McCoy was born in Austin, Texas in 1958. He grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, and attended Walter Johnson High School, graduating in 1976. McCoy briefly attended University of Maryland, College Park.  He worked briefly at the Harlequin Dinner Theater in Rockville. McCoy began acting when he appeared in two plays in the student-directed one act festival: Winners by Brian Friel, and Footsteps of Doves by Robert Anderson. Moving to New York City, he graduated from Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in 1979.

Since starring as Sgt. Nick Lassard in Police Academy 5: Assignment Miami Beach and Police Academy 6: City Under Siege, his motion picture credits have included White Wolves: A Cry in the Wild II, the Curtis Hanson films The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992) and L.A. Confidential (1997), as well as the action comedy National Security (2003) alongside Martin Lawrence and Steve Zahn.

He has worked regularly on television. His credits include starring in the sitcom We Got It Made, and guest appearances on The Love Boat; Murder, She Wrote; Star Trek: The Next Generation; The Golden Girls; The Nanny; L.A. Law; Melrose Place; NYPD Blue; Chicago Hope; Sabrina, the Teenage Witch; Six Feet Under; The West Wing; Carnivàle; CSI: NY, Silicon Valley; True Detective; Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip; Reba and Huff. He played Lloyd Braun in two episodes of Seinfeld. He appeared in three Bigfoot-themed movies: Bigfoot: The Unforgettable Encounter (1994), Little Bigfoot (1997) and Abominable (2006).

In 2014, McCoy began appearing as spokesperson in commercials for The Hartford Insurance Company, of which he was identified as a customer on the “compensated endorser” principle.

In 2019, McCoy once again appeared as spokesperson in television commercials for The Hartford Insurance Company. These commercials were directed towards AARP members

from Wikipedia.

Pauline Delaney, accomplished stage, TV and film actress who is best known for her role in Circle of Friends and Into The West, died in London from complications caused by Parkinson’s disease on January 15, 2007.

Ms Delany is born in Dublin on June 8, 1925. Her mother, a keen theatregoer, inspires her love of the stage, taking her on regular visits to the Abbey Theatre and the Gate Theatre. She learns her craft through evening classes at the Brendan Smith Academy in Dublin and later gives up her job as a trainee fashion buyer to tour with a production of Charlie’s Aunt, starring Leslie Phillips.

In the mid-1950s, she marries actor Norman Rodway and they become members of the Globe company, together with Anna Manahan, Maureen Toal and Milo O’Shea, presenting new plays at a small Gas Company theatre in Dún Laoghaire. When financial problems force the Globe to close, she helps form Gemini Productions and stars in its 1960s Dublin Theatre Festival success, The Poker Session, by Hugh Leonard.

When the play transfers to London, Delany moves there. Her marriage to Rodway ends and she subsequently forms a relationship with Gerry Simpson, an Irish-born playwright. She is a familiar figure on the London stage, appearing in several productions, including The Hostage at the Royal Court, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg at the King’s Head Theatre and Cross Purpose at Hampstead Theatre.

Delany appears in several TV plays including The Dead, Shadow of a Gunman, Stephen D and The Seagull, as well as roles in The Bill, Casualty and Rumpole of the Bailey. Among her film credits are The Quare Fellow, Brannigan, Rooney and Nothing but the Best.

Cornelia Hayes O’Herlihy

born in Ireland, spent her early profesional life appearing in theatre in London and Dublin, and on television and film in England and America in films, Gods and Monsters and Tears in the Sun with Bruce Willis. She has been starred or featured on in two series of Charles Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit and The Old Curiosity Shop. In theatre she starred in Pride and Prejudice in England. When she married long-time CART member Dan O’Herlihy’s son, Lorcan, Dan called our producer Peggy Webber and said, ”Thank God, I finally have an actress in my family, and a damn good one she is too!” 

From “The Irish Times” by Donald Clarke.

FOR THE IRISH-ITALIAN ACTOR, WORKING ON HER LATEST FILM, THE NIGHTINGALE, WAS EMOTIONALLY  WRENCHING. IT LEFT HER WITH A SENSE OF RESPONSIBILITY TOWARDS VICTIMS OF VIOLENCE 

We must resist the temptation to say that Aisling Franciosi is everywhere. It’s about to feel that way, but the Irish-Italian actor – she nods to both nationalities – has ridden the peaks and troughs of her precarious business. A little over a year ago, her gut-wrenching performance in Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale knocked the Venice Film Festival sideways. As we meet, she’s shooting the juiciest role in a BBC adaptation of Rumer Godden’s Black Narcissus. There is, however, no sense of complacency.

