Patrick Duggan

Priests were recurring characters for the Irish actor Patrick Duggan on British TV, giving him the role he will be best remembered for: Father Joe Briefly in Channel Four’s cult-attracting Father Ted.

Duggan’s earlier small-screen clerics were seen in the sitcom The Upper Hand, the Troubles-set thriller Crossfire, and Mary O’Malley’s comedy about love across the Catholic-Jewish divide, Oy Vay Maria. But the Dublin-born actor’s five decade-spanning career was rooted in a substantial theatrical hinterland, with Duggan appearing in important premieres in his native Ireland.

Having trained at the city’s Gate Theatre under the charismatic stewardship of Hilton Edwards and Michaél Mac Liammóir, Duggan became a stalwart of Irish theatre before establishing himself in England.

He was seen in the premiere of Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow in Dublin’s now long-gone Pike Theatre in 1954 and in The Hostage at the Hammersmith Lyric in 1961. By that point, he had begun to make regular television appearances.

He spent the 1960s crossing the Irish Sea, seen at London’s Royal Court as a “production without décor” in Derek Marlowe’s The Scarecrow with Eileen Atkins (1961), in John B Keane’s The Man from Clare (1962) and as the agnostic Eddie in Sam Thompson’s The Evangelist (1963) at the Abbey, Dublin, followed by the first staging of Brian Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come! at the Gaiety, Dublin (1964) and in its London premiere at the Hammersmith Lyric (1967), as well as Thomas Kilroy’s The O’Neill at the Abbey in 1969.

In 1971 he was seen in the George Bernard Shaw rarity John Bull’s Other Island at the Mermaid, returning to it at the Greenwich Theatre in 1980.

There was a rare stage appearance as a priest in O’Malley’s Once a Catholic (Watford Palace, 1982), a season at the Connaught, Worthing the following year and a scene-stealing Arvide Abernathy in Guys and Dolls in Cheltenham in 1989.

Duggan revisited Friel’s Philadelphia for Dan Crawford at the King’s Head, transferring with it to the Wyndham’s Theatre in 1992, and was seen in his Translations at the New Vic, Newcastle-under-Lyme (1998) and in Watford (2000).

His most recent television work included the Ardal O’Hanlon comedy vehicle My Hero, police serial The Bill, and Armando Iannucci’s satirical Time Trumpet.

Duggan was also the author of three admired books for children exploring life among Ireland’s travelling community. Patrick Duggan was born on May 10, 1934, and died on March 8, aged 87. His partner of 45 years, Charles Zarb, died on April 22.