DAVID KELLY:DAVID KELLY, who died last Sunday at the age of 82, was recognised by the public and by his colleagues in the theatre and the cinema as the character actor par excellence.
In private life he was substantially the opposite of the eccentrics he portrayed on stage and screen.
He moved with ease in a profession noted for its dissemblance and hype, without assuming the vacuous traditional airs and graces of that world.
Indeed, in a roomful of big egos and luvvies he invariably appeared as the straight man in spite of his bow ties and nifty suits; there was no pomp, and, in the old-fashioned phrase, “no side to him”.
The greatest actors are usually very different in character to those whom they portray so famously.
David Kelly did, in a very long and crowded career, play a vast number of "straight" parts, adequately and with assurance – one recalls his monumentally ordinary land surveyor in James Douglas's early television drama The Hollow Field. What really stood out, however, was the bright and engaging spark that illuminated his portrayals of the odd, the curious and the joyfully bonkers; to which must be added the marginalised, the disturbed and the dispossessed, among them Rashers Tierney in the TV serialisation of James Plunkett's Strumpet City.
It is probably for the latter that he will ultimately be remembered.
He was known throughout the international movie-going world for pictures such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factoryand Waking Ned Devinewhere he provided enormous audience satisfaction for the sheer, yet subtly controlled, exuberance of his performances. Who can forget him as the elderly codger in the latter, speeding across the strands of the Isle of Man on a motorbike clad in nothing but what God gave him?
It was an image that apparently caused him much amusement when he was deemed by fans to be a sex symbol at 70. This won him a Golden Satellite Award.
He said that his one and only performance in television's Fawlty Towersas the unashamedly stage-Irish builder O'Reilly won him wider recognition than many more "serious" roles: yet the comment was made with the full irony of how a comic part requires just as much, and arguably more, expertise to put across.
An equally bizarre performance, which happily continued week after week, was as the one-armed restaurant dishwasher in Robin’s Nest.
Sadly, only those viewers almost as old as himself can recall his early comedy work for Telefís Éireann with Jimmy O'Dea in the weekly series The Signalmanby Flann O'Brien which the station wiped for "reasons of economy".
He attended Synge Street CBS in Dublin, proceeding to the National College of Art.
In his student years he was a familiar figure cycling from his parents’ home in Clonskeagh with a huge portfolio of drawings held tightly under one arm. Although his absorption with acting took over about this time, he never lost his interest in graphics and calligraphy, as many who received his beautifully designed Christmas cards will recall.
After his marriage to the actor Laurie Morton he continued to live in the same area in one of those unique art-deco houses on Goatstown Road. They met while acting at the Pike Theatre Club in Dublin. There they appeared in the late-night satirical revues written and produced by Alan Simpson and Carolyn Swift in the 1950s before that vibrantly anarchic house was beaten into closure (in spite of winning a court case) by still unidentified forces of church and State.
David and Laurie were a wonderfully well-matched couple – both of them comedians with the capacity for the deeply felt emotional undercurrents of the people they were called upon to portray.
When David had temporary problems with alcohol it was Laurie who kept the household together; she never lacked for work on the stage and in long-running television serials where her exceptionally intelligent and witty presence was in constant demand.
David was a long-time colleague of Milo O'Shea, most memorably in the Gate Theatre production of Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boysand in Hugh Leonard's BBC series Me Mammy. Their sporadic and joyous collaboration had also had its beginning in the Pike revues.
In rather different vein – yet perhaps not so much so when one considers matters such as the ability to embody the absurd and the demented as something very basic to the comédie humaine – he was the first Irish Krapp in Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, dishevelled, with cracked voice and myopic eye, his mind rent by confusing memories.
This was in 1959 in a wildly adventurous summer season of plays produced by Louis Lentin in the Players Theatre, Trinity College, Dublin. Thirty years later he gave his revised – that is to say more mature, more comic but equally riveting – performance of that massively demanding role.
Directed by Pat Laffan, to the eternal credit of the Gate Theatre, the interpretation also found acclaim in New York, Chicago, Washington DC and Melbourne.
From an enormous archive of memorable performances and appearances one may select with pleasure and indeed astonishment the variety of guises. From a reading of Yeats with Siobhan McKenna to open Ursula White-Lennon's Pocket Theatre in 1966; as Titus Oates in Desmond Forristal's The True Story of the Horrid Popish Plotwhich Hilton Edwards directed in medieval pageant style at the Gate in 1972; as Ferapont in Chekov's Three Sistersin a production by Pat Laffan at the Gate as part of a season in the late 1980s devised to restore the classically-based company that had been Longford Productions.
This is only a small selection of riches from the cornucopia.
David Kelly is survived by his wife, Laurie Morton; his son David, a creative executive in advertising, and his daughter, the actor Miriam Kelly. His sister Marie, a much-loved stage director, predeceased him.
David Kelly: born July 11th, 1929; died February 13th, 2012