David Morrissey (born 21 June 1964) is an English actor and director. Morrissey grew up in the Kensington and Knotty Ash areas of Liverpool. He learned to act at the Everyman Youth Theatre, alongside Ian Hart and Mark and Stephen McGann. At the age of 19, he and Hart were cast in the television series One Summer, which won them recognition throughout the country. After making One Summer, Morrissey attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art before acting with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre.

Throughout the 1990s, he often portrayed policemen and soldiers. His breakthrough roles came in Our Mutual Friend, in which he played Bradley Headstone, and Hilary and Jackie, in which he played Christopher Finzi. More film parts followed, including roles in Some Voices and Captain Corelli's Mandolin, before he played the critically-acclaimed roles of Stephen Collins in State of Play and Gordon Brown in The Deal. The former won him a nomination at the British Academy Television Awards and the latter a Best Actor award at the Royal Television Society Awards. His film roles have not always been acclaimed; his appearance as the male lead in Basic Instinct 2 (2006) was widely criticised, and The Reaping (2007) bombed at the box office. Since then, he has had leading roles in Cape Wrath and Sense and Sensibility, and a guest role in the 2008 Doctor Who Christmas special, "The Next Doctor".

Morrissey is also a director; he has directed two television films for the BBC and his feature debut, The Pool, will be released in 2009. He is married to the novelist Esther Freud and has three children.

Early life and career

David Morrissey was born to Joe and Joan Morrissey on 21 June 1964.¹² Joe was a cobbler and Joan worked for the Littlewoods catalogue company.³ He was their fourth child; he has two brothers and a sister. The family lived at 45 Seldon Street, in the Kensington district of Liverpool. For National Museums Liverpool's Eight Hundred Lives project, Morrissey wrote that the house had been in his family since around the turn of the twentieth century; his grandmother had been married there and his mother born there. In 1971, the family moved to a larger and more modern house on the new estates at Knotty Ash. Seldon Street is now demolished.⁴

He attended St Margaret Mary's School⁵ where, after seeing a broadcast of Ken Loach's Kes (1969) on the television and making it his ambition to become an actor,³ he was encouraged by a primary school teacher named Miss Keller. She cast him as the Scarecrow in a school production adapted from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz when he was 11 years old. Keller left the school soon after, knocking Morrissey's confidence.⁶ His secondary school, De La Salle School,⁷ had no drama programmes and was the sort of place where the fear of bullying dissuaded pupils from joining in in lessons.¹ On the advice of one of his cousins, Morrissey joined the Everyman Theatre's youth theatre. For the first couple of weeks he was quite shy and did not join in the workshops. Eventually he did, and appeared in the youth theatre's production of Fighting Chance, a play about the riots in Liverpool. He went to the theatre on Tuesday and Wednesday nights.⁶ Ian Hart, with whom he had been friends since the age of five,⁸ was one of his contemporaries, as were Mark and Stephen McGann. Morrissey became friends with the McGann brothers, and was introduced to their brother Paul when the latter was on a break from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA).⁹ When Morrissey was 15 years old, shortly after joining the Everyman, his father died after developing a blood disorder.¹ He had been ill for some time and had eventually succumbed to a haemorrhage at the age of 54, dying at the family home.²¹⁰

At 19, Morrissey (left) played 16-year-old Billy in One Summer.

In 1982, Morrissey, along with many of the Everyman Youth Theatre's actors, was called up to audition for One Summer, a television series by Willy Russell for Yorkshire Television and Channel 4 about two Liverpool boys who run away to Wales one summer. Russell had been attached to the Everyman for many years, and Morrissey had seen him while he was working behind the bar downstairs from the theatre, though the two had never been introduced.⁶ Morrissey went to at least eight auditions, and in one read for the part of Icky opposite Paul McGann, who was reading for Billy. McGann, five years older than Morrissey, believed that he was too old to be playing the part of 16-year-old Billy, and the part went to Morrissey. Spencer Leigh got the part of Icky and Ian Hart played the supporting role of Rabbit. Willy Russell fell out with the director, Gordon Flemyng, and Yorkshire Television over the casting of 19-year-old Morrissey and Leigh; he believed that the innocence of 16-year-olds running away for the summer was lost by casting older actors, though he did not have any problems personally with Morrissey and Leigh.⁶¹¹ After filming One Summer for five months, Morrissey went travelling in Kenya with his cousins. When he returned to Britain, One Summer was being broadcast, and he dealt with the new experience of being recognised in public.¹¹

