 Robert Carlyle is a slight man with delicate features, but his outsize
presence has led to his frequently being cast as outsiders, villains, society's
marginalia. His expressive face and blazing eyes hint at a vivid inner life and,
while a pattern close to typecasting has emerged at times, he has displayed an
exceptional capacity for endowing hard men with a very wide range of fine
emotional shadings.
Born in Glasgow on 14 April 1961, he was brought up by his father, Joseph,
after his mother disappeared when Robert was four. They lived in run-down flats,
communes and squats, sometimes sleeping rough, while Joseph, a painter and
decorator, travelled in search of work. Robert left school at 16 and worked with
his father for five years, then got involved in drama after reading Arthur
Miller's The Crucible, subsequently graduating from the Royal Scottish Academy
of Music and Drama.
His first significant part was as an ex-con labourer in Riff-Riff (1991),
whose director, Ken Loach, was looking for actors with experience of the
building trade, and he made a mark as a psychopathic Liverpool football fan in
Jimmy McGovern's Cracker story 'To Be a Somebody' (ITV, 1994), on which he met
his future wife, Anastasia Shirley, a make-up artist (they married in 1997 and
have three children). He played the title character's gay lover in McGovern's
subsequent Priest (BBC, 1994), directed by Antonia Bird, but his career really
took off in the mid-1990s.
Danny Boyle's Trainspotting (1996) gave him a defining role, as the
terrifying - yet electrifying - Begbie, which he followed with a sharply
contrasting one, as the laid-back, dope-smoking Highlands policeman Hamish
Macbeth (BBC, 1995-97). His international profile increased sharply when he
played an unemployed Sheffield steelworker who forms a male striptease act in
the breakthrough comedy The Full Monty (d. Peter Cattaneo, 1997), for which he
won a BAFTA (he was also BAFTA-nominated the same year for Hamish Macbeth).
Working again with Loach, he played an unemployed bus driver who becomes
involved with the Nicaraguan Sandinistas in Carla's Song (1996), received
another BAFTA nomination for his drug-dealer in Frank Deasy's Looking After
Jo-Jo (BBC, 1998) and was an 18th century highwayman in Plunkett & Macleane
(d. Jake Scott, 1999). He teamed up with Bird again for two features, the crime
thriller Face (1997) and Ravenous (1999), a horror movie about cannibalism. He
was the Bond villain in The World Is Not Enough (d. Michael Apted, 1999), a
drunken father in Angela's Ashes (d. Alan Parker, 1999) and a wacky traveller in
The Beach (d. Danny Boyle, 2000). His decade ended with an OBE in 1999.
After that, outstanding roles began to dry up. He played yet another petty
criminal, this time caught in a mid-life crisis, in Shane Meadows' comedy-drama
Once Upon A Time In The Midlands (2002), took the title role in the CBS
mini-series Hitler: The Rise Of Evil (2003), and was Emmy-nominated for his
greasy Russian sex-slave trader in Human Trafficking (US, Lifetime Network,
2005). 2007 brought two disaster movies, Flood (d. Tony Mitchell) and zombie
sequel 28 Weeks Later (d. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo), after which two very small
British dramas offered powerful roles. In I Know You Know (2008, d. Justin
Kerrigan), he was the single father of a boy who fantasises that his dad is a
secret agent, while in Summer (d. Kenny Glenaan, 2008), he played a man whose
life has been blighted by his acute dyslexia.
Neither was a hit, though Carlyle felt them among his best performances.
Discouraged by this, and by the failure of 4Way Pictures, the production company
he set up in 1999 with Bird, Mark Cousins and Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh to raise finance for a film about grave-robbers, he signed up for a long-term
role as the brilliant, tortured scientist Dr Rush in the Canadian sci-fi series
SGU Stargate Universe (2009-10).
Sheila Johnston
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FILM & TV CREDITS
