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Michael Feeney Callan is a novelist, filmmaker and painter.

An award winner for his short fiction, he joined BBC television drama as a story editor, and wrote screenplays for The Professionals (TV series) and for American television. He wrote the template Irish police drama series, The Burke Enigma, starring Donal McCann, and Love Is, starring Gabriel Byrne, and went on to direct a number of television programmes, among them the celebrated bio-documentary Luke Kelly: The Performer. Callan has published several novels and has written biographies of Sean Connery, Julie Christie and Richard Harris. Forthcoming is his major biography of Robert Redford. He divides his time between France and Dublin, where he lives with his wife Ree and two children.

Poetry

Callan's abiding wish, from childhood, was to contribute to internationalising Irish cultural experience and, in his words, "to writing some good, lasting poems". His first poems were published within David Marcus’ New Irish Writing series in the 1970s.

Callan has continued to write poetry over the past thirty years and in 2003 published an anthology Fifty Fingers, which includes the very first published poem, Barbara.

Books

Following the early success of his short stories, winning the Hennessy Award for Short Fiction for Baccy, Callan has enjoyed a diverse publishing career. Initially writing many television adaptations, including Capital City (ITV), Jockey School & Target: The Bronze Heist (both BBC), Callan is perhaps best known for his biographies.

Early works profiling Julie Christie and Jayne Mansfield were followed by powerful and authoritative biographies of the enigmatic Sean Connery, long time friend Richard Harris and most recently Anthony Hopkins (the latter referred to as “an impressive work by one of Ireland's foremost biographers”).

For the past ten years, Callan has travelled the United States interviewing more than 400 sources for his latest work. This landmark biography profiling Robert Redford has been written with the full co-operation of the subject who has provided unrestricted access to his diaries and personal records. This eagerly anticipated book is expected to be published in November 2009.

Callan’s first fiction novel, Lovers and Dancers was extremely highly regarded on publication with the Irish Independent exclaiming “A joy to be able to report ... a book of this scale and style coming from an Irish typewriter”.

Subsequently, in 2002, Did You Miss Me?, a novel which successfully explored many difficult female themes and about which the Sunday Business Post remarked “A joy to be able to report ... a book of this scale and style coming from an Irish typewriter”

Writing for Television

Callan's first major screenplay was the epic crime series The Burke Enigma, a six-hour landmark production for RTE, which starred Ray McAnally and Donal McCann and went forward as RTE's drama entry for the 1979 Prix Italia. Subsequently he accepted an offer to join BBC television drama in London, where he story-edited the detective series Shoestring (TV series). Simultaneously, at ITV, he wrote for the action series, The Professionals (TV series).

In the 1980s, Callan collaborated with Frederick Forsyth on two Public Broadcasting Service-aired adaptations of Privilege and A Careful Man.

Perhaps the most intriguing television project of this decade, however, was his never-produced Dr Who two-part episode entitled The Children of January which was delivered to the BBC in 1985 but had not been made at the time the decision was made to cancel the series.

On his website recently, Callan responded to an enquiry on this subject thus: “I wrote a two-parter called The Children of January. It was to be a season closer, not a series termination. But the BBC decided in mid-season that the show had run its course and, in the middle eighties, I think they were right. But I loved my episode, which was delivered late in 1985. I created a race of runaway proto-humanoids called the Z'ros, sort of 'human bees', of which I still have the fondest nightmares. The Children of January, incidentally, refers to renegade outcasts of a dawning 'parallel universe' civilisation that was abandoned”.

Callan has continued to write for Television, including the popular ITV series Cluedo (television) and the RTE drama Templewood.

Film

Michael Feeney Callan made a significant contribution to the regeneration of the film industry in Ireland within the 1980s. Joining Morgan O'Sullivan's pioneering production set-up, Callan collaborated in a strategy to acquire the defunct National Film Studios (as Ardmore studios was then named), alter film investment law and attract Hollywood-based co-production into Ireland.

Throughout the eighties, Callan worked with O'Sullivan, forging a bridgehead at the renamed Ardmore Studios and brought in partnership with the NEA and MTM Hollywood in November 1986.

Callan, in the 1990s, took on directing work and focussed on documentary film-making. His directorial debut was with the light 6 part series My Riviera, in which Roger Moore, James Coburn, Charles Aznavour and Joan Collins visited their favourite places on the Cote d'Azur, an area Callan has enjoyed since the 1970s.

After a short spell honing his skills during the early days of RTE’s Crimeline, directing reconstructions, came one of Callan’s self-expressed career highs, in which he wrote and directed The Beach Boys Today, an immensely well-received road film documenting the final touring days of The Beach Boys.

Following this project, more work in the USA followed, including a documentary entitled Back to Enchantment about animators Gary Goldman and Don Bluth [ An American Tail, Anastasia (1997 film)] which tied in with the Warner Bros. release of Thumbelina (1994 film).

In 1994, Callan was requested to co-write, co-produce and co-direct a film documenting Perry Como’s final concert. Como, by then in his 80th year, was unwell in the week leading to the performance and the performance itself was curtailed as a result but Como was said to be exhilarated by the experience and later commented that he had always wished to end his career in Ireland.

After a year out of the director’s chair, Callan returned with the enormously successful film ‘Luke Kelly: The Performer” which subsequently spent eight weeks at the top of the DVD sales chart in Ireland. The DVD represented a mix of live footage and contributions from contemporaries and the later generation of musicians who have felt his influence and was, according to Callan, “a wonderful fusion, part biography, part musical. It covered so much of the ground I love, the stuff that inspires me. And Luke was an incredibly gifted man.”

In December 2007, Callan joined the advisory board of Irish Film America, joining Jim Sheridan and Paddy Breathnach amongst others, a move which has underlined his commitment to supporting Irish artistic endeavour worldwide.

Coming in 2009 is Callan’s long awaited film about The Dubliners currently titled “Before the Before”.

Painting

Irish Times art critic Aidan Dunne observed that "Callan's work is like a love affair with French painting", and this seems comprehensively accurate, since Callan began painting in Valbonne in the South of France in the eighties and titled his first exhibition, staged at Dublin's Blue Leaf Gallery in May 2002, "A Workshop in France".

Subsequently his work ran on two parallel tracks. His figurative nudes featured in the Blue Leaf's Nude group showing in November 2002, and more detailed figurative work, taken from his heavily illustrated poetry notebooks, was the focus of the "Fifty Fingers" exhibition, which opened in August 2003. In tandem with this figurative work, Callan's experiments in abstract cubism have produced strikingly individual works peopled with statuesque Hellenic imagery.

Callan's next exhibition entitled "Suburbia" is due to be shown in Autumn 2009.

Other Media Work

Callan is a regular guest on RTE Radio 1 programme The Arts Show