Morrissey had planned to study at RADA, but his colleagues at the Everyman encouraged him not to as he already had his Equity card. His One Summer co-star James Hazeldine convinced him otherwise, and he went to London for a year. He became homesick while there and did not enjoy the way RADA was turning him into a "bland actor".⁸ On a visit back to Liverpool he told Paul McGann's mother that he was considering leaving the college. Back in London, Paul McGann met with him and told him that he had been through the same homesickness phase when he first went to RADA. McGann's reassurance got Morrissey through his studies.⁹

Acting career after RADA

Avoiding typecasting

After a year at RADA, Morrissey went back to Liverpool to do the play WCPC at the Liverpool Playhouse.⁶ He then did Le Cid and Twelfth Night with Cheek by Jowl, and spent two years with the Royal Shakespeare Company. With the RSC, he principally worked with director Deborah Warner. In 1988, he appeared as the Bastard in Warner's King John. He saw the role as a learning curve, as he had often wondered at RADA if he would ever have the opportunity to act in classical theatre.⁶ His performance has been described as "the most contentious characterisation of the production"; he received negative critical reaction from Daily Telegraph and Independent critics, but a positive opinion from the Financial Times.¹² He also spent time with the National, playing the title role in Peer Gynt (Declan Donnellan, 1990).¹³ During this time, he lived on the housing estate in White City, where he and his flatmates were the frequent victims of burglars; his flat was broken into five times in one month.¹⁴¹⁵

At the end of the 1980s, Morrissey met director John Madden for the first time. Madden was looking for an actor who could portray an ordinary man in The Widowmaker (1990) who turns out to be a mass murderer. He knew Morrissey was right for the part in his first audition.⁶ The next year, Morrissey appeared as Theseus in an episode of The Storyteller ("Theseus and the Minotaur", 1991), and as Little John in Robin Hood (John Irvin, 1991). Robin Hood's cinema release clashed with that of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (Kevin Reynolds, 1991). The latter, starring Kevin Costner in the title role, was a box office smash, and left the Irvin version forgotten. Morrissey was out of work in film and television for eight months after its release. Eventually, he was hired for a small role in Clubland (Laura Sims, 1991) as a policeman. He almost lost the role a week into rehearsals when his appendix burst. In order to keep the part, and a flat in Crouch End he had just bought, Morrissey performed while still in stitches.¹⁴

At this early stage in his career, he tried to avoid being typecast as policemen and soldiers on television, though still ended up playing the former in Black and Blue, Framed, Between the Lines and Out of the Blue, and the latter playing Andy McNab in The One That Got Away (Paul Greengrass, 1996). For Framed, a New York Times critic called him "especially impressive in the difficult role of Larry, who must project a certain innocence even as his marriage disintegrates and he seems to be drawn further into Eddie's [the antagonist] vortex."¹⁶ In Out of the Blue, in which he played Detective Sergeant Jim Llewyn in the second series, Morrissey first met screenwriter Peter Bowker.¹⁷ In 1994, he played customs officer Gerry Birch in the first series of The Knock, and Finney in the six-part ITV series Finney. In Finney, Morrissey assumed the role originated by Sting in Stormy Monday (1988). He was the first choice for the part and had to learn to play the double bass.¹⁸

Leading roles

Throughout the rest of the 1990s, Morrissey began to assert himself as a leading actor; in 1996, he made his first appearance in a Tony Marchant drama, playing Michael Ride in Into the Fire. The following year he played the lead role of Shaun Southerns in Marchant's BBC series Holding On (Adrian Shergold, 1997).⁶ Southerns, a crooked tax inspector, was the first of many "men in turmoil" roles for Morrissey,¹³ and it earned him a nomination for the Royal Television Society (RTS) Programme Award for Best Male Actor the next year.¹⁹ In 1998, he appeared in Our Mutual Friend alongside Paul McGann and Daniel Craig. A fan of the book, Morrissey asked director Julian Farino if he could play Eugene Wrayburn, but that part went to McGann. Farino had Morrissey in mind to play schoolmaster Bradley Headstone, a part Morrissey was reluctant to take until reading the script. He studied the role and decided that the character was "an unloved person who keeps on getting it wrong. I could see what a big issue class was for him, which eventually tips him over into madness."¹³ His performance was described by a Guardian writer as bringing "unprecedented depth to a character [...] who is more commonly portrayed as just another horrible Dickens git."⁸ In the same year, he played Christopher "Kiffer" Finzi in Hilary and Jackie. His roles in Our Mutual Friend and Hilary and Jackie have been seen as his breakthrough roles.⁸ In 1999, he appeared in his last theatre role for nine years, as Pip and Theo in Three Days of Rain (Robin Lefevre, Donmar Warehouse). He continued to take in offers for stage roles, but turned them down because he did not want to be away from his family for long periods.²⁰ Writing in Time Out, Jane Edwardes suggested that his role as Kiffer in Hilary and Jackie had inspired his casting as Pip in Three Days of Rain, as the characters have similarities. Morrissey was attracted to the role because the play "starts with a two-page speech, it's in American and [the cast and crew] only had two weeks to rehearse".²¹

