Nick Darke was known within Cornwall as a lobster fisherman, environmental campaigner, and chairman of St Eval Parish Council.
29 Facts About Nick Darke
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Nick Darke's father Temperley Oswald Darke, was a North Cornwall chicken farmer, and a distinguished ornithologist.
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Nick Darke's mother, Betty Cowan, was an actress who performed throughout the UK.
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Nick Darke was raised in, and later moved back to, Porthcothan, where his family had lived for four generations after moving there from Padstow.
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Nick Darke was educated at St Merryn Primary School and Truro Cathedral School, from which he was expelled for getting drunk on sports day.
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Nick Darke was accepted into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art but could not afford the fees; he instead trained as an actor at Rose Bruford College, Kent.
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Nick Darke believed the best advice to learn how to be a playwright was to 'go and be an actor'.
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Nick Darke wrote two plays for the Royal National Theatre, and eight for the Royal Shakespeare Company.
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Kneehigh's London debut, The King Of Prussia, was written by Nick Darke, commissioned by the Donmar Warehouse in 1996.
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Nick Darke wrote Kneehigh's second London show, The Riot, which was commissioned by the National Theatre, Cottesloe, in 1999.
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Nick Darke wrote a Play for Today entitled Farmer's Arms, a comedy western set in the parish of St Merryn, near where he grew up, starring Phillip Jackson, Colin Welland, and Brenda Bruce.
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In 1999, Nick Darke wrote a TV movie called The Bench, starring Geoffrey Hutchings and Leslie Grantham.
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Nick Darke worked with Hutchings twice in the theatre, with one-man, one-act monologue Bud at the Almeida in 1985, and later Hutchings had the central role in The Riot at the National Theatre in 1999.
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Nick Darke wrote, presented, and narrated the film, which his widow Jane Darke filmed and directed.
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Nick Darke himself was a 'wrecker' after moving permanently back home to Porthcothan in 1990.
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Nick Darke claimed his greatest achievement was campaigning North Cornwall District Council to end the mechanical raking of beaches on the North Cornwall coast.
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Nick Darke met painter and documentary filmmaker Jane Darke in Sevenoaks, Kent, in 1979.
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Nick Darke was made a bard of the Cornish Gorsedd in 1996, taking the Bardic name Scryfer Gwaryow.
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Nick Darke suffered a stroke in January 2001, leaving him unable to write and speak.
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Nick Darke died one month after his diagnosis, aged 56, in June 2005.
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The Art of Catching Lobsters, directed and filmed by Jane Nick Darke, with additional camera-work by Molly Dineen, is an account of her husband's death, and the grieving process.
22.
Cheeseman oversaw Nick Darke's move from actor to director and eventually to writer of the annual winter pantomime two years in a row.
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Nick Darke was personally and creatively fascinated by the individual's ability to entirely remake themselves anew, exploring the subject in three of his plays: The Body, The Bogus, and Kissing The Pope.
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Nick Darke was friends with, and hugely influenced by, Cornwall's leading historian John Angarrack, whom Darke made a short documentary film about, named after Angarrack's first book Breaking The Chains.
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Subjects ranged from eco-sabotage, Greek mythology, child soldiers, US geopolitics, Saint Paul, the right-wing lobbying arm of the evangelical Christian movement, domestic abuse, British colonialism, and slavery in Africa, but the bulk of Nick Darke's work, reflected Cornish society and culture, such as tin mining, farming, and fishing.
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Nick Darke had a preoccupation with depicting authentic Cornish characters, based on the people he lived and grew up with.
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Nick Darke's plays 'demand little more than a magic box and a half a dozen versatile actors to transport you from the high seas to revolutionary France in the bat of an eye.
28.
Nick Darke appeared on the Radio 4 programme "Nature".
29.
BBC Radio commemorated the 10th anniversary of his death by rebroadcasting several of Nick Darke's radio plays in June 2015.