J. M. Kerrigan

Joseph Michael Kerrigan (16 December 1884 – 29 April 1964) was an Irish actor. Early life Joseph Michael Kerrigan was born on 16 December 1884 in Dublin, which was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland at that time. He studied at Belvedere College and worked as a newspaperman. Career The In 1907, Kerrigan joined the Irish National Theatre, later known as the Abbey Players. There he became a stalwart, appearing in plays by Lady Gregory, William Butler Yeats and John Millington Synge (for whom he created the role of Shawn Keogh in The Playboy of the Western World). He toured with the company to New York City in 1908 and again in 1911, when their American premiere of The Playboy of the Western World met with riotous disapproval. By the 1920s he was appearing on Broadway, often in plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Sheridan. In 1924, he and Abbey colleague Dudley Digges appeared in Sutton Vane's Outward Bound, along with Alfred Lunt, Leslie Howard, Margalo Gillmore, and Beryl Mercer. All in all, he played in 35 Broadway productions in his career. His first screen appearance was in Food of Love, one of six silent films he did in 1916. He settled permanently in Hollywood in 1935, having been recruited along with several other Abbey performers to appear in John Ford's The Informer. In this film and in Ford's The Long Voyage Home, he played similar roles, that of a leech who attaches himself to men until they run out of money. Perhaps his best-known role was in The General Died at Dawn, wherein he plays a character named Leach, a sinister thief who, holding a gun on Cooper, says: "I may be fat, but I'm agile."