Frank Grimes obituary: Dublin breakthrough led to long career on stage and screen in Britain

Sun, 17 Aug, 2025 - 19:33

Michael Coveney

When he burst on to the stage of the new Abbey theatre in Dublin in 1967, Frank Grimes, who has died aged 78, was acclaimed as the finest young actor of his generation. That first impact was made as a 19-year-old in a revival of Frank O’Connor’s The Invincibles, a controversial piece about the assassination of the then chief secretary of Ireland Lord Frederick Cavendish and his deputy Thomas Burke, in 1882.

But it was as the young Brendan Behan in Borstal Boy (1967) that Grimes hit the big time. Behan’s rollicking autobiographical novel was adapted by Frank McMahon, with Niall Toibín as the older Behan relating the story of the renegade roisterer on a bare stage.

Frank Grimes and Sorcha Cusack as Barry and Helen Connor in ‘Coronation Street’ in 2008. Picture: ITV/Shutterstock

It was a smash hit in Dublin and Paris, and then on Broadway in 1970, where Tomás Mac Anna’s production won the Tony award and Grimes was voted most promising actor by 20 New York critics.

In a sense, his subsequent stage career, mainly in London in the 1980s, was something of a deflation, though he invariably cleaned up the best reviews in plays by David Storey and Chekhov, and, in 1984, as a mercurial Christy Mahon in JM Synge’s Playboy of the Western World on the Edinburgh fringe — all of these directed by Lindsay Anderson, who was Grimes’s mentor when he first moved to London in the 1970s.

Fair City and Coronation Street

Latterly, Grimes was best known for his roles as Fr Lawlor in Fair City, and as the unpredictable Barry Connor on ITV’s Coronation Street. Between 2008 and 2015, Grimes appeared in 55 episodes of the ITV soap opera, with his wife, Helen, played in the first season by Sorcha Cusack and in later episodes by Dearbhla Molloy.

Frank Grimes as Fr Lawlor and TP McKenna as Tom Mitchell in RTÉ's 'Fair City' in 2004. Picture: RTÉ Photographic Archive

He also appeared in episodes of Casualty, The Bill, Doctors and Mrs Brown’s Boys.

Grimes’s best performance on television, however, came in RTÉ’s Strumpet City (1980), adapted by Hugh Leonard from James Plunkett’s novel, in which he played a beautifully-modulated, mild-mannered Fr O'Connor, a Catholic curate in a chaotic Dublin under British rule around the time of the 1913 Dublin lockout.

The wonderful cast included Donal McCann, Cyril Cusack, David Kelly, and Peter O’Toole.

Dublin upbringing

Born in Dublin, the youngest and seventh child of Evelyn (nee Manscier) and Joseph Grimes, a train driver, Frank was educated at St Declan’s secondary school by the Christian Brothers, where he excelled at basketball, algebra, and geometry.

He trained at the Abbey and, after his success there, moved to London.

He began his collaboration with Lindsay Anderson and David Storey in two plays at the Royal Court — The Farm (1973), as the feckless only son returning to an outraged family gathering with news of his impending marriage to a divorced, middle-aged woman; and as an art student in Life Class (1974), with Alan Bates as the art teacher and Rosemary Martin the model.

Frank Grimes won a Jacob's Award for his portrayal of Fr O'Connor in RTÉ's acclaimed television 1980 adaptation of James Plunkett's 1969 novel, 'Strumpet City'.

Both of Grimes’s performances were luminous, truthful and technically adroit.

He played the young Seán O’Casey for RTÉ in The Rebel (1973), a documentary drama by John Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy, and made his only appearance at the Royal Shakespeare Company in O’Casey’s masterpiece, Juno and the Paycock; Trevor Nunn’s 1980 revival at the Aldwych featured a mostly Irish cast headed by Judi Dench and Norman Rodway as Juno and Captain Boyle.

Shakespeare and Chekhov

Grimes’s Hamlet in 1981, directed by Anderson, was the first Shakespeare at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, since 1957, but it seemed tame and tight-lipped after Jonathan Pryce’s electrifying Royal Court version in the previous year.

He was back on track, though, in Anderson’s all-star cast in The Cherry Orchard at the Haymarket in 1983 (with Joan Plowright as Ranevskaya, Leslie Phillips as Gaev), stuttering out Trofimov’s revolutionary rhetoric before apologetically concluding that, when the day dawns, he would be there — “or … I shall show others the way”.

In 1987 at the Old Vic, in Anderson’s revival of a 1928 American comedy, Holiday, by Philip Barry, with Malcolm McDowell and his then wife Mary Steenburgen alongside, Grimes was another memorably reluctant rabble-rouser, drunkenly excoriating the American rich, said Michael Billington, with “a felt-tipped dagger”.

Two years later, at the National Theatre, he was a friendless academic in psychological meltdown as Colin Pasmore in The March on Russia, David Storey’s adaptation of his 1972 novel, Pasmore.

Another minefield of a domestic drama, it was directed by Anderson in the manner of one of his and Storey’s earlier family reunion collaborations, In Celebration (1969). In an impeccably-acted production, Grimes was both participant and observer at the celebratory rites of a family at odds, if not war.

Supporting roles on the big screen

Grimes played supporting roles in several notable films, including Richard Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far (1977), and in Anderson’s The Whales of August (1987), starring Bette Davis and Lillian Gish as two elderly sisters on the Maine coast. He also appeared in Britannia Hospital (1982), the third of Anderson’s blistering 'Mick Travis' trilogy.

Grimes wrote several plays. Anderson directed his first, The Fishing Trip, at the Croydon Warehouse in 1991 and, before the director died in 1994, was helping him prepare his own one-man show, The He and the She of It, expressing a lifelong obsession with, and devotion to, James Joyce.

Grimes married the actor Michele Lohan in 1968, and they had two sons, David and Andrew. After he and Michele divorced, he married the actor and art teacher Ginnette Clarke in 1984. Frank and Ginnette lived in New York from 1982 to 1987, after which they settled in Barnes, west London.

His son David died in 2011. Grimes is survived by Ginnette and their daughter, Tilly, by Andrew, and by seven grandchildren, Emily, Hedy, Martha, Reuben, Toby, Monti and Oskar, and two siblings, Eva and Laura.