He was reunited with Daniel Craig in Some Voices (Simon Cellan-Jones, 2000), playing Pete, the brother of schizophrenic Ray (Craig). Morrissey researched the character of Pete, a chef, by shadowing the head chef at the Terrace restaurant in Kensington, London and chopping vegetables in the kitchen for two hours a day.⁶ An Independent critic called him "an instinctive actor who can use his whole body to convey an inner turbulence".²² For his next film role as Nazi Captain Weber in Captain Corelli's Mandolin (John Madden, 2001), Morrissey researched the Hitler Youth and read Gitta Sereney's biography of Albert Speer,¹³ Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. Like for all of his roles, Morrissey created a backstory for Weber and built up the character to a point that, if changes had to be made to the role and script, it could happen smoothly.⁶

Morrissey returned to television in 2002, playing Franny Rothwell, a factory canteen worker who wants to adopt his dead sister's son, in an episode of Paul Abbott's Clocking Off. His performance was described as "fine, characteristically powerful" in The Independent.²³ He also played tabloid journalist Dave Dewston in the four-part BBC serial Murder,²³ and prison officer Mike in the part-improvised single drama Out of Control. He researched the latter part by shadowing prison officers in a young offenders' institution for a week.⁸ At the beginning of 2003, he played the role of Richie MacGregor in This Little Life, a drama about a mother (played by Kate Ashfield) who has to cope with her 16-week-premature baby. Though Morrissey's character, the husband and father, was not the focus of the film, he researched premature births by speaking to paediatricians at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead.⁶

Critical success

Morrissey was cast in the leading role of MP Stephen Collins for Paul Abbott's BBC serial State of Play (David Yates, 2003). He was originally sent the scripts for the first three episodes in 2002. When he asked for the last three, Abbott told him that they were not ready, but told him how Collins's story concludes. Unsure how to approach this role, he was advised by friend, director Paul Greengrass, to get Collins's job as an MP and the chairman of an Energy Select Committee right. Morrissey contacted producer Hilary Bevan Jones, who set him up with Kevin Barron, a Select Committee chairman, and Fabian Hamilton. Both politicians educated Morrissey on how difficult it is to commute to London from a constituency outside the capital.⁶ He was also able to shadow Peter Mandelson around the House of Commons for a fortnight,¹ asking him about his job as a cabinet minister, though not about his personal life.²⁴ Mandelson told him about how politics can quickly "seduce" MPs who have worked hard to get into Parliament.⁶ That same year, he played Gordon Brown opposite Michael Sheen as Tony Blair in Peter Morgan's The Deal (Stephen Frears, 2003), a single drama about a pact made between the two politicians in 1994. Unlike his research for the fictional State of Play, Morrissey discovered that no politicians wanted to talk to him for this fact-based drama, so he turned to journalists Jon Snow and Simon Hoggart.¹³ He also travelled to Brown's hometown of Kirkcaldy, and immersed himself in numerous biographies of the man, including Ross Wilson's documentaries on New Labour in the six months leading up the 1997 election, and the six months after.²⁵²⁶ Speaking to many of Brown's friends to gain insight into his "private persona", Morrissey discovered that Brown was funny, approachable and charming, something he did not see in his "public persona".²⁶ To look like Brown, Morrissey had his hair dyed and permed, and put on 2 stone (13 kg) in six weeks.¹³²⁷ Stephen Frears, the director, originally wanted to cast a Scottish actor as Brown, but was talked into casting Morrissey by other production staff.²⁸²⁹

Morrissey's role as Gordon Brown in The Deal, for which he put on 2 stone and had his hair permed and dyed, won him acclaim.

