McAnally and Masterson later formed Old Quay Productions and presented an assortment of classic plays in the 1960s and 1970s. He made his West End theatre debut in 1962 with
A Nice Bunch of Cheap Flowers and gave a well-received performance as George in ''
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'', opposite
Constance Cummings, at the
Piccadilly Theatre. On television he was a familiar face, often in glossy thriller series like
The Avengers,
Man in a Suitcase and
Strange Report. In 1968 he took the title role in
Spindoe, a series charting the return to power of an English gangster, Alec Spindoe, after a five-year prison term. This was a spin-off from another series,
The Fellows (1967) in which McAnally appeared as the Spindoe character in several episodes. He could render English accents very convincingly. In 1976 McAnally appeared in the
Granada Television daytime series
Crown Court. He played the character of Robert Scard, a
confidence trickster found guilty of
fraud. In 1988, a century after the
Whitechapel Murders, he appeared in the television mini-series
Jack the Ripper. McAnally played
William Gull, a Physician-in-Ordinary to
Queen Victoria, who the program claimed was the killer. McAnally regularly acted in the Abbey Theatre and at Irish festivals, but in the last decade of life he achieved award-winning notice on TV and films. His performance as Cardinal Altamirano in the film
The Mission (1986) earned him
Evening Standard and
BAFTA awards. He earned a
BAFTA Award nomination for his role in the BBC's
A Perfect Spy and the
ScreenPlay drama
Scout in 1988 for the 1987 BAFTA Awards. Then in 1989 he won the 1988 BAFTA for Best Actor for his performance in
A Very British Coup, a role that also brought him a
Jacob's Award, and just three months before his sudden death. In the last year of his life, he portrayed the father of
Christy Brown in the award-winning film
My Left Foot. ==Death==