Mark McKinney

Mark McKinney
McKinney holding a producer credit for The 1 Second Film in September 2004
Born	Mark Douglas Brown McKinney June 26, 1959 (1959-06-26) (age 50) Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Other name(s)	The Chicken Lady, or Head Crusher

Mark Douglas Brown McKinney (born June 26, 1959) is a Canadian comedian and actor, best known for his work in the long-running sketch comedy troupe The Kids in the Hall. Following the run of their television series (1989 to 1995) and feature film (Brain Candy), he went on to star in Saturday Night Live from 1995 to 1997. From 2003 to 2006, he co-created, wrote and starred in the acclaimed mini-series Slings and Arrows, a TV show about a Canadian theatre company struggling to survive while a crazy genius director haunted by his dead mentor helps the actors find authenticity in their acting.

Early life

McKinney was born in Ottawa, the son of Chloe, an architectural writer, and Russell McKinney, a diplomat.^[1] Because of his father's career, he did a lot of traveling when he was young. Some of the places he lived while growing up were Trinidad, Paris, Mexico, and Washington, D.C. He also attended Trinity College School, a boarding school in Port Hope, Ontario. For a short while, McKinney was a student at Memorial University of Newfoundland where he was a political science major.

Acting career

The Kids in the Hall at the 2008 the Toronto International Film Festival

The Kids in the Hall

He started doing comedy with the Loose Moose Theatre Company. There, Mark met Bruce McCulloch. Together they formed a comedy team called, “The Audience.” Eventually, Mark and Bruce moved to Toronto, and met Dave Foley and Kevin McDonald. Dave and Kevin were in the process of forming a comedy troupe. Along with Scott Thompson, who joined after coming to a stage show, and producer Lorne Michaels, The Kids in the Hall was formed in 1989.

Notable "Kids" characters played by McKinney include the Chicken Lady, Darill (pronounced da-RILL), bluesman Mississippi Gary, and Mr. Tyzik the Headcrusher, an embittered Eastern European who pretends to crush the heads of passersby between his thumb and forefinger.

McKinney is a versatile member, who adopts countless different voices, accents, and personalities to match each bizarre skit.

Saturday Night Live

After the end of Kids in the Hall, McKinney joined the cast of another Lorne Michaels sketch comedy show, Saturday Night Live in the middle of the 1994-1995 season (season 20) as a repertory player. McKinney survived the cast overhaul that occurred at the end of season 20 (which was done to save the show from cancellation due to low ratings and harsh criticism over the show's decline in quality during that season) and stayed on SNL until the end of the 1996-1997 (season 22). During his time on SNL, McKinney had six recurring characters (some of note include Ian Daglers from "Scottish Soccer Hooligan Weekly", Melanie [an ugly Catholic schoolgirl, a character carried over from Kids in the Hall], and Lucien Callow, a fop often paired with David Koechner's fop character Fagan) and 27 celebrity impersonations (some of note include Mel Gibson, Barney Frank, Al Gore, former SNL bandleader and castmember Paul Shaffer, Jim Carrey, Lance Ito, Tim Robbins, Steve Forbes, Wolf Blitzer, Bill Gates, and Ellen DeGeneres) [1].

Movie appearances

He has appeared in several films, including the SNL spinoffs Superstar, The Ladies Man and A Night at the Roxbury. McKinney also starred opposite Isabella Rossellini in Guy Maddin's acclaimed tragicomedy The Saddest Music in the World. He also appeared in the Spice Girls' movie Spiceworld.

McKinney cowrote and starred in the Kids in the Hall movie Brain Candy, in which, among other roles, he spoofed SNL and KITH executive producer Lorne Michaels.

Theater

His Theater appearances include 'The Ugly Man' with One Yellow Rabbit at the Edinburgh Fringe festival & Glasgow. He was in the cast of The Roundabout theater production of 'Flea in her ear' and David Lindsay Abaire's 'Fuddy Meers' for the Manhattan theater club. During the fall of 2001 McKinney performed the one-man show "Fully Committed" at the Wintergarden theater in Toronto and again in the summer of 2002 at the Centaur Theater in Montreal, Canada.^[2]

Latest appearances

His latest appearances on television have been as a cast member on the CBC comedy Hatching, Matching, and Dispatching, the first season of Robson Arms, as well as on the hit Canadian comedy Corner Gas, as an American who came to Dog River by accident.

From 2003 to 2006, he co-created, co-wrote and starred in the acclaimed dramedy TV mini-series Slings and Arrows, about the backstage goings-on in a Canadian Shakespearean theatre company struggling with financial problems as they rehearse and present various productions. Add to this the oddly realistic maneuvering of the theater company's quirky business managers, actors, directors and corporate sponsors, and you have a witty, funny and poignant story.

In 2006-7 he both worked as a story editor on and a recurring role as Andy Mackinaw in, NBC's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, a humorless widowed writer/story editor for the show-within-a-show.^[3]

As well, he directed and appeared on the CBC Radio post-apocalyptic comedy Steve, The First and its sequel, Steve, The Second, for his friend Matt Watts.

In the summer of 2007 he became the producer and executive story editor of Less Than Kind, a half hour comedy starring Maury Chaykin.

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Mark McKinney

• Mark McKinney at the Internet Movie Database