Both roles won him considerable acclaim; he was nominated for the British Academy Television Award for Best Actor for his role as Collins, but lost to his co-star Bill Nighy.³⁰ His performance in The Deal received acclaim from Charlie Whelan, Gordon Brown's former spin doctor,³¹ and Tim Allan, a deputy press secretary of Tony Blair.³² A BBC News Online critic praised Morrissey's grasp of Brown's physical tics in a review that panned the rest of the film.³³ The following year, Morrissey won the RTS Programme Award for Best Male Actor, this time beating Nighy.³⁴ The RTS jury wrote, "The strength of this performance brought to the screen, and to life, all of the characteristics and traits of the man he portrayed in a way that was both credible and convincing."³⁵ Nighy said that the only time he had ever believed in an awards ceremony was when Morrissey won the RTS prize.³⁶

In 2004, eager to play a comic role,¹⁰ he reunited with Peter Bowker for the BBC One musical serial Blackpool, in which he plays Blackpool arcade owner Ripley Holden. Bowker remembered Morrissey from Out of the Blue and wanted to build off the actor's sense of humour and cast him against type.¹⁷ Before filming began, Morrissey spent four days in Blackpool talking to the locals and finding out how the arcades worked.¹ His performance was described as "a powerful mixture of barely suppressed danger and vulnerable, boyish charm."³⁷ A public poll on bbc.co.uk ranked him the second best actor of 2004.³⁸ The success of the original series lead to a one-off sequel in 2006 entitled Viva Blackpool, in which Morrissey reprised the role.³⁹

Hollywood roles

The following years saw him cast in two high-profile feature films; while filming the Brian Jones biopic Stoned (Stephen Woolley, 2005), he got an audition for Dr Michael Glass, the male lead in Basic Instinct 2 (Michael Caton-Jones, 2006). He was flown out to Los Angeles for a screen test with Sharon Stone. He and Stone bonded and the screen test was extended from one to two hours.⁸¹³ Morrissey had enjoyed the first film and liked the script for the sequel. He read up on psychiatry (Glass's profession) and worked out in a gym for the nudity scenes.⁸ The film was a box office and critical bomb.⁴⁰⁴¹ The Washington Post criticised the film's focus on Morrissey's character, calling him "overmatched by Stone" and "a sad sack",⁴² and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer called him "a charisma-challenged non-entity".⁴³ The following month, the same Washington Post critic wrote in The Los Angeles Times that because Morrissey was not a film star, the chemistry between him and Stone had been spoiled.⁴⁴ The reviews depressed Morrissey, and he briefly considered giving up acting, but instead saw the role as learning curve.³

Immediately after filming Basic Instinct 2, he began work on The Reaping (Stephen Hopkins, 2007) in Louisiana, playing science teacher Doug Blackwell opposite Hilary Swank. The role had been offered to him quite late in pre-production, and he flew to Baton Rouge the Monday after Basic Instinct 2 wrapped. After a week of filming, production had to be suspended when Hurricane Katrina hit the state.⁴⁵ The Reaping was released in 2007 and was another bomb. Despite the failures of both films, Morrissey was grateful that both opened him up to more film offers from Hollywood.⁸

Recent work (2006–present)

In March 2006, Morrissey travelled to New Zealand to film a role in The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep (Jay Russell, 2007). While there, he was offered the script for Cape Wrath, a Channel 4 series about a family being relocated on a witness protection scheme. He was signed on to the seven-part series in September 2006, playing Danny Brogan, and filming ran from October to December.⁴⁶ He relished working on the character's backstory: "It's written in such a way that there are so many different 'realities' at work—there's the Danny who existed pre-Meadowlands, and then there's the new Danny, the one he has invented. Before every scene there's a thousand questions that go through your head—and not just simple ones like 'where am I going, where have I been'—you're asking why you are reacting in this way to that particular person with this emotion. There is no scene where Danny just walks through a door and just says something. It's all about playing with my character's head as much as the audience."⁴⁷ The following year, he appeared in the part of Colonel Brandon in Andrew Davies' Sense and Sensibility. When he first got the script in 2007, he was unsure if British television needed another Jane Austen adaptation, but took the role when he saw how Davies had given more screen time to the male characters than they get in the 1995 film adaptation.⁴⁸ He also appeared as Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk in The Other Boleyn Girl, (Justin Chadwick, 2008). He described Norfolk as "a sort of Lemmy-from-Motörhead version of a court enforcer", and researched the role by reading history books and literature from the 16th century.³

From November 2008 to January 2009, Morrissey has returned to the theatre for the first time in nine years, to play Terry in the Almeida Theatre's UK premiere of Neil LaBute's In A Dark Dark House. He also appeared alongside his Blackpool co-star David Tennant in "The Next Doctor", the 2008 Christmas special of Doctor Who, playing Jackson Lake, a man who believes himself to be the Doctor after his mind is affected by alien technology. He had been asked to appear in the series before but had to turn down the offers due to other commitments.⁴⁹ He approached the character like any other dramatic part, and was influenced in his performance by previous Doctor actors William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton and Tom Baker; he believed there was "a truth" to their acting, and they "never saw it as a genre show or a children's show". He had difficulty interacting with greenscreens, as it "was just a man holding a scaffolding pole with a tennis ball on the end", though was able to react to the "cold, emotionless" faces of the Cybermen.⁵⁰⁴⁹ Secrecy surrounded the exact details of Morrissey's role in the episode; until the day of broadcast his character was referred to only as "the other Doctor".⁴⁹ This prompted speculation that Morrissey would be taking over the lead role after Tennant quit, and in October 2008 he was the bookmakers' favourite.²⁰ He also has a leading role as Dad in the new John Crowley film, Is There Anybody There?.⁵¹

In 2009, he will appear as Dr Jan Falkowski in U Be Dead, a fact-based drama for ITV about a doctor who becomes the victim of stalking via text messaging,⁵² and as Maurice Jobson in the Channel 4 adaptation of David Peace's Red Riding Quartet.⁵³

Directing career

Morrissey has developed a directing and producing career alongside acting; while at the Everyman, he was "obsessed" with film and would shoot short films on Super 8.¹¹ After his acting career took off, he got into directing because he was aware that, as an actor, he was coming into a project quite late into development and then leaving before post-production; he wanted to see a film through to the end, so took up professional directing.⁶ His first major project was Something for the Weekend (1996), which he wrote and produced. Initially called The Barber Shop, the title was changed to avoid a clash with another film. His directorial debut, the short A Secret Audience, centres on a meeting between Napoleon Bonaparte and Pope Pius VII.⁵⁴ His second short, Bring Me Your Love, was based on the short story by Charles Bukowski, and starred Ian Hart as a journalist bringing his wife flowers in a mental hospital. It was screened in front of Some Voices. An Independent critic wrote that Bring Me Your Love "holds out great promise" for Morrissey.²² An Observer reviewer wrote that it was worth seeing but was "less impressive" than A Secret Audience.⁵⁵ Bring Me Your Love was produced by Tubedale Films, which Morrissey set up with his brother Paul and wife Esther Freud.³

In 2001, Morrissey directed Sweet Revenge, a two-part BBC television film starring Paul McGann. It won him a BAFTA nomination for Best New Director (Fiction).⁵⁶ In 2004, Morrissey reunited with Tony Marchant to direct the two-part television film Passer By, about a man who witnesses an attack on a woman but does nothing to stop it. Morrissey was brought onto the project after reading the first draft of Marchant's script. The script went through five more drafts before being filmed over 30 days.⁶⁵⁴ Morrissey developed his directing techniques by watching the directors on films and television series that he acted in; he took the minor role of Tom Keylock in Stoned so that he could watch Stephen Woolley at work.⁸ He also took an interest in the computer-generated effects used in The Reaping.⁵⁷

In 2007, Morrissey made his feature debut directing The Pool, a film about a London boy falling in love with a Liverpool girl. The film was shot on a budget of £100,000³ on location in Liverpool in September and October 2007.⁵ It is scheduled for release in early 2009.²⁰ Morrissey has said that he prefers to keep acting and directing separate, and would not direct anything he is acting in.⁶

Personal life

Morrissey married his long-term partner, novelist Esther Freud, on 12 August 2006 in a ceremony on Southwold Pier.⁵⁸⁵⁹ They met at the dinner party of a mutual friend, and have three children; Albie, Anna and Gene.³ His sisters-in-law are Bella Freud and Susie Boyt and his father-in-law is Lucian Freud.¹³

Morrissey was brought up in a Catholic household, but had eschewed religion by his teens.⁸ Though a Labour Party member,⁸ he was disappointed with the way New Labour turned out, and "despises" Tony Blair.⁵⁸ On 20 July 2007, he was presented with an Honorary Fellowship from Liverpool John Moores University for his contributions to performing arts.⁶⁰

Acting credits

Main article: David Morrissey filmography

Filmmaking credits

• Something for the Weekend (1996) — Writer and producer (short)
• A Secret Audience (1998) — Director (short)
• Bring Me Your Love (2000) — Director and writer (short)
• Sweet Revenge (2001) — Director (two-part TV film)
• Passer By (2004) — Director (two-part TV film)
• The Pool (2009) — Director and writer (feature film)

Awards and nominations

References

Further reading

• Franks, Alan (7 April 2007). "The everyman", The Times, Times Newspapers.
• Jones, Catherine (23 February 2008). "TV actor Morrissey guest of honour", Liverpool Echo, Trinity Mirror.
• Rudd, Alyson (5 March 2007). "It's Beverly Hills Kop", The Times, Times Newspapers.

External links

• David Morrissey's agency CV at Troika Talent
• David Morrissey at the British Film Institute's Screenonline
• David Morrissey at the Internet Movie Database