“After The Nightingale, I got one more job and then I had a horrible year – until July of last year,” she says. “You work solidly for seven years and then there’s a dry spell. That was interesting. The Nightingale was getting a lot of attention and people were saying: ‘You’re having such a busy year.’ But I wasn’t actually working.”

People say: ‘If you have positive thoughts, that’s going to affect how you feel.’ The same is true if you are putting yourself in negative feelings for 16 hours a day. I was pretty exhausted by the end of the shoot 

At any rate, The Nightingale is finally here to unsettle and engage brave audiences. Kent’s follow-up to The Babadook casts Franciosi as an Irish immigrant to Tasmania who, after a brutal rape, follows her assailant through rough terrain towards a horrific reckoning. Along the way, she gains an understanding of connections between the colonised Irish and the indigenous peoples of Australia. The consistently strong reviews all focused on the ruthless integrity of Franciosi’s performance. It was an emotionally wrenching experience.

“I had played traumatising roles before, but I had been able to leave the work behind when I went home,” she says. “But this was a whole different experience. The material is very heavy in terms of the violence against women and the racially motivated violence. I had nine months between getting the role and shooting. I did a lot of research. I worked with a clinical psychologist. She had worked with the script since the beginning. She facilitated me meeting real victims of domestic violence.”

FOR THE IRISH-ITALIAN ACTOR, WORKING ON HER LATEST FILM, THE NIGHTINGALE, WAS EMOTIONALLY  WRENCHING. IT LEFT HER WITH A SENSE OF RESPONSIBILITY TOWARDS VICTIMS OF VIOLENCE 

We must resist the temptation to say that Aisling Franciosi is everywhere. It’s about to feel that way, but the Irish-Italian actor – she nods to both nationalities – has ridden the peaks and troughs of her precarious business. A little over a year ago, her gut-wrenching performance in Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale knocked the Venice Film Festival sideways. As we meet, she’s shooting the juiciest role in a BBC adaptation of Rumer Godden’s Black Narcissus. There is, however, no sense of complacency.

“After The Nightingale, I got one more job and then I had a horrible year – until July of last year,” she says. “You work solidly for seven years and then there’s a dry spell. That was interesting. The Nightingale was getting a lot of attention and people were saying: ‘You’re having such a busy year.’ But I wasn’t actually working.”

People say: ‘If you have positive thoughts, that’s going to affect how you feel.’ The same is true if you are putting yourself in negative feelings for 16 hours a day. I was pretty exhausted by the end of the shoot 

At any rate, The Nightingale is finally here to unsettle and engage brave audiences. Kent’s follow-up to The Babadook casts Franciosi as an Irish immigrant to Tasmania who, after a brutal rape, follows her assailant through rough terrain towards a horrific reckoning. Along the way, she gains an understanding of connections between the colonised Irish and the indigenous peoples of Australia. The consistently strong reviews all focused on the ruthless integrity of Franciosi’s performance. It was an emotionally wrenching experience.

“I had played traumatising roles before, but I had been able to leave the work behind when I went home,” she says. “But this was a whole different experience. The material is very heavy in terms of the violence against women and the racially motivated violence. I had nine months between getting the role and shooting. I did a lot of research. I worked with a clinical psychologist. She had worked with the script since the beginning. She facilitated me meeting real victims of domestic violence.”

“Irish Examiner” 2019.

She’s already starred in ‘Brooklyn’ and ‘Fantastic Beasts’, but 2019 will bring even bigger releases for Waterford-born Fiona Glascott. Watch this space, writes Shilpa Ganatra.

Even if Fiona Glascott’s name is unfamiliar, her work won’t be. The Waterford native has channelled Maggie Smith to play a young Professor McGonagall in the latest installment of Fantastic Beasts, bid farewell to her sister played by Saoirse Ronan in Brooklyn, and portrayed the well-to-do Sarah in Indian Summers.

Those with a sharper memory might remember her from earlier appearances as Matt Le Blanc’s ex in Episodes, the sister of victim Aiden Gallagher in Omagh, and scorned student Isolde in Liz Gill’s romcom Goldfish Memory, which earned them both nominations at that year’s Iftas.

