His biggest success, Run for Your Wife (1983), ran for nine years in London's West End and is its longest-running comedy.
[7] In 2000, he appeared in the Last of the Summer Wine episode "Last Post and Pigeon" where he played the role of a wordless and energetic French peasant.
During his tenure the company produced over twenty plays such as Pygmalion (starring Peter O'Toole and John Thaw), Loot and Run For Your Wife.
[10] Cooney's farces combine a traditional British bawdiness with structural complication, as characters leap to assumptions, are forced to pretend to be things that they are not, and often talk at cross-purposes.
In the 2005 New Year Honours, Cooney was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in recognition of his services to drama.