David Kane
Friday 31 October 2014
Actress.
Born: September 19, 1968; Died: October 26, 2014
An appreciation.
Jenny McCrindle, who has died aged 46, was one of the most talented Scottish actresses of her generation, with a rare naturalistic quality, who could play both drama and high comedy with equal aplomb.
A born comedienne, with great stage presence, she brought the house down in Michael Boyd's production of Dumbstruck at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, in 1994, but was equally at home in the hard-hitting TV series Looking For Jo Jo with Robert Carlyle.
For me, she should have been the fifth Marx Brother, her comic timing and sense of anarchy was unique. She never delivered a line the way you expected and the word upstaging could have been invented for her. She would appear on stage in the wrong wig, or with a false nose, and do practically anything to amuse the audience, and her fellow actors. And audiences loved her for it.
In rehearsals, she was insecure, struggling to learn her lines because of her dyslexia, pinning pages of the script at strategic points around her flat in an attempt to memorise them, only growing in confidence when she got in front of an audience, the opposite of the way most actors worked. But that connection with people was what drove her forward. She needed to hear them laugh.
Born in Clydebank in 1968, Jenny attended the Scottish Youth Theatre and first appeared, with fellow students, in Charlie Gormley's Heavenly Pursuits starring Tom Conti. She went on to appear in Peter McDougall's Down Where The Buffalo Go alongside Harvey Keitel, Dream Baby with Peter Capaldi and John Byrne's Your Cheatin' Heart.
She worked with some of Scotland's best known writers, including Ian Heggie (An Experienced Woman Gives Advice), Irvine Welsh, (The Acid House), Frank Deasy (Looking For Jo Jo), Chris Hannan (The Baby) and Simon Donald (The Life Of Stuff). She co-starred with Clive Owen in Chancer and her comic partnership with John Sessions in the thriller Jute City almost led to a spin-off series.
She also made a perfect Glesga princess in Sleeping Beauty, the Tron panto written by Craig Ferguson and Peter Capaldi, and in the late night cabaret afterwards would often accompany her friend Fiona Bell in a version of Fever by banging a tea tray on her head. She was a born entertainer, with a child-like love of anarchy that was funny and infectious.
For instance, in the mid-1990s she was asked by a senior comedy producer at the BBC to come up with an idea for a prime-time sit-com. After some thought she travelled down to London where she pitched to the executives at Television Centre the story of "a lassie with a talking fanny". Hardly Miranda material but pure Jenny. Needless to say this concept proved to be a little ahead of its time for the BBC.
It was while filming Ruffian Hearts for the corporation in 1995 that Jenny noticed a numbness in her right hand that she later realised was the first symptom of multiple sclerosis, the disease that would blight her life and end her career.
She continued working but grew progressively worried about what was happening to her body and after she experienced some blurring in her right eye sought medical help. She was officially diagnosed with MS in 1999 and afterwards her life changed. She became quietly reclusive and stayed in contact with only close friends and family. Her last acting job was in a short film called Somersault, in that same year.
While suffering from MS she began to paint, attending art classes, but was notoriously hard to get a hold of and rarely answered her phone. She preferred to deal with her illness in private. Sadly, in the last few years her MS became more aggressive and her health deteriorated.
Jenny was one of a kind, a little lady with a big heart, funny and inventive, with a sense of humour that was bible black. Unpredictable on screen and off, she could be inspiring and frustrating in equal measure, with a wickedly reckless streak.
The world is a lesser place without her and I, for one, consider myself lucky to have been part of her life. She made me laugh so much I stole many of her best quips for my own scripts.
To paraphrase some lines from Dumbstruck, she was "a funny girl, a very funny girl, a very very funny girl". Now her suffering is over. Jenny is survived by her mother and father, George and Libby, and sister Joanne.
http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/obituaries/jenny-mccrindle.25736832
