Nick Darke

Nick Darke born Nicholas Temperley Watson Darke (29 August 1948 – 10 June 2005) was a Cornish playwright and writer, poet, lobster fisherman, environmentalist, beachcomber, politician, broadcaster, film-maker and chairman of St Eval Parish Council.

Nick Darke was born in Bodmin in Cornwall and lived most of his life in Porthcothan where his family have lived for four generations after moving there from Padstow. His grandfather was a sea-captain who spent his life at sea and was wrecked twice at the Cape of Good Hope. His father T. O. Darke, was a chicken farmer, fisherman and a distinguished ornithologist. His mother was the actress Betty Cowan. He was educated at St Merryn Primary School and Truro Cathedral School, from where he was expelled for getting drunk on sports day. He then attended Newquay Grammar School and subsequently trained as an actor at the Rose Bruford College in Kent. After making his professional début in repertory at the Lyric, Belfast, he went on to learn his craft at the Victoria Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent, England, where he acted in over eighty plays and directed Man Is Man, The Miser, Absurd Person Singular, The Scarlet Pimpernel, and A Cuckoo in the Nest, 1977–79. At Stoke he wrote his first full-length play, Never Say Rabbit in a Boat in 1977. He gave up acting to write full-time in 1978. Over the next twenty-eight years, he wrote twenty-seven plays which have been performed in theatres all over the world (eight for The Royal Shakespeare Company and two for The National Theatre). He also wrote for radio, television and film.

Many of his plays reflect Cornish society and culture such as the tin mining, countryside, fishermen and the quirky nature of country living. During the later part of his career he worked regularly with the theatre company Kneehigh Theatre. One of his last works, the documentary The Wrecking Season (2004) which he wrote and narrated, charts the lives of Cornish beachcombers, of which he himself was one having moved permanently back home to Porthcothan in 1990. He married the painter Jane Spurway in 1993 and is the father of film-maker Henry and stepfather of Jim, a marine scientist. He was made a Bard of the Cornish Gorsedd in 1996 taking the Bardic name Scryfer Gwaryow ('Writer of Plays').

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