AS FINAL encores go, the stage could hardly be grander or the audience more appreciative.
Luminaries of the acting profession, Waterford mayor Jack Walsh and most of the city council along with friends and family gave a fitting send-off to actress Anna Manahan at her funeral Mass yesterday in Waterford Cathedral.
Manahan was born into a theatrical family and died in her native city, but her greatest triumphs, most notably her Tony Award in 1998 for her performance on Broadway in The Beauty Queen of Leenane, were elsewhere. The unprepossessing statuette was placed on her coffin along with a Bible and her photograph.
Manahan died on Sunday at the age of 84. She had yearned for the world of the theatre from the age of seven and would have loved all the fuss, said her friend and local writer-director Jim Nolan who was one of the founders of the Red Kettle Company in the city.
Delivering a well-received eulogy which chronicled her triumphs and disappointment, along with her strengths and foibles, Mr Nolan said she would have revelled in the attention of the last few days.
“The newspaper headlines, the radio and television slots and especially this – a full house, a captive audience, the leading role and centre stage where she always belonged,” he said.
Mr Nolan recalled how Manahan had overcome early setbacks, especially the death of her husband Colm O’Kelly in Egypt just a year after they were married in Waterford Cathedral in 1955.
He said the Tony she won in 1998, relatively late in life, was so deserved because she had worked so hard to attain it. “I like to think that it was also a fitting acknowledgment of all her work,” he added.
However, he said she was also “no saint and she wouldn’t want me kidding you on that score”.
She had an “enormous ego”, he explained, but it was the same ego which protected her when the phone did not ring and the only thing she could cling to was her self-belief.
Among yesterday's congregation was the author of The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Martin McDonagh, who presented a copy of the text of the play as part of the offertory procession, and Garry Hynes, who won a Tony for directing Manahan in that play. Her friend, the actor Des Keogh, paid tribute to her unofficial role as spokeswoman for the elderly of Ireland when the medical cards furore erupted late last year. "She saved my medical card," he said to applause.
Others in attendance included actors Bryan Murray, Jim Bartley, Una Crawford O’Brien, Risteárd Cooper and Phyllis Ryan, the playwright Bernard Farrell, the chairwoman of the Arts Council Pat Moylan and Fr Dermot McCarthy who was head of religious programme at RTÉ for many years.
The mourners were led by her surviving brothers Val and Joe and her nieces and nephews.
Her parish priest Fr Bernard Kennedy said Manahan had been described as the “greatest actress of the 20th century”.
Manahan was afforded one last ovation as the coffin left the church. She was buried at Ballygunner Cemetery.