declan mcalarney

full name: declan rory mcalarney date of birth: 25 february 1982 + 36 hometown: dublin, ireland residence: dublin, ireland occupation: actor status: 🍀

Declan Rory McAlarney (born 25 February 1982) is an Irish actor of stage and screen and the first, and thus far only, millennial male to have won an acting Oscar.

McAlarney began his acting career in Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film Marie Antoinette and would have his first, smaller, breakout portraying Ian Curtis in Control (2007).

McAlarney is best known for his performance as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything (2014), for which he won the Academy Award, BAFTA Award, Golden Globe Award and Screen Actors’ Guild Award for Best Actor. He would be nominated for all of the above for the second time with Hacksaw Ridge (2016).

Early Life
McAlarney was born in Dublin, Ireland to James and Maureen McAlarney (née McCarrick). He has admitted that his middle name is in tribute to his maternal grandfather, Ruairí McCarrick, who was originally from Co. Waterford, Ireland.

His father is a butcher with the Tesco chain of supermarkets, while his mother is a retired First and Second Class teacher. McAlarney’s mother was passionate about the children growing up in speaking the Irish language beyond the classroom. McAlarney has admitted that if Gaelscoileanna (Irish-medium education) had been more widely available at the time, he likely would have attended. Instead, Declan and his siblings attended tutoring and Irish language camps in their youth during school breaks. He has said that he mainly uses the language now amongst family and friends who speak it. McAlarney has a younger sister Kailee (born 1987), also a teacher, and a younger brother Patrick (born 1990), a solicitor.

McAlarney was raised primarily in north Dublin, first in Beaumont, where he attended St. Vincent’s CBS Primary school in Glasnevin. At the age of 9, he was enrolled in classes at the Gaiety School of Acting, as well as involved in association football (soccer) and hurling. He would remain with the Gaiety School through their Youth Theatre Company, eventually leaving when he began to attend Trinity College Dublin, where he studied acting.

As a teen, the family moved to Fairview, where his parents still currently reside. McAlarney finished his secondary level education at all-boys Belvedere College SJ, completing his Leaving Certificate in 2000. His attention turned solely to acting, eliminating sport in 1998, when he suffered radius and ulna fractures during a hurling match. The result was two permanent pins remaining in the repaired bones.

Career
While at Trinity, McAlarney would only have one professional credit while studying, voicing John Barker in the 2002 BBC Radio 4 presentation of The Angry Brigade. After a few small roles in television upon earning his degree, there would come a two year period of auditioning but not quite finding anything, in which he worked a series of part-time jobs and truly considered if maybe as much as acting was what was his passion if it was a bit of a pipe dream.

After a chance lucky audition lead to Marie Antoinette (2006), McAlarney moved to London full time. Control (2007) director Anton Corbjin had wanted lesser-known actors in all of the band roles, getting them together to actually learn to play the instruments used in the film as Joy Division. McAlarney, along with the rest of the cast, worked with a dialect coach to sound more like the Macclesfield-born Curtis (and the rest of the band respectively). The film was critically acclaimed, and would lead to nominations for multiple awards including the BAFTA Rising Star. McAlarney would also make his stage debut in 2007, alongside Elizabeth Alton, Ewan McGregor and Chiwetel Ejiofor in Othello for the Donmar Warehouse theatre organization in London, leading to plaudits of its own, including a nomination for the Laurence Olivier Awards for Best Newcomer in a Play.

Rather than continuing into leading film roles, McAlarney found himself more at home in the theatre, working with Kenneth Branagh on Ivanov (2008) for Donmar's West End season, and for a third time with Red. He would play the fictional assistant, Ken, to the main character, painter Mark Rothko. The play would have mixed reviews in London, but would transfer to the stage in New York, on Broadway, in early 2010. It would be a smash hit there, nominated for seven Tony Awards and winning 6, including Best Play and a Tony for Best Featured Actor for McAlarney.

Upon his return from New York, he would do his first television work for BBC Three, Him & Her as the hapless male lead Steve. This role would continue for 25 episodes over the course of four series, ending in 2013. At the same time, the attention on his career would further increase after turns in One Day (2011) and the miniseries The Hollow Crown (2012) and on stage again as Richard II, directed by Michael Grandage. In April 2013, he would be cast to play noted English physicist Stephen Hawking in a biopic about his life directed by James Marsh. The free time not filming the final series of Him & Her was spent working with photographs and videos of Hawking, meeting ALS patients and a choreographer on how to best portray the debilitating decline and challenges of ALS. McAlarney also was able to meet Hawking himself, as well as his ex-wife Jane and their children, along with co-star Bea Fitzallan. He has said that “The real problem with making a film is of course it isn’t made chronologically. So it was about having a very clear path of his physical deterioration so that on any day, we would be able to move back and forth, while still focusing on the spark and humour and the narrative.” For the role, he won the Academy Award, BAFTA, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Actor.

In the time since, he appeared on film in a supporting role in Brooklyn (2015), the first to use his native Irish accent and leading roles in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016) and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017). He also appeared in the Irish short film, Goodbye Darling, opposite fellow Irish actress and Academy Award winner Minna Marks, as part of celebrations of the 100th anniversary of the Easter Uprising in 2016.

McAlarney would earn his second round of nominations for the Academy Award, BAFTA, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Award after starring in the biographical drama Hacksaw Ridge (2016), the first film from Academy Award-winning director Mel Gibson in a decade. In the film, McAlarney portrayed Desmond T. Doss, the first conscientious objector in US history to be awarded the Medal of Honor. The choice of director was the subject of some controversy, however the film was met with positive acclaim. He would eventually lose out on all four awards to Casey Affleck.

He returned to the stage, making his National Theatre debut in the spring of 2017, starring as Prior Walter in Tony Kushner's two-part play Angels in America. In September of that year, it would be announced that the play would make the transfer to Broadway between February and July of 2018.

McAlarney's next announced role would be portraying American astronaut and first man to walk on the moon Neil Armstrong in First Man (2018).

Personal Life McAlarney was invited to become a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2015.

In addition, he is a champion of the Irish cinema industry and is a patron of Bord Scannán na hÉireann (the Irish Film Board) along with Minna Marks.

McAlarney's main residence was in Spitalfields, London until late 2017, moving back to his hometown. He also owned a home in Los Angeles from 2013 until early 2017.

RELATIONSHIPS
McAlarney had a rumored connection to actress and presenter Caroline Flack.

In 2015, he began dating a fellow actress, and the two were rumored to be engaged the following summer. McAlarney announced their breakup in an interview with Harper's Bazaar tied to press for Hacksaw Ridge.