Emmet Bergin: the dashing actor who brought some sizzle to Sunday nights in 1980s Ireland

Big of hair, wide of tie, wandering of eye, Emmet Bergin’s libidinous lawyer Dick Moran brought a rare sizzle to the Irish airwaves when soap opera Glenroe made its debut in 1983. Bergin, who died at his home in Dublin, imbued dapper, dashing Dick with a twinkling gaze and a raffish charm, which the character would deploy upon any eligible woman within eyeshot. Ireland had seen nothing like him before.

In 1983, the Catholic Church still maintained a chokehold on the country’s morals. In those grey, grim times, Glenroe, though often hokey and generally condescending towards rural Ireland, was a refuge – and Moran its most fascinating character.

He wasn’t a revolutionary figure: Dick was simply a small-town solicitor with a big car. But golly did he rev up Glenroe – first with his heartfelt affair with Mary McDermott (mother of Mary McEvoy’s Biddy and played by Geraldine Plunkett) and then with his entirely carnal fling with posh femme fatale Terry Killeen (Kate Thompson).

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The latter was big news in Irish soapland. The day after her first appearance on Glenroe, Thompson recalled receiving dirty looks going about her business in Dublin. Later came the handwritten death threats. The hate mail said a lot about Irish society and its compulsion to blame Terry rather than Dick for the dalliance. This was a country where women invariably carried the can. Yet it also said a lot about the smoothness with which Bergin brought Dick to life. Audiences simply could not bring themselves to turn on him.

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Bergin spent his career in the shadow of brother Patrick, who bounded into international stardom after appearing opposite Julia Roberts in Sleeping With the Enemy. In Ireland, though, the real A-lister was Emmet, whom Glenroe would turn into one of the country’s most recognisable actors.

He broke into acting in the early 1970s and had a small uncredited part in David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter. A decade later, John Boorman cast Bergin as Sir Ulfius in his trippy Arthurian blockbuster Excalibur. He would later portray Sunday Independent editor Angus Fanning in the biographical thriller Veronica Guerin. However, Bergin’s true sword-in-the-sword moment came with Glenroe: Dick Moran was the part he was born to play.

He was introduced throwing significant glances at Mary McDermott, a newcomer to Glenroe, along with daughter Biddy. Married to a much older man, she was trapped in a comfortable yet loveless relationship. But soon, she and Dick were conducting an affair. In any sane country, Mary would have been free to divorce husband Michael (Mícheál Ó Briain), to be with Dick. That was not possible in Ireland in 1983 – a fact that Glenroe confronted with admirable frankness.

I was aware of people reacting to me, the day after the first episode

—  Kate Thompson

“Dick and Mary had a problem”, Bergin would tell the producers of the 2015 RTÉ documentary, Well Holy God! It’s Glenroe. “They loved one another [but] the laws of the State were against them. Mary felt guilty because she was having an affair with the man she loved.”

Michael would finally be killed off, allowing Dick and Mary to tie the knot – only for sophisticated temptress Terry to enter the picture. She and Dick were quick to get together – their relationship consummated in a notorious scene in which Terry provocatively folds herself into the sofa. The camera cuts to Dick’s cigar smouldering in an ashtray. The rest is left to the viewer’s imagination.

The nation was agog. “I was aware of people reacting to me, the day after the first episode,” recalled Thompson. “I remember walking into a studio one day to do a voice-over and the receptionist looked up and she said ‘Oh! My mum hates you!’”

Today, no soap worth its name would be complete without an affair or three. But pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland was a different place. Dick Moran’s romantic misadventures scandalised Ireland and turned Emmet Bergin into a star. What a trail he blazed as dastardly Dick, a character who left an impression on Irish drama in the 1980s like no other.

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