Michael Patrick, the Belfast actor celebrated for a string of fearless stage performances, died on Tuesday at NI Hospice at the age of 35. His wife, Naomi, said the family was broken-hearted.
Naomi said on social media that Mick was an inspiration to everyone who was privileged enough to come into contact with him, not just in the years of his illness but throughout his life. She described him as a man of joy and abundance of spirit with infectious laughter, and called him a titan of a ginger haired man.
Patrick, whose offstage name was Michael Campbell, had been diagnosed with motor neuron disease in 2023. He had already become regarded as one of Ireland’s most gifted performers, and his career was marked by work that drew directly on his own life and losses.
He and his writing partner Oisín Kearney met at Cambridge University, where Patrick studied physics, Kearney studied politics, and the pair ran the university’s Irish Society. Together they made several productions, including Frank McGuinness’s Someone to Watch Over Me, and in 2017 they wrote My Left Nut, a bleakly humorous autobiographical solo play.
That personal register never left his work. Patrick’s father died of motor neuron disease when he was a young boy, a loss that later informed My Left Nut. In 2025, he performed My Right Foot at Dublin Theatre Festival, a deeply personal 70-minute chronicle of motor-neuron disease, and earlier that year his role as the wheelchair-using king in The Tragedy of Richard III won the judges’ prize at the Stage Awards at the Royal Opera House in London.
His portrayal of Richard III at the Lyric Theatre in 2024 was the first time an actor with a disability had played the Shakespeare role on the island of Ireland. That performance came after his diagnosis had already changed the course of his career, but it also became one of the clearest signs of the reach and authority he had on stage.
There was one final, painful turn in February, when Patrick posted that he had decided not to have a tracheotomy so he could spend more time out of hospital during what his neurologist had said would probably be the final year of his life. That decision now frames the news of his death: Patrick chose time and presence over the last medical step that might have extended his life, and his family and colleagues are left with a body of work that had already become inseparable from the life behind it.
His funeral will take place at 11am on Monday, April 13th, at Immaculate Heart of Mary Church in Carryduff, Co Down.
