Stephen Rea

Stephen Rea’s career and private life unfolded in close proximity to the Troubles, but neither fitted neatly into the public categories that surrounded them. A Belfast-born Protestant actor sympathetic to the nationalist cause, he became known for refusing to smooth away his Ulster accent or let interviews reduce his work to his marriage to former IRA member Dolours Price. He and Price met during student protests, married in secret in 1983, and had two sons. Rea’s later roles, most notably in The Crying Game, repeatedly brought the conflict back into view even as he tried to keep its political and biographical claims from defining him.

Identity and early career

Rea grew up in a mixed Belfast neighbourhood among mixed neighbours and friends, in a household with his parents, grandmother and three sisters. His Protestant upbringing did not prevent him from sympathising with the nationalist cause. He considered resistance by the Catholic community an understandable response to a long history of repression. For a time he lived in West Belfast and performed at a local community festival; some Protestants regarded his presence there as a betrayal. The episode foreshadowed the difficulty of being assigned a fixed political identity in a divided city.

His interest in acting began early. In a children’s production of Little Red Riding Hood, he played the Wolf and decided that he wanted to become an actor. He studied at Queen’s University Belfast in the 1960s, where he met Price during student protests. While she was drawn into revolutionary activity, Rea pursued theatre, working at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre before moving to London. He had loved Belfast but felt there was too little room there to become something different; he later felt similarly dissatisfied in Dublin, which he believed squandered talent.

In London, Rea established himself on the stage, appearing at the Royal Court, the Old Vic and the National Theatre, as well as on British television. He could imitate English accents, and people advised him to do so to improve his prospects. He chose instead to keep his Ulster voice, preferring unemployment to presenting himself as someone raised in Surrey. For Rea, Irish speakers had made the English language their own, and that achievement mattered even amid political defeat.

Meeting Price and the theatre of conflict

Rea and Price had first met in the late 1960s, but their lives diverged as the Troubles took hold: she joined the Provisional IRA, while he developed his acting career. They encountered each other again in London when Price and her sister Marian went to see Brian Friel’s The Freedom of the City on the night before a bombing. Rea, one of the play’s leads, portrayed a civil rights marcher mistaken for an IRA member. The play’s account of peaceful protesters misidentified as terrorists, then shot by British troops while an official inquiry justified the killings, carried a charged resonance for Price. For Rea, the performance brought him back into the orbit of someone he had known before their paths split.

In 1980, Rea and Friel co-founded Field Day, a theatre company intended to produce a play each year and tour it around Ireland. Its first production was Friel’s Translations, set in Donegal in 1833 and concerned with a British Army survey that replaced Irish place names with English forms. It opened at the Guildhall in Derry, a unionist symbol and a frequent IRA target; scaffolding still covered parts of the building as repairs continued after earlier attacks. The choice carried both irony and hope. The company’s work often had political implications, but Rea resisted being placed in an ideological camp. He saw Field Day’s purpose broadly: audiences across the border might share a story and find some common ground in a divided country. Its board included three Catholics and three Protestants, though no unionist.

Field Day meant months on the road. Rea spent about five months each year touring, and Price often accompanied him. She managed the company’s books and correspondence, tracked mileage and petrol costs, and took the car to what she called the car hospital. Together they crossed the island, bringing professional theatre to rural areas that had not seen a company of that kind in decades. The touring work made their partnership practical as well as personal: the actor’s career and the former militant’s life were joined in the ordinary labour of keeping a travelling company moving.

Marriage, restrictions and public scrutiny

In autumn 1983, Rea and Price married at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Armagh, close to the prison where she had once been held. The prison chaplain, who had campaigned for her release, officiated. Aware of the attention likely to follow the union of a well-known actor and the convicted Old Bailey bomber, they kept the ceremony secret, with only two witnesses. The secrecy did not keep the marriage out of the press for long, but it reflected the pressures under which the couple began their life together.

Price’s release conditions restricted her life in Britain, and she repeatedly asked the British government to let her visit Rea in England. In practice, she was already living much of the time in Dublin and travelling with Field Day around the Republic. In May 1985, police stopped the couple’s car in Folkestone. They gave a London address; in fact, they had taken a flat in Maida Vale, only a few miles from the Old Bailey. Margaret Thatcher refused to change Price’s conditions, even as officials noted that she was already living in London and that imprisoning her again could provoke anger and renewed hunger-striking. The government instead tolerated the breach without formally conceding that the terms should change.

The arrangement placed Rea’s career and Price’s legal status in direct tension. An established actor could not easily continue his profession from Northern Ireland, but Price was not officially allowed to live with him in England. Newspapers followed the couple’s movements and portrayed Price as the former bomber enjoying the fashionable life of an actor’s wife. When Rea was due to perform in High Society at a royal gala attended by the Queen Mother, reporters speculated about whether Price would attend. His agent said she would stay away; for the purposes of propriety, the reported meaning of home was Belfast.

Rea said that marrying Price had not damaged his career, and colleagues had treated him generously. The press nevertheless kept returning to her past. He wanted interviews to concern his work and became known for ending them when questions turned to his wife. The avoidance itself became a running joke among journalists. Yet his choice of roles complicated any attempt to keep the two subjects apart: he often played soulful gunmen, including IRA gunmen, and spoke of trying to understand how ordinary people became involved in violence that spiralled out of control.

Family and the politics of voice

A few days after New Year in 1989, Rea and Price had their first son, Fintan Daniel Sugar, known as Danny; just over a year later, their second son, Oscar, was born and named after Oscar Wilde. Price, who had feared in prison that she might never have children, was devoted to them. The family lived in London and kept a home in Belfast. Rea wanted his sons to have an Irish childhood and Irish accents rather than be raised as English children. Seamus Heaney wrote them an original poem on a Japanese fan, which the couple hung on the wall at home; the poem has never been published.

Rea’s work also connected him to Gerry Adams in an unusual way. During the broadcasting ban on IRA and Sinn Féin voices, television could show Adams and convey his words but could not transmit his actual voice. Broadcasters used actors to dub him, and Rea was among those who provided the voice-over. He framed his participation as resistance to censorship rather than as a declaration of political allegiance: viewers, he argued, should be able to hear what Adams had to say. In this arrangement the image and words belonged to Adams while the audible voice belonged to Rea, a literal separation between public speech and the person speaking.

In 1992, Rea gained international recognition starring as Fergus in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game. Fergus, an IRA gunman assigned to guard a British soldier, develops a relationship with his captive and cannot bring himself to shoot him. The film’s central dilemma echoed the fatal work Price had undertaken for the Unknowns: she had driven Joe Lynskey to his death while crying, and she had taken Kevin McKee to a house in County Monaghan where his captors became reluctant to kill him, forcing another team to come from Belfast. Rea’s fictional role thus brought an intimate resemblance to Price’s history into a performance he could not simply separate from his marriage. During filming in Belfast, he introduced Miranda Richardson, who played an IRA woman, to Price; Richardson later recalled that Price was treated like a film star in a pub.

Later years and ending

As Rea’s acting career continued, he remained guarded about Price’s past in interviews, while his work kept returning to the conflict’s people and moral entanglements. His marriage to Price eventually ended, though their shared family and history remained. When Price died in 2013, Rea and their sons carried her coffin, and he spoke at her funeral. His public farewell, reported as describing how the experience had broken both their hearts and bodies, closed a relationship that had joined love, political consequence and the pressures of public scrutiny. Rea’s life in the book is therefore not a simple passage from one political side to another: it is a sustained effort to make theatre, preserve his own voice, and live beside a history that repeatedly made his private ties part of the public story.