Hit-run victim an ‘actor’s actor,’ devout Joyce fan: Irish-American actor, Mike Toner, has been involved in a very serious hit and run accident in Center City on Tuesday, June 9th.

Anyone with information about the hit-and-run is being asked to call 215-685-3180 or 215-686-8477 (TIPS).

Toner, of the 4300 block of Vista Street in Holmesburg, has appeared in a number of theatrical productions here and in New York, according to online biographies.

In a 1988 interview with The Inquirer, Toner, a Mayfair native who graduated from what is now La Salle University, said he had carved out a niche playing Irish characters.

At that time, he had created two one-man shows. One was a compilation of selections from the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett called Beginning to End. The other was An Evening with Mr. Dooley, based on the fictitious Irish American colloquial philosophizer created by the Chicago journalist Finley Peter Dunne in the late 1800s.

“I sort of subspecialize as an actor in the dramatization of Irish and Celtic literature and characters,” Toner said.

“When I’m dramatizing Irish literature, poetry, or fiction, or any of the Celtic – Scottish, Welsh, Cornish, Manx – it gives me such a depth of intellectual and emotional experience to work with,” he said. “It’s very rich material, I find, for actors. It really helps me expand my scope and depth.”

He also has been a reader of Joyce’s Ulysses at the annual June 16 celebration of Bloomsday at the Rosenbach Museum.
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