She was tiny - four foot eleven and a half, to be precise - but her huge voice and super-exuberant presence filled the stage, transfixing audiences for generations. "Well, we were taught to project," she once said. "You couldn't always rely on a microphone."
For many, the childhood experience of Maureen Potter, who died yesterday at the age of 79, was an unforgettable introduction to the magic of theatre. Her laughter was irrepressible, irresistible. She could mimic. She could poke fun hilariously at the great and good. She could sing. Her dancing energy, even later, at an age when most performers have hung up their dancing shoes, was infectious. Although the quintessential Dub - a northsider and proud of it - she had a quality that reached out to urban and rural Ireland, and to young and old, inspiring an affection virtually without match.
And within her profession yesterday there was also an aching sense of their loss, not just of a consummate professional, but of the most generous of their own, a friend and mentor to so many.
Although her chosen vehicle was mainly the knock-about of pantomime, sketches, song and dance, Maureen Potter is up with the greats of the "serious" Irish stage, the Micheál MacLiammóirs and Siobhán McKennas. And when she turned her hand to serious drama, as she did, for example in memorable productions of O'Casey, she proved that her extraordinary sense of timing was no comic's turn but the essence of a great actor.
Maureen Potter claimed that she only agreed to attend her first day of school at the age of five when her mother also enrolled her in dancing classes, and she then never looked back. At seven she was already All-Ireland Junior Irish Dancing champion and had completed her first professional engagement at a hall in Derry. She toured professionally in Britain while still underage, and then in Europe with Jack Hylton's troupe, before returning to Ireland just before the war. Then she auditioned for the great Jimmy O'Dea, the start of a stage relationship that lasted 30 years until his death. It began with Jack and the Beanstalk; as well as guarding the beanstalk, Potter's fairy, in specially tailored morning suit, top hat and unco-operative, stick-on moustache, did an impersonation of popular mayor Alfie Byrne that brought the house down.
Whether it was for the 15 years of Gaels of Laughter in the Gaiety, the pantomimes that were so much part of Christmas, the six years of the RÉ Maureen Potter Show, or the TV later on, few who ever saw her will remember her without a smile crossing their face. That's as Maureen would have wished. "Leave 'em laughing."