Eamon Kelly - the great storyteller of the Abbey - who died on October 24th aged 87, was born on March 30th, 1914, outside the village of Rathmore on the Cork/Kerry border, the first of eight children of carpenter Edmund (Ned) Kelly and his wife Johanna (nΘe Cashman).
As his family then lived in a one-roomed cottage, Eamon Kelly was born in his grandfather's house. At six months old he moved with his family to a council house in Glenflesk. He did not go to the local national school until he was eight as he was considered delicate, and dropped out at 14 to become apprenticed to his father as a carpenter.
Later, he went to night classes at Killarney Technical School where, in 1938, he won a scholarship to Bolton Street College of Technology in Dublin (now DIT, Bolton Street), to train as a woodwork instructor. While there, he also took a course at the old Metropolitan School of Art.
Qualifying as a vocational teacher, Eamon Kelly taught woodwork and technical drawing in the Listowel area for 11 years, from 1940-1951.
He also acted with the amateur Listowel Players, finally taking over as producer from playwright Bryan MacMahon, whom he later named in a radio interview as being, with Abbey director Tomβs MacAnna and playwright Brian Friel, one of the three people who most influenced his life.
In 1951, he married actor Maura O'Sullivan from Listowel, with whom he had fallen in love when she had played Pegeen Mike to his Christy Mahon in Synge's Playboy of the Western World.
Not until he was 37, however, did Eamon Kelly find his true vocation as a professional actor, author and storyteller, when he and his wife together joined the Radio ╔ireann Players (the REP) in 1952. Yet soon he was to become known the length and breadth of Ireland for his storytelling, a talent first discovered by Radio ╔ireann's Director of Drama and Variety, Micheβl ╙ hAodha when, after hearing him telling a story at a REP party following Tyrone Guthrie's production of Peer Gynt, gave him his own storytelling programme.
Now Eamon Kelly's death will be universally mourned, for his performances have been acclaimed in London, Edinburgh, New York, St Petersburg and Moscow.
Eamon Kelly was 50 by time he got his first professional stage role. That was in 1964 when he was cast as S.B. O'Donnell in Hilton Edwards's production of Philadelphia, Here I Come at the Gaiety Theatre. The role had few lines, for O'Donnell, like Eamon Kelly's own father, was a man of few words, but it was a defining one and, when the production transferred to Broadway in 1966, he was nominated for a Tony Award, also receiving the New York Critics' Award for best supporting actor. After a year's run on Broadway, the play toured America and went to London before touring the UK for six months.
Returning home, Eamon Kelly joined the Abbey, his first appearance being as An Pisc∅n Piaclach in An BΘal Bocht, which opened the new Peacock Theatre in July 1967. Since then his many appearances in plays at the Abbey in both English and Irish include Tomβs MacAnna's revival of Philadelphia, Here I Come in 1972 as well as The Playboy of the Western World, Kolbe, Translations, The Quare Fellow, The Cherry Orchard, The Man From Clare and Boss Grady's Boys, in his research for which he visited a mental institution to observe the mildly disturbed.
He went to Russia as Dandy in the Abbey production of The Field and to the Edinburgh Festival with King Oedipus, as well as playing in the Old Vic in Patrick Mason's production of The Well of the Saints. He performed in the Abbey or Peacock in everything from Shakespeare (playing Old Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice, 1984) to James Joyce (playing Bloom's father in Ulysses in Nightown, 1990), playing Brother Duffy in Neil Donnelly's award-winning Silver Dollar Boys and Pozzo in Waiting For Godot with Peter O'Toole and Donal McCann.
Perhaps his most memorable roles, however, were as Pats Bacock in J.B. Keane's Sive, in the two-hander adapted for him and his wife from the book The Tailor and Ansty (1968) and in Stone Mad, based on Seamus Murphy's book about stone masons, during the course of which he actually carved an inscription on a gravestone.
With Tomβs McAnna he wrote four shows in the Irish Story Theatre series in the Peacock, beginning with ScΘal ScΘala∅ in 1971, but most famous were his own storytelling shows: In My Father's Time, Bless Me Father, The Rub of the Relic, The Story Goes . . ., English That For Me, A Rogue of Low Degree, and Your Humble Servant, later published by the Mercier Press. English That For Me, first performed in the Abbey in 1980 and revived the following year, travelled to the TADA off-Broadway Theatre in 1989.
In various interviews Eamon Kelly said he heard many of his stories in his own home, which was a well-known rambling house, where people congregated at night, hearing many more from the stonemasons, whom he met while working as a carpenter.
Outside the Abbey, he toured in 1981 with the Field Day production of The Three Sisters and the Irish Theatre Company's production of An Baile's Strand and Sharon's Grave. His British productions include Philadelphia Here I Come at the Lyric in 1992, Da at the King's Head and Greenwich theatres and The Coleen Bawn at the Royal Exchange, Manchester. In 1985, he recorded with Rosaleen Linehan an audio-tape, Legends of Ireland, which was part of an Irish Times educational project for primary school children and was subsequently distributed to more than 3,000 schools in the State.
In addition to his Tony Award nomination and New York Critics' Award in 1966, Eamon Kelly was named Kerry Person of the Year in 1984, received a Harvey's Special Services Award in 1986, a National Entertainment Hall of Fame Award in 1988, a Sunday Independent/Irish Life Award in 1991, an honorary doctorate from the National University of Ireland in 1989 and the Abbey's highest honour: a Gradam Amharclann na Mainistreach in 1991.
In The Irish Times in 1976, Eamon Kelly said he wanted to die in harness and, if he began his career late, he certainly performed well into old age. His last part was as Father Willow in Marina Carr's By the Bog of Cats in October 1998, when he was 84. The same year, The Journeyman was published by Marino Books, the sequel to The Apprentice (1995), which between them give a fascinating account of his early life. Some of his stories are also published in the anthology Christmas In Ireland (1989).
Eamon Kelly was a vegetarian and a non-smoker so perhaps, like Bernard Shaw before him, that was a contributory factor to his active old age. He was a good cook and believed, like St Paul, in the merits of a little wine for the stomach's sake.
He never lost his love of nature, taking the greatest pleasure from looking at flowers, birds, bees and animals, so he not only lived life to the full but enjoyed all its fruits. Perhaps that is why he in turn gave such pleasure to thousands all over the world.
Eamon Kelly is survived by his wife Maura, sons, Eoin and Brian, daughter Sineβd, brothers, Johnny and Laurence, and sisters, Hannah and Bridie.
Eamon Kelly: born 1914; died, October 2001