MAUREEN TOAL: THE ACTOR Maureen Toal, who has died aged 80, was best known for her role as Teasy McDaid in the RTÉ soap Glenroe. This, however, was only one of many roles she played during a distinguished career that spanned six decades and took her to Broadway and the West End.
Frank McGuinness and John B Keane both wrote plays especially for her. While The Change in Mame Fadden was not Keane’s best, McGuinness’s Baglady, about an elderly victim of child abuse, attracted critical and popular acclaim.
Reviewing the premiere in 1985 David Nowlan wrote in this newspaper: “Maureen Toal plays with heart-wrenching power, now chatty, now distraught, alternately nostalgic and haunted, finally drained and somehow purified. She has seen a life drown and, with her, we see how water may cleanse and how it may destroy. She, with this beautiful play, excellently directed, must move a stone to tears.”
Toal regarded Baglady as a career highlight: “Frank McGuinness reaches deep inside and pulls it right out of you. That play had an extraordinary effect on me.”
Born in Dublin in 1931, she was the daughter of Thomas and Mary Toal. She grew up in Clontarf and was educated at St John the Baptist national school and Scoil Chaitríona on Eccles Street.
She joined the Abbey theatre in 1946, and her first role was as Máire Seoighe in Cara an Phobail, by M Ó Droighneáin, after Lady Gregory. In 1949 she made an early London appearance, in MJ Molloy’s The King of Friday’s Men, at the Lyric theatre, Hammersmith.
Three years later, and married to Milo O’Shea, she toured Ireland and the US with the Ronald Ibbs theatre company. She appeared in many productions with her husband, including Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke (1954).
“We helped each other professionally,” she said of her stage partnership with O’Shea. “Milo is a great actor. But he’s especially great in comedy. And I was a good ‘feed’ to him, like Maureen Potter was to Jimmy O’Dea.”
The couple divorced in 1974. She subsequently shared her life with the actor Eoin Ó Súilleabháin, and cared for him selflessly during the illness that blighted the last 14 years of his life.
With Norman Rodway and Godfrey Quigley she was one of the mainstays of the Globe theatre company in the 1950s, and she also acted with Orion productions in venues such as the Eblana theatre at Busáras and the Gas Company theatre in Dún Laoghaire.
She regularly appeared at the Gate theatre, in productions such as She Stoops to Conquer (1958), GP Gallivan’s Decision at Easter (1959) and Brian Friel’s Crystal and Fox, with Cyril Cusack (1968). She later took the lead in Friel’s Loves of Cass Maguire at the Abbey (1978).
Also at the Abbey she twice performed in productions of Seán O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, playing Mrs Tancred in 1979 and Maisie Madigan in 1980. And she played Mrs Henderson in several runs of The Shadow of a Gunman during the 1980s.
She made her television debut in a BBC production of Juno in 1951. Her appearance in James Douglas’s Babby Joe on Telefís Éireann in 1966 prompted Irish Times critic Ken Gray to write: “Miss Toal has few equals when it comes to portraying the shop-soiled glamour girl; she does it with an underlying wistfulness that arouses deep empathy.”
In the 1980s she played Mrs McFee in the Channel 4 series The Irish RM. And a decade later, as Teasy McDaid, she entered the licensed trade in Glenroe.
Her first film appearance was in Rooney (1958), the story of a Dublin dustman who helps Kilkenny’s hurlers to victory over Tipperary in the all-Ireland final. This was followed by A Guy called Caesar (1962), and she also appeared in Joseph Strick’s Ulysses (1967).
An all-rounder, she took part in revues at the Pike theatre, and appeared in musicals, pantomimes and variety shows. And she toured with the Irish Theatre Company.
In 1975 radio critic Mary Leland singled out a broadcast by Toal for special mention: “I had not realised how effective she is on radio. She uses her voice as an artist uses his brush, not just for structures but for intonation, shadow, nuance, atmosphere. In a painting it is what makes you buy; in a voice you want to go on listening.”
She was a veteran of many premieres including Hugh Leonard’s A Life (1980), which transferred from the Abbey to the Old Vic, London, and Sebastian Barry’s Boss Grady’s Boys (1988). She also soldiered bravely in Crock, the ill-fated adaptation of James Stephens’s Crock of Gold in 1974
In 1980, at the inaugural Irish theatre awards show, she won the award for best performance by an actress. In 1995 RTÉ television screened a special Lifeline tribute, and in 2010 she was awarded an honorary doctorate in literature by UCD.
She is survived by her son Colm O’Shea.
Maureen Toal: born September 7th, 1931; died August 24th, 2012