Michael Colgan (actor)

Michael Colgan (born 1972 or 1973 as Michael Hughes in Keady, County Armagh) is a Northern Irish actor, novelist and academic, currently a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Queen Mary University of London.

Colgan was educated at Saint Patrick's Grammar School, Armagh and did his undergraduate studies in English at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, then completed a MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, followed by a PhD at London Metropolitan University. He also studied at l'École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris and has lived in London.

Colgan, who uses his birth name of Michael Hughes in his academic career, taught both Creative Writing and English Literature at his alma mater London Metropolitan University and also taught Creative Writing as a Visiting Lecturer at Roehampton University and the University of Hertfordshire, then Lecturer in Creative Writing at Queen’s University Belfast, before joining Queen Mary University of London as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing.

A notable early performance in Saint Patrick's Grammar School, Armagh was the role of Harpagon in Molière's L'Avare, which was performed entirely in French. After theatre school in Paris, he went back to Ireland to work with his younger brother, film director Enda Hughes, in 1996 in the feature film The Eliminator.

He starred in the 2002 feature film This Is Not a Love Song directed by Bille Eltringham. He also spent a year working in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and has appeared in several television productions, including Rebel Heart and Sunday (2002) for the BBC.

Colgan has worked at the Royal Shakespeare Company and in productions at the Royal Exchange, the Abbey Theatre, the Lyric Players' Theatre, Belfast, the Everyman Theatre, Liverpool, the Young Vic and the Tricycle Theatre.

In 2009 he was appearing at the Young Vic in Rupert Goold's critically acclaimed production of King Lear starring Pete Postlethwaite.

In 2013, Colgan played Richard Webb in the drama series What Remains. In 2014 he appeared in the first episode of the Channel 5 detective drama Suspects.