Tom Hickey (actor)

Tom Hickey
Born	1944 (age 72–73) Kildare, Ireland
Occupation	Actor
Years active	1963–present

Tom Hickey (born 1944) is an Irish actor who has appeared on stage and screen in a career that began in the early 1960s. He is, perhaps, best known for playing Benjy Riordan in the long-running television series, The Riordans.

Born in Kildare, Hickey began his career in 1963 at Deirdre O'Connell's Stanislavski Studio in Dublin where he trained in Stanislavski's system of acting. He has said that he sees his choice of profession as a "vocation", having decided to become an actor when he was five or six years old.

In 1965, Hickey joined the cast of RTÉ television's new rural drama series, The Riordans. He went on to play the part of Benjy Riordan in the successful serial for the next sixteen years.

In 2001, he made a rare venture into television advertising with his appearances in a series of commercials for Club Orange, a soft drink. The first of these was directed by Declan Lowney, the director of Father Ted. Lowney also directed Moone Boy, a Sky television series in which Hickey played Granddad Joe.

On stage, Hickey has favoured parts in the work of modern Irish playwrights such as Tom Murphy, Frank McGuinness, Bernard Farrell, and Marina Carr. In the early 1980s, the playwright Tom MacIntyre asked him to play the lead role in his adaptation of Patrick Kavanagh's poem The Great Hunger. Following the success of that collaboration, he has become an acclaimed interpreter of MacIntyre's work, in such plays as Rise Up Lovely Sweeney, The Gallant John Joe and What Happened Bridgie Cleary.

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