Despite a warm, genial personality, actor Robert Carlyle made a career out of playing dark, crazed and often brutally violent characters – or as he liked to call them, “f***ing nutters.” Whether playing a drunken thug, a homicidal vagrant, a sadistic sex slave trader or a down-and-out steelworker compelled to earn cash by stripping in an all-male review, Carlyle fully inhabited each role with such force and conviction that many were led to believe that he was indeed crazy in real life. While his bohemian childhood – he and his father lived on communes throughout England – might have infused in Carlyle an unconventional approach to life, he remained quite grounded, methodically carving out a successful career while raising a family with wife and makeup artist, Anastasia Shirley. His distaste for the trappings of celebrity notwithstanding, Carlyle developed a sturdy reputation for being one of the most electrifying performers on either side of the Atlantic.
Born on April 14, 1961 in Glasgow, Scotland, Carlyle was abandoned by his mother, Elizabeth, when he was only 4 years old. His father, Joe Carlyle, was a painter and raised his only child by himself, bringing him up in various hippy communes where Carlyle said he felt a great deal of love, despite the unusual and often dangerous environment. But when he was 15- or 16-years-old, Carlyle felt the sting of his mother’s abandonment and spent the next few years rebelling and hanging out with the proverbial wrong crowd. Carlyle dropped out of school when he was 16, joining his father in the painting business. A few years later, Carlyle happened to purchase a copy of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which “switched on a light bulb” in his head – he knew that he wanted to become an actor. He first studied at the Glasgow Arts Centre, before attending the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, only to drop out in 1986 because he hated the stuffy, debilitating nature of the institution.
After leaving the Royal Academy, in 1990, Carlyle formed the theatre company, Rain Dog, named after a favorite Tom Waits song. Carlyle’s obvious talent attracted the attention of director Ken Loach, who cast the actor in “Riff-Raff” (1991) as an ex-con whose squatter lifestyle leads him to fall in love with a hopeful singer-cum-drug addict (Emer McCourt). In the made-for-British-TV drama, “Safe” (1993), Carlyle displayed his darker side playing Nosty, the vicious, hard-drinking leader of a homeless gang who likes to do things like stab himself with a broken bottle. In another BBC production, Carlyle expanded his range by playing the tender gay lover of a Catholic priest (Linus Roache) in Antonia Bird’s endearing drama, “Priest” (1995). Carlyle followed with a compelling performance in “Go Now” (1995) as a vibrant young man who learns he has multiple sclerosis, before making another dramatic about-face by playing a twisted football fan who vows to kill 96 people in revenge for the famed Hillsborough disaster in “Cracker: To Be a Somebody” (A&E, 1995).
Carlyle next landed what became his signature role – the drunken sadist Begbie in Danny Boyle’s much-acclaimed “Trainspotting” (1996) – a darkly comic look at the on-and-off addiction of a heroin junkie (Ewan McGregor) and the disintegration of his friendship with a group of losers, liars, thieves and psychos. The actor was virtually unrecognizable in his next film, “The Fully Monty” (1997), playing a good-natured, but down-and-out steelworker who organizes a group of out-of-work fellows into a Chippendale-style dance troupe to make some desperately needed money. Carlyle was wary about doing “The Full Monty” at first – he was not sure it would benefit his career. But instead of being a career-breaker, “The Full Monty” propelled Carlyle into the international spotlight, which of course brought about its own problems – chief among them, unwanted tabloid stories and pesky journalists hounding him for interviews.
If Carlyle wanted to avoid the trappings of celebrity, he could not have found a worse place to hide than playing the rabid anti-capitalism terrorist Renard in “The World Is Not Enough” (1999) – the 19th installment to the never-ending James Bond franchise. In “Angela’s Ashes” (1999), he played a drunken, unemployed louse of a father who moves his family from Brooklyn back to their Irish homeland, where he continues to be unable to provide for his family. Reuniting with Boyle, Carlyle showed up briefly as a drug-addled, sun-bleached Scotsman named Daffy Duck who sends an American backpacker (Leonardo DiCaprio) on a quest to find a secret island off Thailand inhabited by marijuana growers supposedly living in a quasi-utopia in the film, “The Beach” (2000). After a rather forgetful turn as an American-hating crook in the abysmal action comedy “Formula 51” (2002), Carlyle turned to television movies and gave a riveting performance as Adolf Hitler in his days before becoming the Führer in “Hitler: The Rise of Evil” (2003).
Carlyle took depravity and sadism to new levels in “Human Trafficking” (Lifetime, 2005), a compelling and often gut-wrenching miniseries that chronicled the international sex slave trade and its impact on the United States as seen through the eyes of a rookie cop (Mira Sorvino). He played a ruthless trader who runs a model agency scam to lure young girls into brothels scattered across the United States – a role that earned the actor a 2006 Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie. After a forgettable performance as an evil sorcerer in “Eragon” (2006), the actor broke his vow to never do sequels by starring in “28 Weeks Later” (2007) – the continuation of Danny Boyle’s excellent sci-fi horror film, “28 Days Later” (2002) that saw the British Isles devastated by the so-called rage virus, which turns humans into blood-thirsty zombies. Carlyle played a Londoner who abandons his wife (Catherine McCormack) when she is infected by the virus, causing a rift between him and his two children (Imogen Poots and Mackintosh Muggleton).