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KOP A TRULY GREAT ROLE AS LIVERPOOL MANAGER BILL SHANKLY

HERO STATUS: Bill Shankly

Thursday January 31,2008

By Brian Swanson

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IT’S not be a matter of life and death – for the team behind a new tribute to Bill Shankly, their quest is “much more important than that”.

During his lifetime, the great Liverpool manager, the Scot who was a hero to the Kop fans, was irreplaceable.

Now, more than a quarter of a century after his death, writer and Liverpool fan Andrew Sherlock is trying to do what many believe is impossible – find an actor to play the man who valued football above all else for a one-man tribute show.

An Audience with Shankly will have its Scottish premiere at the Dumfries and Galloway Arts Festival in May after opening at Liverpool Olympia on April 24. Andrew, 43, who will also direct the play, said: “It’s got to be exactly right, which means a frighteningly real recreation of the man himself. He will have to have that flinty, determined look that Shankly had, and, believe me, that will be a challenge.

“Whoever gets this part will not be just a soundalike or a lookalike, he will have to be Shankly. When he walks on stage, we want people in the audience to think, ‘that’s him,’ even fans who know all about him but never met the man.”

As part of his research, Andrew visited the former mining village of Glenbuck in Ayrshire, where Shankly was born in 1913. He said: “They are as proud of him there as we are in Liverpool, and quite right too.

Shankly was, after all, one of the greatest football managers of all time. Every second person we met in Glenbuck claimed to be related to him – some might even have been.”

Shankly first took charge at Liverpool in l959 and the play – to be 90 minutes long, with oranges at half-time – will reflect his team’s glory days of the Sixties and Seventies.

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