You Never Said Goodbye

One morning, sixteen-year-old John McArdle’s father went to work and never came back. Struck down prematurely by a fatal heart attack, the forty-eight-year-old professional soldier left behind a wife and five children to grieve his death.

Now, more than five decades later, award-winning actor John McArdle writes a tender and moving letter to his father that provides an intimate portrait of the impact of his father’s death, how he tried to cope, and how he turned his wild adventures abroad into a successful acting career.

A teenager in Liverpool during the “swinging sixties,” McArdle turned to drugs and alcohol to numb his sadness and provide the illusion that he was experiencing life. As a child, his family had followed his father around the world, so young McArdle decided to go abroad once more and immigrate to Australia.

While in Oz, McArdle worked in the bush, went to a remote island to dodge the draft, and spent time in a New Zealand prison for stowing away on a ship. After five years, he decided to return to England—this time with a wife and baby in tow—and finally fulfill his dream of becoming a professional actor…

Born in Liverpool to an army family, John McArdle was educated both in England and abroad. He left school at age fifteen to work at unskilled jobs and later returned to complete his education as an adult in order to be admitted to drama school.

McArdle earned a diploma in speech and drama before embarking on a successful thirty-year career in acting, for which he received an award for "best actor" from the Royal Television Society in 2002. He also wrote and directed a short film about his grandfather, which was screened at the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles and won awards at the Cannes Film Festival and the Giffoni Film Festival in Italy.

McArdle lives in northwest England with his wife and two children. He also has another son from a previous marriage.