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Producer · Actor

1964-06-21 · Liverpool, England · Male

65 series in the catalog

David Mark Joseph Morrissey (born 21 June 1964) is an English actor and filmmaker. He had numerous small roles in films and television series throughout the 1990s before achieving wider recognition for playing Gordon Brown in The Deal (2003), Stephen Collins in State of Play (2003), The Governor in the third, and fourth seasons of The Walking Dead (2012–2015), and DCS Ian St Clair in Sherwood (2022–present). He has also acted extensively on stage with companies such as the Royal Shakespeare Company and Royal National Theatre.

Morrissey has directed short films and the television dramas Sweet Revenge (2001) and Passer By (2004). His feature-length directorial debut, the television film Don't Worry About Me (2010), premiered on BBC Two. He was nominated for the British Academy Television Award for Best Actor for State of Play and won a Best Actor award from the Royal Television Society for The Deal. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Edge Hill University in 2016.

Early life

David Mark Joseph Morrissey was born in the Kensington area of Liverpool on 21 June 1964, the son of Littlewoods employee Joan and cobbler Joe Morrissey. He has two older brothers named Tony and Paul, and an older sister named Karen. The family lived at 45 Seldon Street in Kensington. Decades later, as part of National Museums Liverpool's Eight Hundred Lives project, Morrissey wrote that the house had been in his family since at least 1900; his grandmother had been married there and his mother was born there. In 1971, the family moved to a larger and more modern house on the new estates at Knotty Ash, while Seldon Street was later demolished.

Morrissey was greatly interested in film, television, and Gene Kelly musicals as a child. He decided to become an actor after seeing a broadcast of Kes on television. At St Margaret Mary's Primary School, he was encouraged by a teacher named Miss Keller, who cast him as the Scarecrow in a school production of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz when he was 11 years old. Keller left the school soon after, leaving him without encouragement. His secondary school, De La Salle School, had no drama classes and made him think that the fear of bullying often dissuaded pupils from participating in lessons. On the advice of a cousin, he joined the Everyman Youth Theatre. For the first couple of weeks, he was quite shy and did not join in with the workshops. When he eventually participated, he ended up appearing in their production of Fighting Chance, a play about the 1981 riots in Liverpool.

By the age of 14, Morrissey was one of two youth theatre members who sat on the board of the Everyman Theatre. His contemporaries included Cathy Tyson, brothers Mark and Stephen McGann, and Ian Hart, the last being his friend since they were both five years old. He became friends with the McGann brothers and they introduced him to their brother Paul, who was on a break from his studies at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). When he was 15 years old, his father died from a terminal blood disorder at the age of 54, after a long period of illness. After leaving school at the age of 16, Morrissey moved to Wolverhampton to join a theatre company there, where he worked on sets and costumes.

Acting

1980s

In 1982, Morrissey auditioned 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. 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 stepped back from the production, leaving the role to go to Morrissey. Spencer Leigh got the part of Icky and Ian Hart played the supporting role of Rabbit. Russell had a professional disagreement with the director Gordon Flemyng and producer Keith Richardson over the casting of 18-year-old Morrissey and Leigh; he believed that the sympathy of 16-year-olds running away was lost by casting older actors. Russell subsequently had his name removed from the credits of the original broadcast. 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.

Morrissey had planned to study at RADA in London, 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". On a visit back to Liverpool he told Paul McGann's mother that he was considering leaving the college. Back in London, McGann met with him and reassured him that he had been through the same homesickness phase when he first went to RADA. Morrissey continued his studies at RADA and graduated on 1 December 1985.

After a year at RADA, Morrissey went back to Liverpool to perform in WCPC at the Liverpool Playhouse. He then did Le Cid and Twelfth Night with Cheek by Jowl, and spent two years with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), principally with director Deborah Warner for whom he played the Bastard in King John in 1988. He saw the role as a learning opportunity, as he had often wondered at RADA if he would ever have the chance to act in classical theatre. His performance has been described as "the most contentious characterisation of the production"; he received negative critical reaction from The Daily Telegraph and Independent critics, but a positive opinion from the Financial Times. In The Guardian, Nicholas de Jongh wrote, "The Bastard, who has the most complex syntax in early Shakespeare, half defeats David Morrissey. His slurred, sometimes unintelligible diction helps to deflate the Bastard, but his bawling rhetoric strikes as mere sham rather than fierce plain speaking." Morrissey also spent time with the National, where he played the title role in Peer Gynt (1990). Michael Billington praised the unkempt energy of his performance. During this time, he lived on the housing estate in White City, where he and his flatmates were the frequent victims of burglars.

Morrissey's second television role came in 1987 when he played the 18-year-old chauffeur George Bowman, whose obsession with his employer and lover Alma Rattenbury (Helen Mirren) leads him to murder her husband, in an Anglia Television adaptation of Terence Rattigan's play Cause Célèbre. 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 who turns out to be a mass murderer, in his film The Widowmaker (1990). He knew Morrissey was right for the part in his first audition. The next year, Morrissey appeared as Theseus in an episode of The Storyteller directed by Madden ("Theseus and the Minotaur", 1991), and as Little John in Robin Hood (1991). Robin Hood's cinema release clashed with that of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991). The latter, starring Kevin Costner in the title role, was a box office hit and left Morrissey's version forgotten. Morrissey was out of work in film and television for eight months after it was released. Eventually, he was cast in a leading role as a CID officer in the BBC television drama Clubland (1991). He almost lost the role a week into rehearsals when his appendix ruptured. In order to keep the part, and a flat in Crouch End he had just bought, Morrissey performed while he still had his stitches in.

1990s

His role in The Widowmaker led to him being offered and taking many obsessive character roles; he played police officers in…