Michael Patrick, whose growing theatre career was significantly altered by a diagnosis of motor neuron disease, has died at the age of 35.
The Belfast actor, whose portrayal of Richard III at the Lyric Theatre in 2024 was the first time that an actor with a disability had played the Shakespearean role on the island of Ireland, died on Tuesday, April 7th, at NI Hospice. He had been diagnosed with MND in 2023.
His wife, Naomi, said his family was broken-hearted. She posted on social media that “Mick was an inspiration to everyone who was privileged enough to come into contact with him, not just in the past few years during his illness but in every day of his life. He lived a life as full as any human can live. Joy, abundance of spirit, infectious laughter. A titan of a ginger haired man.”
Patrick, whose name offstage was Michael Campbell, was regarded as one of Ireland’s most gifted performers. He was also, with his writing partner, Oisín Kearney, half of a successful creative team. The pair met at Cambridge University, where Kearney studied politics and Patrick studied physics. Together they ran the university’s Irish Society and, as director and actor respectively, made several productions, including Frank McGuinness’s Someone to Watch Over Me.
Patrick’s father died of MND when his son was a young boy. In 2017 the actor confronted his loss by writing, in tandem with Kearney, My Left Nut, a bleakly humorous autobiographical solo play, focused on the turmoil of a vulnerable adolescent struggling to deal with an alarming medical condition with no father to turn to.
In 2025, at Dublin Theatre Festival, Patrick performed the solo show My Right Foot, a deeply personal 70-minute chronicle of motor-neuron disease that was a masterclass in humour, honesty and resilience.
Earlier that year the actor’s role as the wheelchair-using king in The Tragedy of Richard III won him the judges’ prize at the Stage Awards, at the Royal Opera House in London.
In February Patrick posted that he had decided not to have a tracheotomy – which would have allowed an artificial airway to be fitted to his throat, to help him to breathe – so that he could instead spend more time out of hospital during what his neurologist had said would probably be the final year of his life.
The actor’s funeral will take place at 11am on Monday, April 13th, at Immaculate Heart of Mary Church in Carryduff, Co Down.