Why Ned Dowd is on this page

Heritage: Brother of the screenwriter Nancy Dowd (already in the directory). Dowd-surname carrier; the cited Wikipedia articles for Ned and Nancy do not document Irish ancestry.

Ned Dowd (born 1950) is an American actor, line producer and former minor-league professional hockey player whose hockey experiences directly inspired his sister Nancy Dowd’s screenplay for the cult sports comedy *Slap Shot* (1977). Nancy Dowd spent a month with his Johnstown Jets team doing research for the film and worked from notes and tape recordings he made for her in the team’s locker room and on the team bus. Ned Dowd appeared in *Slap Shot* itself as the notorious goon hockey player Ogie Ogelthorpe, and from that role launched a long Hollywood character-acting and assistant-directing career, eventually settling into work as a line producer and second-unit director on a string of major film productions. He is brother to Nancy Dowd; cross-link the two profiles in the directory’s “see also” field.

Family connections

• sister: Nancy Dowd

Heritage notes

Family root: United States — diaspora-unconfirmed-surname-only.

The directory threads Ned Dowd back to the O'Dubhda clan story via the surname-variants reality — the same family carried these spellings as it scattered. See the septs and the diaspora for the wider pattern, or the Clan DNA Project for the genetic connections being mapped now.