Rest assured, you’ll be hearing much more of Fiona in 2019. “It’s been a really exciting time recently, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed for good things this year,” she says, speaking from London where she lives. “Being in Fantastic Beasts was a huge thing in 2018, even though it was recorded the year before. It helped me to get to LA and have meetings about future opportunities.”

Things are certainly looking rosy, which is no surprise for those who have caught her performances; she impressively embodies each role to the extent that Fiona Weir, the casting director of Brooklyn, snapped her up for Fantastic Beasts without an audition. But away from the cameras, Fiona’s character is as humble as they come. She speaks with a can-you-believe-it excitement about her life and career, and is as much as a listener as a talker.

Yet she’s so much of an actor that she’s married to one too: The Death of Stalin and Bodyguard star Tom Brooke, with whom she lives in south London.

They met while starring in a live-to-TV theatre production in London eight years ago, soon after Fiona moved from Ireland to pursue her acting career.

“We played husband and wife on a really short job, and I never realised I liked him except smiled every time I saw him and I kept wondering where he was all the time,” she explains.

“A friend of mine suggested that maybe I like him. It turned out he lived quite close to where I did, and he asked if I wanted to meet him after the job finished. I went to meet him and he had laid out a picnic, and as the lights went down over London, he brought out some candles and champagne. I thought, ‘oh he’s good’. We’ve been together since.” The pair married on new year’s eve four years ago, and a year later, their daughter Ruby was born.

“When we had her, we said that we’d stick to our guns with our career — for her, not in spite of her,” she explains. “Of course it helps that the other person is in the same job. Even someone who only works from home might not understand if a job takes you away for a few weeks.

“He has an extraordinary career, and we both make sure each other’s work is exactly what the other person wants it to be. Ruby has always been with me when I’m working, and when he has to travel for the right job, that’s okay. I can hold down the fort with the dogs and child, and we’ll visit if we can.” Rather than pause her own career, with drama’s notoriously all-or-nothing working hours, she’s found that motherhood has helped her focus her goals.

“It’s actively been great for my work, to have a daughter who takes up all my time,” Fiona laughs. “It sounds like a contradiction but it’s true. Being a mother has made me more ambitious. I want to work harder than ever and I want to succeed more, not to just see a role model but also for Ruby to be proud of me. It’s such an enormous change, having a child, that’s propelling me forward.

“I haven’t stopped myself for going for something great because it would take me away,” she adds. “I’m lucky that I had Ruby at a point when I’m choosy about what I do anyway. If I had her in my early twenties it might be a different conversation, but if I want to do a project, it means it would be good enough to have to take her with me, or enrol her in a school, or whatever I was legally allowed to do. I have to look all that up…”

Can Glascott tell based on a script how well a project might fare?

“In my experience, if the performance in the moment is creative and alive and we’re working as a team, they have the best shot of coming out as a complete great production,” she says. “Of course there’s a lot that the actors aren’t involved in, like the editing, cinematography, the music. But on certain jobs, like Brooklyn, even on set it felt believable that I was heartbroken because my sister was going away — despite there being a whole row of crew crammed onto the set with us!

“That was a bizarre situation. However it came across, there was a camera person crouched down beside me with a microphone on my lap, and the crew almost touching me because there was no room. Working on films strangely ruined watching them for me at first. I’d watch a poignant scene between two people and think ‘but there’s a million people there! They’re not on their own.’”

Filming Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald was a particular boon as the films are known for their unbeatable quality of cast. Even though the young Professor McGonagall was only in it for a couple of scenes, they were added at JK Rowling’s behest. So while it remains to be seen what JK’s brilliant mind has in store for the third spin-off, our fingers are crossed that Glascott will reprise her role, especially as not many can follow in Maggie Smith’s footsteps.

“I’m a huge Harry Potter fan, and Maggie Smith is a legend,” says Glascott. “I didn’t get to meet her but there’s so much of her work in the character, it was like being given a cheat sheet of the character.

“When you think about all the other films she’s done, right back to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, she’s an extraordinary lady and I was understandably nervous. But I was helped massively by Catherine Charlton, the dialogue coach. She had me listen to Maggie’s voice as Professor McGonagall as I went to sleep for about two weeks. My husband was like ‘what are you doing’? And I told him that myself and Maggie were going to have a little lie down. It really helped, it’s such a clever way of getting a speech pattern into your mind.”

