Billy Connolly, photographed for the April 1994 issue of Glasgow City Council's newspaper The Bulletin on a visit to the Bigger Picture exhibition at McLellan Galleries. Connolly was the narrator for the BBC Scotland television series on Scottish art, and the exhibition followed up its success by displaying one of the most impressive and extensive collections of Scottish paintings ever assembled.
Born in Anderston, Billy Connolly is one of the world's best-known Glaswegians, having achieved fame as a folk musician; a comedian; an actor on stage, screen, and television and a playwright.
Connolly gave up his job as a welder in a Clyde shipyard and founded the folk group The Humblebums with Tam Harvey and later with Gerry Rafferty. As his jokes became more popular than the music, Connolly went solo in 1971. His irreverent stand-up routines brought international success, and Hollywood film and TV roles. In 1997 he won critical acclaim for his role as Queen Victoria's companion in the film Mrs. Brown. His colourful life story was told in a best-seller biography, Billy, written by his second wife Pamela Stephenson.
Reference: Bulletin photographs, Box 11, April 1994
Reproduced with the permission of Glasgow City Council, Libraries Information and Learning
Keywords:
actors, art, banjo players, BBC Scotland, Bigger Picture, Billy, Bulletin, comedians, comedy, folk singers, Humblebums, McLellan Galleries, Mrs Brown, musicians, narrators, paintings, playwrights, welders