Joseph Michael Kerrigan (December 16, 1884 - April 29, 1964), better known as J. M. Kerrigan, born in Dublin, Ireland, was an Irish character actor who had very little screen time in movies which he starred as minor roles, such as the "First Drayman" in Merely Mary Ann (1931) with Janet Gaynor. One of his most recognizable minor roles in Gone with the Wind (1939), when he played John Gallegher, the seemly jovial mill owner who whips his convict labor in to "co-operation". He also appeared in Walt Disney's 1954 famous film version of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in a minor role at the beginning of the film.
Kerrigan worked as a newspaper reporter until 1907 when he joined the famous Abbey Players. There he becams a stalwart, appearing in plays by Lady Gregory, John Millington Synge, William Butler Yeats, and Sean O'Casey (for whom he played the role of Jimmy Farrell in The Playboy of the Western World. His first screen appearance was in the silent film Food of Love in 1916. By the 1920s he was appearing on Broadway, often in plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Sheridan. He settled permanently in Hollywood in 1935, having been recruited along with several other Abbey performers, to appear in John Ford's The Informer. In that film and in Ford's The Long Voyage Home he plays similar roles, that of a leach who attaches himself to men until they run out of money. Perhaps his best known role was in The General Died at Dawn, in which he steals scenes from Gary Cooper, Madeleine Carroll, and William Frawley. In it he plays a sinister little petty thief who, holding a gun on Cooper, says, "I may be fat, but I'm agile." Regrettably, in the forties and fifties he rarely got good parts and eventually became little more that a bit player.
Despite having small roles, Kerrigan has a "Star" on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6621 Hollywood Blvd.
He died in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California on April, 29, 1964.
Elfin character player who, sometimes ornery, sometimes self-righteous and usually puffin' away on his pipe, would likely elude the mischief he made for others! (Rather like his countryman Barry Fitzgerald, with a bit more shiftiness - a bit more of a mean streak perhaps.)
