He first came to prominence playing a liberal catholic priest – Father Sheehy – in RTÉ’s iconic rural drama The Riordans. He appeared in such popular shows as Coronation Street, Between The Lines, 1990 and Ballykissangel, and won an Irish Film and Television Academy Award for best leading performance for his role in the 1998 miniseries Amongst Women. Tony Doyle also appeared in the first Minder episode, “Gunfight at the OK Laundrette”, playing a drunken Irishman. His most famous film role saw Tony as the head of the SAS, Colonel Hadley, in the 1982 British film Who Dares Wins. His other film roles included appearances in Ulysses (1967), Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx (1970), Loophole (1981), Eat the Peach (1986), Secret Friends (1991), Damage (1992), Circle of Friends (1995), and as Tom French in I Went Down (1997). He was married to Sally and was the father of six children including the actress Susannah Doyle. He died early on the morning of Friday 28 January 2000, aged 58, at St Thomas’s Hospital near his home in London. Brian Quigley, Doyle’s Ballykissangel character, was written out of the show in the first episode of the final series where Quigley fakes his own suicide (he supposedly drowned himself) and flees to Brazil. The Tony Doyle Bursary for New Writing was launched by the BBC following his death. Judges include his friend and Ballykissangel co-star Lorcan Cranitch. Cranitch subsequently starred in the BBC detective series McCready & Daughter, which had been written with Doyle in mind.