Pauline Flanagan: Pauline Flanagan, who has died aged 78, was one of the finest Irish actresses of her generation. She gave a towering performance in her last role on an Irish stage, as Mommo in Tom Murphy's Bailegangaire, directed by the author, at the Peacock a year ago.
She compared playing the role to climbing Mount Everest. "It is a challenge and a half compared to anything else I have done before. You need to be very careful when you're dealing with the author. Never mind dead letter-perfect, every punctuation point had better be right. But the writing is so layered that if you played in this for a year, you would never come to know these people completely."
The author, she said, provided her with the key to both the play's meaning and Mommo's dark character. "It's the fact that we are excluded from paradise but there is hope of redemption."
She was born on June 29th, 1925, in Sligo, the youngest child of P.J. Flanagan and his wife Elizabeth (née McLynn). The family was steeped in republican politics. Her father was Fianna Fáil mayor of Sligo in 1939 while her mother became the first woman to hold the position in 1945.
Her childhood was happy. "I grew up totally adored and admired. My mother taught me that I could do anything I wanted to; she knew I was strong in myself."
It was while she was a pupil at the Ursuline convent school in Sligo that she was first drawn to acting. Later she and a friend, Aileen Harte, sought advice from Gabriel Fallon, who was adjudicating at Feis Sligigh, on how to pursue a stage career. He suggested that they should advertise in the press and he helped them to draft an advertisement:
"Two young ladies, with exceptional amateur dramatic experience, wish to join exclusive repertory company for summer season."
Among the replies to the advertisement in the Irish Press was one from a company performing in Ballindine, Co Mayo. The two aspiring actresses decided to see the company in action. In a small hall, with the rain beating down on a tin roof, they sat through a production that was "unbelievably bad".
They later accepted an offer from the Garryowen Players for the 1949 summer season in Bundoran, Co Donegal, at £4 a week each. Both were cast in a production of Peg O' My Heart. Pauline Flanagan played Mrs Chichester, her first professional role.
She then joined the Anew McMaster company - "the best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-pastoral, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene-individable or poem unlimited".
"We did everything," she recalled. Among her many off-stage duties was looking after the costumes, which meant ironing almost every day. She played everything - "Portia, Lady Macbeth, Rosalind, Gertrude to McMaster's Hamlet". McMaster played all the lead male roles. There was Greek tragedy - "I was Jocasta to his Oedipus." And there was a full range of potboilers.
Many actors who reached the top of their profession learnt their craft with the McMaster company, among them T.P. McKenna, Patrick Magee, Milo O'Shea and Harold Pinter. "We'd find digs," Pinter later wrote, "wash basin and jug, tea, black pudding and off to the hall, set up a stage on trestle tables, a few rostrum, a few drapes, costumes out of the hampers, set up shop and at night play, not always but mostly, to a packed house." It was hard work but Pauline Flanagan remembered it as a wonderful time. "We had a ball."
In the mid-1950s she visited a sister in New York, intending to stay a few months. There she was offered a job as an understudy in a production of Graham Greene's The Living Room at $125 a week. She jumped at the opportunity and thus began her long and successful New York stage career.
Her Broadway appearances included roles in Medea, Steaming, Under Milk Wood, The Complaisant Lover and God and Kate Murphy. She made many off-Broadway appearances and was closely associated with the Irish Repertory Theatre. She returned to the Irish stage a decade ago. She played Rima in Dolly West's Kitchen for which she received the Samuel Beckett Award and the Olivier Award for best supporting actress following its run at the Old Vic Theatre, London.
She brought her vast experience to roles in By the Bog of Cats for which she was nominated for an Irish Times/ESB best supporting actress award, Portia Coughlan and Tarry Flynn, which also had a highly successful run at the Royal National in London.
Other theatre work in recent years includes Jennifer Johnston's The Desert Lullaby at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, for which she received the TMA Barclay Award and the Gate Theatre's production of Beckett's Endgame at the Gate, at the Melbourne Festival and the Barbican Centre, London.
Television credits include Spenser for Hire, Rage of Angels and Juno and the Paycock, in which she appeared with Liam Clancy and Walter Matthau. She received best actress of the year award for her portrayal of Sarah Bernhardt in Memoir. Her most recent film was Night Train starring John Hurt and Brenda Blethyn.
Winning the Olivier award was, she said, the high point of her career. "That is the absolute pinnacle for me. And it came absolutely out of the blue. They announce the names of the candidates and then they announce your name and you think, 'Oh yes, I know her'."
Her husband, George Vogel and daughters, Jane and Melissa, survive her.
• Pauline Flanagan: born, June 29th 1925; died, June 29th, 2003.