Noel Purcell

Noel Purcell (23 December 1900 – 3 March 1985) was an Irish film and television actor. Purcell began his show business career at the age of 12 in Dublin's Gaiety Theatre. Later, he toured Ireland in a vaudeville act with Jimmy O'Dea. Stage-trained in the classics in Dublin, Purcell moved into films in 1934. He appeared in Captain Boycott (1947) and as the elderly sailor whose death marooned the lovers-to-be in the first sound film version of The Blue Lagoon (1949). Purcell played a member of Captain Ahab's crew in Moby Dick (1956), a gameskeeper in The List of Adrian Messenger (1963), and a barman in The Mackintosh Man (1973), all films directed by John Huston. In 1955, he was an off-and-on regular on the British filmed TV series The Buccaneers (released to American TV in 1956), and Purcell narrated a Hibernian documentary, Seven Wonders of Ireland (1959). In 1962, he portrayed the lusty William McCoy in Lewis Milestone's Mutiny on the Bounty. He played a taciturn Irish in-law to Lebanese-American entertainer Danny Thomas' character Danny Williams in a 1963 episode of The Danny Thomas Show.

Actor