Adrian Vale, the RTE television drama script-editor in the 1960s and 1970s who died on July 14th aged 72, was of Cornish-Irish extraction - his maternal grandmother was a Hodnett, born in Cornwall of Irish parents. He was born in Great Yarmouth, in 1928, where his father was a parson, and soon afterwards they moved to a parish in London's East End.
His later career as an actor/ writer was already in evidence by the age of 10, when, as Michael Smart, a friend from those days recalls, he co-staged a play called The Shadow of the Swastika with his toy theatre.
He was educated at the City of London School. When war broke out in September 1939 the school was evacuated to Marlborough - where the evacuees shared the buildings with the public school boys, but had virtually no contact with them. "Perhaps they didn't know what to make of us - a strange race of Londoners, but hardly Cockney," reflects Smart. Adrian Vale won an Exhibition at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge where he went on to read Classics; he always said he spent more time with "the Footlights" (the university's renowned drama group) than studying - and he became its president in 1950.
After Cambridge, he worked as an actor, and later as a script agent with the agency, MCA (he had just got married and felt he ought to have "a proper job"). He'd moved onto working as a television drama script-editor when he was asked by Hilton Edwards to come to Ireland, to work in RTE's TV drama department - in 1961. For the next 17 years, he was to work with many writers, and on dozens of plays, in Dublin.
He also dramatised works for the Gate and Abbey theatres, and was proud to have had four of his own productions staged in the Dublin Theatre Festival (including Inquiry at Lisieux and The Real Charlotte) - as well as enjoying the work he did for RTE radio. His association with Terence de Vere White, the former literary editor of The Irish Times and Rex Mackey, the eminent senior counsel, who died last November, among others, led to lasting friendships.
Apart from his work in broadcasting, he was a reviewer of fiction with The Irish Times for eight years, and with the magazine, Hibernia, for four. In addition, he was for 10 years a reader for the annual Irish Life stage-play competition - a huge undertaking, and one he pursued with typical diligence and a sense of fair play.
Adrian Vale met his actress wife, Angela Jenkins, while she was a RADA student, attempting to stage-manage a fringe show in London. Disaster threatened, until he came in to rescue the show and ran off with his assistant - though not straightaway: he patiently sat through two years of Angela's RADA productions, and then when she went to Theatre Royal, York as juvenile lead, he travelled to see her until she agreed to marry him; it was a real "theatre" wedding. That was 1955. Judith, the first of their five daughters, was born the following year, a source of great joy, despite the fact that she was handicapped.
When Adrian Vale and Angela first arrived in Dun Laoghaire in 1961 with little Judith and their miniature dachshund, they didn't know a soul - although they were later to discover their Co. Cork cousins, the Hodnetts, from Skibbereen.
During 17 "very happy years" in Ireland, they managed to live in some remarkable houses - from "Prisma", the highest house in Dalkey where the identical twins, Deborah and Tessa were born, to the lowest, with one of the best views in Europe, "Dolphin Cottage", opposite Dalkey Island.
And when after several years, this proved unsafe for two inquisitive little girls - they had the sea-wall and a sheer drop outside their backdoor - they discovered and fell in love with a big, old house, "Lane End" in Glenageary. This now became home for the Vale family, with the later addition of Kate, and finally Claudia, who has recently returned to live in Dublin.
His daughters are convinced they owe a great deal to their father, as he always encouraged them in whatever they wanted to do: Deborah and Tessa followed in their parents' footsteps and became actresses. Kate is a painter. And the youngest, Claudia, is a student counsellor.
Adrian Vale had occasional forays back into the professional theatre, while in Ireland, such as when he and Angela appeared together in An Evening with Chekhov. And he enjoyed such a huge personal success as the evil Sir Francis Levison in the melodrama, East Lynne, that Angela was afraid he might give up his steady job at RTE.
Since returning to England in the late 1970s, he worked for some time at the BBC, and was then director of studies for a correspondence writing school. In later years, he had many of his poems published. He shared a love of ancient Rome with his nine year old grandson, Louis - and particularly enjoyed having another male in the family. Adrian Vale is remembered by his friends and former colleagues - on both sides of the Irish Sea - as an endlessly patient and good-natured man. He and Angela were to have celebrated their 45th wedding anniversary in October.
Adrian Vale: born 1928; died, July 2000