J.M. Kerrigan

Known for ActingBorn 1884-12-16Died 1964-04-29Dublin, Ireland

Joseph Michael Kerrigan (16 December 1884 – 29 April 1964), better known as J.M. Kerrigan, was an Irish character actor. Kerrigan was born in Dublin, Ireland. He worked as a newspaper reporter until 1907 when he joined the famous Abbey Players. There he became a stalwart, appearing in plays by Lady Gregory, William Butler Yeats and John Millington Synge (for whom he played the role of Shawn Keogh in The Playboy of the Western World. His first screen appearance was in the silent film Food of Love in 1916. By the 1920s he was appearing on Broadway, often in plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Sheridan. He settled permanently in Hollywood in 1935, having been recruited along with several other Abbey performers, to appear in John Ford's The Informer. In that film and in Ford's The Long Voyage Home, he plays similar roles, that of a leech who attaches himself to men until they run out of money. Perhaps his best known role was in The General Died at Dawn, where he plays a character actually named Leach, in which he steals scenes from Gary Cooper, Madeleine Carroll and William Frawley. In it he plays a sinister little petty thief who, holding a gun on Cooper, says, "I may be fat, but I'm agile." He had little screen time in films which he starred as minor roles, such as the "First Drayman" in Merely Mary Ann (1931) with Janet Gaynor. One of his most recognizable minor roles was in Gone with the Wind (1939), in which he played John Gallegher, the seemly jovial mill owner who whips his convict labour in to "co-operation". He appeared in Walt Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), the famous film version of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in a minor role at the beginning of the film. In 1946, he tried breaking into Broadway shows, playing the discombobulated leprechaun Jackeen J. O'Malley in the show "Barnaby and Mr. O'Malley", based on the Crockett Johnson comic strip. J. M. Kerrigan died in Hollywood on 29 April 1964, aged 79. Kerrigan has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6621 Hollywood Blvd.Read more

Movies & web series

Two Bright Boys

Vacation from Love

Motor Madness

Laughing Irish Eyes

New Movietone Follies of 1930

The Fountain

The Rainbow Trail

Merely Mary Ann

Little Orphan Annie

Gone with the Wind

Under Suspicion

Frontier

Let's Make a Million

Hot Tip

The Fighting O'Flynn

The Vanishing Virginian

Lloyd's of London

Sorority House

Curtain Call

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

The Sea Hawk

Action in the North Atlantic

Vanity Street

The Fastest Gun Alive

Abie's Irish Rose

The Wolf Man

The Wild North

The Witness Vanishes

The Kid From Texas

Mr. Lucky

Ride a Crooked Mile

General Electric Theater

A Feather in Her Hat

A Modern Hero

Lucky In Love

Two of a Kind

My Cousin Rachel

The Prisoner of Shark Island

Lux Video Theatre

Call Northside 777

Park Row

The Informer

Letter to Loretta

Union Pacific

Shirley Temple's Storybook

Sealed Cargo

The Long Voyage Home

Sabotage