Gifted actor with string of successes in Ireland and on Broadway

Aideen O'Kelly, who has died aged 78* at the Actors' Fund care home in New Jersey after a long illness, was one of that brilliant generation of young actors including, among others, Sinead Cusack, Niall Toibín, Niall Buggy, Maureen Toal, Donal McCann and Joe Dowling who rejuvenated the Irish theatrical scene in the 1960s and 1970s.

Described this week by both Buggy and Dowling in an identical phrase as “extremely beautiful”, she was gifted with what Buggy describes as “a wonderful voice”.

Sent by Abbey Theatre director Ernest Blyth to the Aran Islands to perfect her Irish, she returned to an Abbey Theatre which, as she recalled in an interview with the journalist Charles Hunter for this newspaper in 1984, was "very closed, very much a seniority system".

Blunt and brutal

She had been, she recalled, given roles “in which I was trying to play a 65-year-old at the age of 18, which was crazy . . . I was afraid to talk to anyone, and nobody talked to me.” She went to Blyth to complain, to be told bluntly and brutally: “Well, we don’t think you have any talent at all.”

Remarkably, she persisted and she began gradually to get leading parts, making her mark notably as Nora Clitheroe in The Plough and the Stars in 1966 in the new Abbey, and particularly as a suberbly cast Pegeen Mike in The Playboy of the Western World in 1968, which, despite a curmudgeonly review from her namesake Seamus O'Kelly in this newspaper, was sufficiently successful to be revived in a Gemini Productions version by Phyllis Ryan for the Limerick Arts Festival of 1971, where its cast memorably included Niall Toibín as the elder Mahon, Maureen Toal as the Widow Quin and Niall Buggy as Christy Mahon.

Buggy describes the effect she had on him as a youth of 22: “She was passionate, a wonderful Pegeen, and [working with her] was a wonderful experience for me … she was a very important person for me as a young actor.”

Joe Dowling, former artistic director of the Abbey Theatre, echoed Buggy’s sentiments, saying O’Kelly had been, with contemporaries like Donal McCann, “inspirational for a lot of us”.

Dowling was to work many times with her after leaving the Abbey himself, notably casting her as the aunt in his acclaimed production of Brian Friel's Philadelphia Here I Come on Broadway with Milo O'Shea in 1991/1992, and as Bessie Burgess in the The Plough and the Stars in London in the mid-1990s.

O'Kelly returned to Dublin's stage in 1984, playing the Mother Superior opposite Jeananne Crowley and Olwyn Fouere in John Peilmeir's controversial hit Agnes Of God, at the Gate Theatre.

Powerful impact

Emigrating to the US in the 1970s after the break-up of her marriage to Eoin Troy, she made a powerful impact on American theatre, winning a Drama Desk Award in 1982 for her portrayal of Emilia in Othello, opposite James Earl Jones and Christopher Plummer, both of whom became close friends, and in Hugh Leonard's A Life, opposite Roy Dotrice a year earlier.

Other notable performances on New York's stages were her casting as Winnie in Samuel Beckett's Happy Days in 1988, when the critic for the New York Times noted her ability to give Beckett's language a distinctively Irish lilt; and her powerful American premiere of Frank McGuinness' Baglady at the huge Symphony Space, where her technical mastery of voice production, and her passion, produced for Niall Buggy, "a wonderful experience" .

Before leaving Ireland, O’Kelly had distinguished herself in both radio and television, winning a Jacob’s Award as Best Actress in 1970.

Later film work included roles in films alongside Michael Douglas, Gwyneth Paltrow, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Connery and Dustin Hoffman.

In the United States she converted to Judaism, as her close friend the writer and actor, Malachy McCourt explained: “she said it was a revelation to her, the humanity of Judaism, and the acceptance of the human condition . . . she had found a rabbi who [in her own words] had a spirituality, compassion and humanity she had never found in any Catholic clergy”.

Aideen O’Kelly was one of two daughters of Dermod O’Kelly, an accountant who was the company secretary of the Dock Milling Company in Dublin, and Florence Ledwidge, an official of the Dublin Gas Company.

She grew up in the Dublin suburb of Dalkey. She is survived by her four children, Judith, Orla, Kevin and David, and by her sister, Emer, theatre critic of the Sunday Independent.

*This article was edited on May 27th, 2015