Lalor Roddy

 ( Living People ) 

As an young man, he left for the United States to play football. 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 Ireland at the age of 33 to take up acting.

Roddy's performances in Belfast attracted attention of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and he played roles in the RSC's productions of Billy Roche’s Amphibians and James Robson’s King Baby. In 1998, he played with the RSC for a full season at the company's home in Stratford-upon-Avon. Roddy starred in two plays with the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, namely Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme and In a Little World of Our Own. For the latter play, he won the ESB Group/ Irish Times Award for best supporting actor. Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, with its sympathetic portrayal of Protestant Ulstermen serving in the British Army during the First World War, the leader of whom is a repressed homosexual, was described as a "landmark" play in Dublin, and Roddy's performance in the play did much to enhance his reputation. In a Little World of Our Own, whose subject were Ulster Unionists involved in a paramilitary group, was described as an important production. Roddy noted that Gary Mitchell, the playwright who wrote In a Little World of Our Own, was Protestant while Frank McGuinness, the playwright who wrote Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, was a Catholic. In 2004, he was nominated in the ESB/ Irish Times Theatre Awards for best actor for his performance in The Weir.

In 2004 and again in 2014, he acted in the controversial play Defender of the Faith by Stuart Carolan, set in 1986 on an isolated farm in County Armagh, where a family that supports the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) suspects that one of them might be an informer for the Crown.