The Irish actor and cillian murphy wife, vonne McGuinness, have purchased a cinema where the ‘Peaky Blinders’ star used to watch movies as a child.
They will renovate The Phoenix Cinema in Dingle, County Kerry, south-west Ireland next year.
The building had been operating as a dance hall and had been in business for over a century and on the market for three when Murphy and McGuinness purchased the structure. Oppenheimer and Peaky Blinders star Murphy, from Cork, said: I have been visiting films in The Phoenix since I was a boy enjoying my vacations.
My father watched movies at The Phoenix before he married my mother and we have taken our own children to this theatre to watch movies. We acknowledge what the cinema has been to Dingle.” McGuinness added: “We want to open the doors again, develop the further potential of the site, to bring it back into the cultural life of this special town.”
The Phoenix is the sole cinema venue in the tourist section of Dingle Peninsula and were it closed, the other nearest competitor to residents of the town would be in Tralee – approximately 30 miles away.
It began in 1919 and had been reconstructed twice in the subsequent decades after fires had occurred in the structure.
Worries of high costs and low footfall — made worse by the pandemic and tough business terms — led its former owners to close The Phoenix in November 2021.
This year alone Murphy sweep through awards season with a Golden Globe award, a Bafta and an Oscar for his portrayal of the movie’s leading role as Oppenheimer.
The next year, he will be stepping into one of his most popular parts; he will act as Tommy Shelby in Peaky Blinders movie.
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