When Deirdre O'Connell, actor, director, drama teacher and artistic director of the Focus Theatre, died at her home on June 9th, just a week short of her 62nd birthday, she did so knowing that her life's work had been both completed and recorded.
Born Eleanore Deirdre O'Connell on June 16th, 1939 in the South Bronx district of New York, she and her four siblings were the third generation of their family to move both ways between Ireland and the US. Her father, Michael J.O'Connell, was born in Glenagola, Co Sligo and her mother Nellie (nΘe Taasse) came from Banteer, Co Cork. When they emigrated to the US, however, it was only following in the footsteps of both their parents, who had later returned to Ireland, just as they in turn would do, late in life, to live in Bray, Co Wicklow.
Deirdre O'Connell's father had various occupations, including working in Brooklyn Navy Yard and assisting prisoners as a correction officer. He and his wife encouraged their daughter to pursue her passion for the theatre when on leaving school, she won a scholarship for night classes at Erwin Piscator's New York Dramatic Workshop. Moving into a flat, she found her two flatmates were Jane Fonda and Barbra Streisand, the latter keeping in touch with her over the years by telephone and many postcards, carefully kept at her home.
During her final year at the workshop, Deirdre O'Connell began studying at the famous Actors' Studio, run by Lee Strasberg, where her teachers also included Allen Miller and Peggy Furey, while a fellow student was Marilyn Monroe. While in New York she performed both on and off Broadway in plays by Strindberg, Chekov, Synge, O'Neill and Thornton Wilder.
She had, however, always intended to return home, as she considered Ireland to be, having last been there at the age of 17. She had then called on Ursula White-Lennon who ran a school of acting. She had been told to return when she was trained and, six years later, did so to found in May 1963, the Stanislavski Studio at the Pocket Theatre in Ely Place then under the directorship of White-Lennon.
Based on the theatrical theory and techniques of Constantin Stanislavski, founder of the Moscow Art Theatre, the aim of the studio was to train a permanent company of actors and directors, who would present plays at the Ely Place premises. Unfortunately, after the first production, an adaptation of Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf called For Madmen Only, the premises was sold and the studio, following brief stays in Westland Row and Kildare Street, moved to the Pike Theatre until it closed in 1964. Once more theatreless, Deirdre O'Connell, who was also a noted ballad and folk singer and had sung with Joan Baez and Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival, then embarked on a period of frantic fund-raising by singing in London. She kept the studio alive in temporary premises in Fitzwilliam Square by flying back to Dublin at weekends.
It was then that she met Luke Kelly, whom she married on June 21st, 1965, in O'Donoghue's of Merrion Row, which was almost the headquarters of The Dubliners. He put up 80 per cent of the money to obtain and convert the disused factory at 6 Pembroke Place, which became the Focus Theatre. Mick McCarthy, whose Embankment at Tallaght had also hosted appearances by Deirdre O'Connell's company, provided much of the remainder in building materials. On September 29th, 1967 the new 65-seater theatre opened with Doris Lessing's Play With a Tiger, directed by Deirdre O'Connell, designed by John Behan and with a cast which included the director herself as well as Tom Hickey, who had trained at the studio while working as a cameraman in RT╔ Television.
The cast also included Tim McDonnell, whose adaptation for the Focus of Gogul's Diary of a Madman with himself in the lead became an award-winning film, directed by Ronan O'Leary, with Deirdre O'Connell in her only fiction film role as Mavra.
Since 1967, over 250 productions have been staged at the Focus of plays by internationally-famous writers such as Arthur Miller, Jean-Paul Sartre, Samuel Beckett, Ibsen and Camus.
There has also been much work by Irish playwrights, including a unique occasion when prisoners from the pre-release training unit attached to Mountjoy Gaol, calling themselves the Exit Theatre Group, appeared at the Focus during the 1983 Dublin Theatre Festival in Miriam Gallagher's Fancy Footwork.
Among the most successful of Deirdre O'Connell's students, apart from Tom Hickey, were Gabriel Byrne and Johnny Murphy, and all three pay tribute to their teacher in Ronan O'Leary's still-to-be-screened documentary about the Focus, Hold the Passion. It was completed shortly before her death and shows her acting, teaching and directing techniques and explains her understanding of the Stanislavski/Lee Strasberg method. Thus her teaching will live on after her and, as she says in the film: "It is the deepest form of human communication that I know I have to give...It is an act of love."
A woman of single-minded determination and integrity, Deirdre O'Connell always wore black and looked, as Gabriel Byrne says in the documentary, like something out of a Chekov play. Pursuing her ideal remorselessly, she turned down the offer of a role in a Marlon Brando film, and the part of Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in the Gaiety, in order to concentrate on the Focus. Moreover, this attitude denied her other opportunities, for Irish Actors' Equity would not grant her membership because she had not performed in any of the recognised professional theatres, the Focus being too small to operate under an Equity contract. This resulted in Equity's refusal to allow her to accept the role in Antigone, when Shelah Richards directed it for RT╔ television.
But, as she says in the film: "I'll never change and there's no point in trying to change me!"
She is survived by brothers, Emmett and Kevin; and sisters Geraldine and Gretta.
Deirdre O'Connell: born 1939; died, June 2001