earned a Drama Desk Award during its run. The latter encompassed minor roles in David Lean's "Ryan's Daughter" (1970) and numerous appearances, both as star and as guest performer, on productions by the BBC and RTE, which made him a familiar and well-liked presence in Irish viewers' homes. He starred opposite Gabriel Byrne in the popular primetime soap "Bracken" (RTE One, 1980-1982) and appeared briefly in "Brideshead Revisited" (ITV/PBS, 1981), but enjoyed his greatest small screen success as Slipper, the perennially inebriated yet remarkably wise groom to Bryan Murray, who served as landlord to Peter Bowles' army major turned magistrate on "The Irish R.M." (Channel Four/RTE One, 1983-1985). The popularity of the series kept Tóibin busy for much of the next three decades, which he divided between the stage - most notably a return to the Abbey for The Field in 1987 - feature film appearances, including Ron Howard's "Far and Away" (1992) and Joel Schumacher's "Veronica Guerin" (2003), and television, which included a run as the cranky Father Frank McAnally on the international favorite, "Ballykissangel" (BBC One, 1996-2001). By the early 2000s, Tóibin's television and film careers had slowed, though he remained active on stage - he reprised Borstal Boy seven times during his lifetime - and on radio, most notably "2020," a production for RTE Radio's "Drama on One" series directed by John Boorman in 2011. His final years were marked by tributes from his peers and countrymen for his body of work, including a Lifetime Achieveman Award from the Irish Film and Television Academy in 2011 and the Freedom of Cork Award in 2015. Tóibin died in Dublin after a long illness on November 13, 2019, just eight days before his 90th birthday.
