John Kavanagh (born 1946) is an Irish actor who has acted on the stage, in over twenty films including Cal (1984), Braveheart (1995) and Alexander (2004), and on television.

That same year, he played another small role in the World War II film The McKenzie Break (1970), about a POW camp in Scotland whose prisoners are preparing an escape.

A singer as well as an actor, Kavanagh played the lead in the Irish stage production of Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris in the 1970s (alongside his sister Anne Bushnell).

Kavanagh then guest-starred in the Sharpe series (starring Sean Bean and Hugh Fraser), where he played the holy man Father Michael Curtis.

[1] Kavanagh next acted in Some Mother's Son (1996), a prison film written by Jim Sheridan, and reunited with Brenda Fricker in Pete's Meteor (1998).

Kavanagh played Cardinal Campeggio, who presides over the court that is to rule on Henry VIII's petition for an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon.