Dylan Moran is an actor and standup comedian probably best known for his role in the Channel 4 TV Series Black Books. He also performs regularly at various comedy festivals both national and international, including the Edinburgh Festival, the Just for Laughs Montreal Comedy Festival, and the Kilkenny Comedy Festival.
Moran was born on the 3rd of November, 1971 in Navan, County Meath, Ireland. He left school aged 16 with no formal qualifications, and spent the next four years "drinking and writing bad poetry"1. In 1992 he decided to start doing stand-up comedy at Dublin's "The Comedy Cellar" after seeing comedians such as Ardal O'Hanlon perform there. When interviewed on exactly, why he went into stand-up, he says:
I have absolutely no idea. Chemical imbalance, a certain lack of character, I don't know. I have no qualifications to do anything else and there weren't any formal application forms you had to fill in for stand-up, so I thought I'd give that a twist. You try various things when you're growing up. I was an attaché in the Foreign Service for a while and then I drove a bulldozer, but neither of those panned out for me so it had to be stand-up.2
In 1993, Moran won Channel 4's "So You Think You're Funny" award, followed by the Perrier Comedy Award at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1996. Aged 24 at the time, he was the youngest person ever to receive the award.
In 1998, Moran starred in his first television series: How Do You Want Me?, written by Simon Nye. This was followed in 1999 by a small part in Notting Hill and in 2000 by the first series of Black Books, which he wrote along with fellow Irishman Graham Lineham and starred in alongside actors Bill Bailey (whom he had met many years before in the UK comedy circuit) and Tamsin Greig. The first series went on to win the BAFTA for Best Situation Comedy as well as a Bronze Rose at the Festival d'Or in 2001, and was followed by the second series (written by Moran and Kevin Cecil) in 2002. The third series, written in 2004 by Moran, Cecil, and Andy Riley, won another BAFTA in 2005.
Moran also starred alongside Michael Caine in the movie The Actors in 2003 and played the annoying prat David in Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright's ZomRomCom Shaun of the Dead in 2004. His latest part at the time of writing was as Dr Slop in Michael Winterbottom's adaptation to film of Laurence Stern's book The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. He also took part in the Comic Aid show for victims of the 2004 tsunami in Asia in February of 2005.
Moran is married (he got married on the day of Princess Diana's funeral, in a church just around the corner) with two children. Although he carries on his image of an alcoholic, smoking Irishman in his stand-up work he is amazingly well-read, with some of his favourite authors being Don DeLillo, S.J. Perelman and J.B. Morton. He currently lives with his family in his adopted home town of Edinburgh. Of his future career, he states: "I plan not to be dead in three years, that's as far as it goes."3
Quotes From:
- Dylan Moran Rules
- BBC Films
- The Observer
References
- IMDB: http://imdb.com
- Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_Moran
- Dylan Moran Rules: http://www.dylanmoranrules.com
- BBC Comedy: http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/profiles/Dylan_Moran.html
- BBC Films: http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2003/05/09/dylan_moran_the_actors_interview.shtml
- The Observer: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,873001,00.html