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Aidan Gillen More at IMDbPro »

Date of Birth

24 April 1968, Dublin, Ireland

Birth Name

Aidan Murphy

Height

5' 9" (1.75 m)

Mini Biography

Aidan Gillen (born Aidan Murphy on 24 April 1968) is an Irish stage and screen actor, known in the UK for his role in Queer as Folk and in the US for his role in HBO's television series The Wire in which he plays Tommy Carcetti and for his role in Game of Thrones as Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish.

Early life

Gillen was born as Aidan Murphy in Drumcondra, Dublin, and educated at St. Vincent's C.B.S. (Glasnevin). He has a sister, Fionnuala Murphy, who is an actress. He began his acting career as a teenager with Dublin Youth Theatre, at the age of 16 playing Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Project Arts Centre, before moving to London.

Career

He is known in the UK for his role as Stuart Alan Jones in the ground-breaking British television series, Queer as Folk, and its sequel, Queer as Folk 2, for which he was nominated for the British Academy Television Award for Best Actor in 2000. American audiences know him for his role as Tommy Carcetti in HBO's television series The Wire.

Gillen was nominated for a Tony Award for his highly acclaimed Broadway role in Harold Pinter's The Caretaker in 2003. He has also been nominated for an Irish Times Theatre Award for his portrayal of Teach in the Dublin Gate Theatre's 2007 production of David Mamet's American Buffalo'.

Gillen appeared alongside the professional wrestler John Cena in the 2009 film 12 Rounds. In July of that year, he appeared in a one-off BBC2 drama Freefall along with Dominic Cooper and Sarah Harding.

In 2011, Gillen played the role of Petyr Baelish in the HBO series Game of Thrones and Barry Weiss in Blitz.

Personal life

In 2001, Gillen married his girlfriend Olivia O'Flanagan. The couple live in Ireland, with children Berry (born in 1997) and Joe (born in 2000). In 2009, when Gillen won an Irish Film and Television Awards award for his role in The Wire, he dedicated the award to Olivia and their two children.

Source

The Mini Biography is from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aidan_Gillen. IMDb is not affiliated with, and neither endorses, nor is endorsed by Wikipedia or any of the authors who contributed to this article. The Wikipedia content may be available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, version 3.0 or any later version, available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/. Additional or other terms may apply. See Wikipedia Terms of Use for details. This webpage may use the Freebase schema, licensed under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/.

Spouse

Olivia O Flanagan'

(7 July 2001 - present) 2 children

Trivia

Brown haired Irish actor who got his big break in the controversial, highly acclaimed TV series "Queer as Folk" (1999).

Now lives in North London with girlfriend Olivia and their children, daughter Berry and son Joe. [2001]

Mother is a nurse and his late father was an architect.

Brother of actress Fionnuala Murphy.

He uses the surname of Gillen because someone else was already registered as Aidan Murphy in the Actors' Guild. Gillen is his mother's surname. http://tonys.broadway.com/nominee_detail.cfm?nom_id=43&category=Feature dActorPlay

Was nominated for Broadway's 2004 Tony Award as Best Actor (Featured Role - Play) for a revival of Harold Pinter's "The Caretaker."

Educated at St. Vincent's C.B.S., Glasnevin.

Moved back to Ireland with his wife and two kids in 2009. Now lives in Kerry, Ireland. [2011].

Personal Quotes

On his role as Carcetti in _The Wire (2002)_: We follow Carcetti's journey as a minor player in city politics to a major contender in a mayoral election. He was a young guy who was considered an upstart, who saw an opportunity to do something, maybe effect some change. We see him open up and develop a conscience. I hope he's not just coming across as smarm. I'd say he's flawed, but driven.

I'm always attracted to bold, risk-taking scripts. Both The Wire and Queer as Folk had a big scope. They were panoramas, telling ambitious stories about two cities, Baltimore and Manchester, for the first time. Some people said that Queer as Folk was sensationalist and had too much sex. The real mayor of Baltimore complained that The Wire was too bleak. But they're missing the point. Both David Simon and Russell T Davies obviously loved the worlds they were writing about. In drama you can either pretend everything is OK, or you can show the world as it really is in the hope that it gets better.

People say The Wire's bleak, y'know, but I see it as a love letter to Baltimore, and it's one written in a very strange and complex way.

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