Being a Harry Potter fan, experiencing the cloisters of Hogwarts, filmed in Lacock Abbey, was a thrill in itself. 

“Most of the crew are big fans as well, so you chat about the books and it’s a really nice set to work because it’s like people going to have a day out, not just going to work.”

Glascott’s next roles look to be just as intriguing. Firstly, there’s Supervised in which she stars alongside Fionnula Flanagan, Beau Bridges, Tom Berenger, and Louis Gossett Jr. The comedy follows the escapades of four ageing superheroes in a retirement home in Ireland.

After that, there’s The Martini Shot, which wrapped in October 2018. That stars John Cleese, Derek Jacobi, and Matthew Modine [Full Metal Jacket, Stranger Things]. “Matthew plays an ageing film director who’s dying, and wants to make his great last masterpiece,” explains Glascott.

“He’s also got this idea that he’s a god and can change people anyway he wants to. I play Mary, his assistant with whom he has a very intense working relationship.

“It’s a really funny, interesting piece, and Matthew was such a pro. It was great to work with Derek Jacobi in it too; he insisted I call him Del Boy because I kept calling him Sir Derek. But I couldn’t go that far.”

With such varied roles and no sign of her determination abating, it’s no surprise that Glascott’s desires for the future are to carry on the way she’s going. “As I go on, I’m playing more interesting characters in very different projects so I’d love for that to continue. And I’d love to do big movies, as they’re so much fun. Basically, lots more of the same would be wonderful.”

BFI Screenonline

There was certain inevitability that Sydney Tafler would be found playing the title role in Wide Boy (d. Ken Hughes, 1952). In British films of the late 1940s, 50s and 60s, Tafler was most likely to be found on a bombsite selling goods that had mysteriously fallen from the back of a lorry. But there was always more to him than a rakish trilby and a smooth line of patter, for he was a versatile character actor who virtually never gave a bad performance, even in Fire Maidens From Outer Space (d. Cy Roth, 1956).

Tafler graduated from RADA in 1936 and made his acclaimed film debut in It Always Rains On Sunday (d. Robert Hamer, 1947) as a spivvish record shop owner who delights in his part time role as a dance band leader. It set the template for Tafler’s subsequent screen career, from the brash junk dealer in The Lavender Hill Mob (d. Charles Crichton, 1951), and the solicitor in Too Many Crooks (d. Mario Zampi, 1957), roles which demanded immaculate comic timing, to the smooth and sinister Mr. Stone in The Long Arm (d. Charles Frend, 1956). His strip club manager confronted by Charles Hawtrey in Carry On Regardless (d. Gerald Thomas 1961) provides virtually the film’s only funny scene.

Tafler was also found lurking – he was very good at lurking – in a pool hall in Emergency Call (d. Lewis Gilbert, 1952), but Gilbert was the director who offered Tafler the chance to escape from stereotyping. His physiotherapist teaching Douglas Bader how to walk on tin legs in Reach for The Sky (d. Gilbert, 1956) is an outstanding performance in one of the film’s best sequences, but Tafler would have to wait a further 12 years for another chance to show his range. His Goldberg in The Birthday Party (d. William Friedkin, 1968) is one of the best screen Pinter performances , vulpine of smile and dead-eyed with menace. Tafler’s CV raises questions as to how Jewish characters were depicted in post-war British cinema, but what cannot be denied is his sheer talent. 

Andrew Roberts

Madeleine Christie was born in Edinburgh in 1904 and is the mother of actress Amanda Walker. She died in London in 1996.

Michael Petrovitch’s first television was in an episode of the British TV series “Jason King” in 1972.   That same year he had the leading role opposite Susan Hampshire in “Neither the Sea nor the Sand”.   Most of his acting career was concentrated on television and he seems to have stopped acting in 1986

Alexandra Stewart left for Paris, France, in 1958, to study art. Within a year, she made her film debut in Les Motards, and has since then enjoyed a steady career in both French- and English-language films.

Besides her cinema career, she regularly appeared on television in shows such as Les Jeux de 20 heures and L’Académie des neuf. She has also appeared in the 1981 cartoon Space Stars and had cameos in Highlander: The Series, The Saint, Danger Man (TV Series) and the pilot episode of The X-Files. She was part of the jury of the 2004 Chicago International Film Festival.