Lalor Roddy

Lalor Roddy (born 30 November 1954) is a Northern Irish actor, described by the Irish Times theater critic Fintan O'Toole as "surely the finest Irish actor of his generation". Youth Roddy was born and grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland. In 2014, he stated in an interview about his youth: "Theatre was very much part of our upbringing and the cinema as well. My mother was associated with the Lyric Theatre in its early days in both a managerial and performing capacity back when they were in Derryvolgie Avenue. We were dragged along to the theatre and I never lost a love for it. It was a magical experience where you were transformed to another world. My mother’s father managed cinemas in Belfast, in the Falls Road and the top of the Shankill, and he would have brought me along on a lot of Saturdays to the matinees and that filled me with a similar love, so that love was always there despite me taking another route in life." As an young man, he left for the United States to play football (soccer). Upon his return to Northern Ireland, he majored in psychology at the University of Ulster. Roddy had been working as a psychologist in England until he returned home to Ulster at the age of 33 to take up acting, saying: "I had been working as a psychologist in England, but decided the time had come to get out. I had had enough therapy to last me a lifetime. Maybe it was the lurking actor in me, but I found I was taking too many people’s problems onto myself – and paying the price. At least now, I can inflict them on others!" In the theater In 1988 together with Tim Loane and Stephen Wright he founded the Tinderbox theater company in Belfast, which produced two plays by Harold Pinter. The two plays were produced on the very modest budget of £75 pounds each. In 1989, the Tinderbox company received a cheque from the playwright Samuel Beckett, described as the "ultimate endorsement" in the world of Irish theater. From 1989 to 2000, the Tinderbox company hosted an annual Festival of New Irish Playwriting intended to present "artistically dangerous" new plays. The intention behind the Tinderbox was to challenge the sectarian hatreds that led to "the Troubles" of Northern Ireland and create a theater company that would "despite the system" put on new plays that might bring people together. Roddy was one of the co-artistic directors of the company. The Tinderbox company came to be in the 1990s and 2000s one of the leading theater companies in Belfast.