Agnes Bernelle took an adventurous road through life. It brought her from a comfortable middle class beginning in Germany before the second World War to her last years in Dublin. There were many colourful diversions.
Much loved and admired as a singer, actress and great-hearted survivor of good times and bad, she never ceased to perform, even when sickness would have deterred many a lesser person.
She was born in Berlin in the 1920s, the daughter of Rudolph Bernauer, a Hungarian theatre impresario and writer of successful musicals. Life was easy. The family moved at the centre of the city's thriving artistic life, of Marlene Dietrich and the songs of Brecht and Weill.
Young, talented and beautiful, she seemed destined to have a distinguished career there. But Nazism ended all that. Her father found doors closing to him and, to avoid worse, fled to London. There he supported his family by writing and directing low-budget films.
His daughter went to school there, learned English, and by the time the war started was beginning to appear in satirical revues by an anti-Nazi refugee group.
During the war, too, she met Desmond Leslie, a young Irish RAF pilot, whom she was to marry and who brought her home to his ancestral home, Castle Leslie. It was, she said in her memoirs, The Fun Palace, like stepping back into the 18th century.
Indeed it's hard to imagine a greater contrast than that between the cultivated Mitteleuropean life to which he'd been born and the rackety Anglo-Irish world of old retainers and her eccentric, kilted father-in-law, Sir Shane Leslie, who had been disinherited in favour of his eldest son.
Children followed quickly, but theatrical success always seemed to be a tantalising step away as she struggled to establish herself as an actor. It was in the 1963 Dublin Theatre Festival, at the old Grafton Cinema, that she finally got the recognition she deserved with a one-woman show of the songs of Brecht and Weill.
In this she opened up to a new generation these wonderfully mordant works, which are among the high points of 20th-century popular music. Amazingly, she was to do precisely the same thing a second time nearly 20 years later when she was "discovered" yet again by a succession of singers as diverse as Tom Waits, Marc Almond, Elvis Costello and Marianne Faithfull.
Her marriage to Desmond Leslie ended in 1969, the same year she met her long-time partner Maurice Craig, the architectural historian. Through the years she appeared in plays, wrote her memoirs, made records and was the subject of an RTE documentary, The Berlin of Agnes Bernelle. She worked with all sorts of people, from Orson Welles to Peter Cook, and had friendships with colourful personalities from Claus von Bulow to King Farouk of Egypt.
She performed in many other one-woman shows, most of them devoted to German cabaret songs, including some written by her father, but was wryly disparaging about the fact that it was for these she tended to be best known, even though she had done so much else.
At the end of her life, however, she changed her view on this. "I never used to care at all about cabaret," she said. "The straight theatre was what I wanted. But in the last few years I've looked at this and decided it was rather silly, and I have given it a little more importance in my life."
She took great pride in the new audience whom she had attracted. When she started, she said, those who came to hear her had been mainly middle class and middle-aged. "Now it has totally changed. My audiences on the whole are very, very young. Some of them are the grandchildren of my first audience."
She seemed to carry round with her a large chunk of the history of the 20th century and yet was never pompous or self-important. She was indefatigable, warm and generous.