Paul McGann

Paul John McGann was born in Liverpool on 14 November 1959, into a Roman Catholic family. His ancestors immigrated from Ireland in the mid-19th century, having left due to the Great Famine. His mother, Clare, was a teacher, and his father Joe, a soldier on Gold Beach during D-Day, who died in 1984, was a metallurgist. His cousin, Ritchie Routledge, was in the 1960s band The Cryin' Shames. He has an older brother, Joe, and three younger siblings: brothers Mark and Stephen and sister Clare. All three of his brothers are also actors and the four of them played brothers in the 1995 TV serial The Hanging Gale. That same year, McGann also played Grigori Potemkin in the television film Catherine the Great alongside Mark and Stephen.

McGann attended Cardinal Allen Grammar School in the Liverpool suburb of West Derby. He was 17 and working in a shoe shop when he acted on the advice of one of his teachers and successfully auditioned for a place on the acting course at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. In 1980, the Principal of RADA, Hugh Cruttwell, selected a scene from an adaptation of William Shakespeare's Macbeth, which McGann co-wrote with Bruce Payne, to be performed in front of Queen Elizabeth II in one of her rare visits to the academy. Kenneth Branagh performed a soliloquy from Hamlet at the same event.