First night review of ‘Kenny’ the movie
Dalglish’s wife reveals torment over Hillsborough in new film
IT IS in a grainy piece of home video footage, from Christmas Day in 1990, that a door is opened to the unbearable stress and strain. Behind the hand-held camera, the voice of Kenny Dalglish is heard shouting ‘OK! OK!’, but he doesn’t sound a happy man as he beckons his children into the living room of their house to open their presents.
This should be the most joyful day of the year but you can see in the faces of the family who adore him that all is not right.
You then hear Dalglish, his voice strained, again, almost snapping at one of his daughters: ‘Lynsey! Don’t take that off!’
Over the top of this scene, speaking from the present, Marina Dalglish provides a frank insight about her husband; 20 months after the horrors of the Hillsborough tragedy, when 96 Liverpool supporters needlessly perished, she candidly tells us Kenny was ‘falling apart, he was unbearable to live with’.
This is just one of many powerful and emotional chapters from the biopic — sensitively directed by Stewart Sugg — of one of the greatest figures to grace the British game, which premiered last night and will be released in cinemas tomorrow.
Those dark events from April 15, 1989 form a significant part of the narrative and one of the most poignant scenes comes towards the end when he recalls the day he took his eldest daughter, Kelly, and son, Paul, to Anfield to survey the tributes that had turned the pitch into a carpet of flowers.
Recounting that experience with two of his children, his eyes moisten and his voice cracks. Like the footage from Christmas Day, this is something we have never seen.
‘They wanted to go; I wanted to take them,’ he says, his voice trailing off as he looks away to gain his composure. ‘For them, it was sad; for us it was sad . . . It was just something that had to be done.’
For 27 years, Dalglish has held himself together in public; during all those funerals he attended and the hospital visits he made. He even did so in one clip when he stands at the top of a country lane and looks down into the valley where Sheffield Wednesday’s stadium towers in the distance. He will never go back there.
Dalglish was the boy who came from ordinary beginnings in Glasgow and ended up living a life in football that was anything but ordinary, witnessing at first hand three of the most horrific disasters the sport has known.
In January 1971, he was a Rangers fan standing on the terraces when 66 fans died in a tragic accident at Ibrox — ‘There but for the grace of God, go I’, he says — and in 1985 he was a player when 39 mainly Juventus fans were killed at the Heysel Stadium before the European Cup final. Then, of course, he was Liverpool manager at Hillsborough in 1989. Those events are covered in significant detail but it does not make the film morbid. It couldn’t do. No focus on the life and times of Dalglish could avoid the joy he brought to those Celtic and Liverpool fans who adored him when a ball was at his feet.
Here was a man who commanded a British record transfer fee (£440,000) when he crossed the border in 1977. Twelve months later, he had capped his first year in England by scoring the winning goal in the European Cup final. His first season as a manager (1985-86) ended with Liverpool doing the Double.
In total, there were 29 honours as a player, with a further 13 — including the Premier League title with Blackburn in 1994 — as a manager, but the Dalglish story cannot be defined solely by football and that is perfectly captured in these 90 minutes.
‘Only Kenny can tell us what that journey was really like,’ says Professor Phil Scraton, whose efforts helped expose what had really happened at Hillsborough. ‘Marina and Kenny Dalglish were real humanitarians in the face of dreadful adversity. That’s why they are so respected in our city.’ Kenny is in cinemas tomorrow and out on DVD on Monday.