The death of Tom Collins, a crucial figure in the growth of Irish cinema, has been announced. “Tom Collins lived one hell of an amazing, full, big life,” his daughter, the film programmer Eibh O’Brien-Collins, said. “He was a husband, father, grandfather, friend, uncle, filmmaker, photographer and mischievous chancer.”
Raised in Derry, Collins had, as director, writer and producer, been a force for many years. He was an early contributor to the Derry Film and Video Collective during the mid-1980s and, for that body, acted as camera operator on Margo Harkin’s documentary Mother Ireland, a film effectively banned under the British broadcasting voice restrictions. He went on to write and direct a number of landmark productions over the succeeding decades. Bogwoman, set in his native city during the 1950s, starred Peter Mullan and Sean McGinley. Teenage Kicks: The Undertones, his excellent documentary on Derry’s greatest band, won strong reviews in 2001. Five years later he drew Michael Sheen to Ireland for the rock’n’roll comedy Dead Long Enough.
Collins may be best remembered for his determined work in Irish-language features. Released in 2007, Kings, an adaptation of Jimmy Murphy’s play The Kings of the Kilburn High Road, starred Colm Meaney and Donal O’Kelly in the tale of Connemara men adrift in an often unfriendly London. The picture was selected as the Irish entry in the foreign-language category at the Academy Awards and won strong reviews wherever it played. “I think they thought of the generations that were lost,” Collins said of Kings’ positive reception in Ireland. “We as a nation let a lot of our emigrants suffer in the back streets of London. We had a Celtic Tiger economy and we did very little to help the men and woman who worked hard to build an economy.”
Collins’s film An Bronntanas, from 2014, was also selected to compete for that Academy Award. News of his death comes as speculation mounts about the chances of Colm Bairéad’s An Cailín Ciúin securing a nomination for the international-feature Oscar (as the category is now called). Collins’s work in the native tongue – producing stories that won over mainstream audiences – paved the way for the current renaissance in Irish-language features that has given us such fine titles as Tomás Ó Súilleabháin’s Arracht, Rachael Moriarty and Peter Murphy’s upcoming Róise & Frank, and Bairéad’s unlikely box-office triumph.
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Tributes have been paid in the film-making community. “I’m so sorry to hear this. He was a lovely and brilliant man,” Lenny Abrahamson, the Oscar-nominated director of Room, said. “He was always a pleasure to run into at festivals, such a warm and kind man,” his fellow director Paul Duane said.
Eibh O’Brien-Collins noted her father’s “heroically long battle with cancer”.
