When Michael Patrick became the first actor in Ireland’s theatrical history to portray Richard III as a wheelchair user, he was determined that neither his nor his character’s disability be seen as part of the play’s inherent tragedy.

Instead, as he explained in an interview with the Guardian at the time, he used his still recent diagnosis of motor neurone disease to inform a new understanding of one of the greatest plays in the canon. “It’s less about the disability being the tragedy, and it’s more about people’s reaction to the disability being a tragedy, if that makes sense. Because, you know, in an ideal world, Richard could be in a wheelchair and he could still do all the things he wants to do,” he told me ahead of opening night.

The adaptation, staged in 2024 at the Lyric theatre, Belfast, was a huge success and earned Patrick the judges’ award at the Stage awards in 2025.

The production came about thanks to a half-joking comment Patrick made on social media in July 2023 when he first shared his MND diagnosis: he listed parts he wanted to be cast for, now that “my limp is really authentic”, and one was Richard (another more sarcastic suggestion was Dickens’ Tiny Tim).

Patrick, who has died aged 35, was a well-known figure in the Irish drama world, having had roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company in productions of The Taming of the Shrew and Measure for Measure in the 2019-20 season, as well as several BBC shows including Blue Lights (2023) and This Town (2024) , and others for the Irish broadcaster RTÉ. He also appeared in an episode of the sixth season of Game of Thrones in 2016.

His career was shaped by his long-term creative partnership with the writer and director Oisin Kearney. They were also great friends. The two met at Cambridge University, where Patrick was in the middle of a physics degree at Churchill College when he realised he wanted to be an actor; he later went to drama school at the Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts in London.

Together they put on several plays at Cambridge, including Frank McGuinness’s Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me and Samuel Beckett’s Play, and jointly led the university’s Irish society. Working together, Patrick and Kearney would go on to write, direct and act in many productions for stage and screen.

The Alternative, a play that reimagined the Irish Republic as part of the United Kingdom and dramatised a fictitious referendum on breaking up the country, was selected over hundreds of scripts to win Fishamble theatre company’s competition looking for “a play for Ireland”, with an acclaimed touring production in 2019.

For one of their first projects together, the pair wrote a one-man show, My Left Nut, about a testicular condition Patrick developed as a teenager, in which Patrick played himself and other characters. They premiered it at the Dublin fringe festival in 2017 and took it to Edinburgh the following year.

Although it dealt with heavy themes, such as shame and the grief a young Patrick experienced when he lost his father, the Guardian described it as “wincingly funny”, and it was later adapted for the screen by the BBC. Patrick wrote on his website that by the time of filming, “he could not play the main character as apparently at 30, he was too old to play a 15-year-old”.

One-man plays about body parts would prove the bookends of his acting career. Last year, he and Kearney wrote My Right Foot, a deeply personal production about living with a progressive, terminal condition. Patrick, by then using a powerchair, performed it at the Dublin theatre festival. The Stage called the show “funny, warm and incredibly moving”.

Patrick’s off-stage name was Michael Campbell, and he was known to friends and family as Mick. Born in Belfast, the son of Mickey, a computer engineer, and Pauline (nee Hughes), a priest’s housekeeper, he went to Rathmore grammar school in the south of the city. He was introduced to Shakespeare by a drama teacher, Gwyneth Murdock, as a teenager, and developed a lifelong love of the playwright’s work.

When Michael was eight his father also died of MND at the age of 47. Later, he credited his mum with bringing up him and his three siblings while raising £100,000 for an MND charity. When My Left Nut was broadcast, he told the BBC it had been good to have the opportunity to talk about his dad, saying: “He’s been a lot more present in our lives recently, which has been really nice.”

Speaking after his friend’s death, Kearney said: “His diagnosis didn’t stop him from working. He performed onstage six months before his passing and he was still writing up to the moment he went into a hospice. He was as determined as ever to make work with honesty and a sense of humour.”

Patrick is survived by his wife, Naomi (nee Sheehan), whom he married in 2023, and by Pauline and his siblings, Kate, Hannah and Maurice.