Inspiring teacher who showed children the magic of the stage

The legacy of Billie Barry, who has died aged 87, will be measured finally not by the number of " big name" stars her eponymous stage school turned out but by the thousands of children who came to love the footlights under her tutelage.

Entertainers like Angeline Ball (The Commitments), Boyzone's Mikey Graham, Westlife's Brian McFadden and his sister, actress and singer Susan McFadden, Jacinta Whyte, star of the first West End run of the musical Annie, and many others have acknowledged the start that their sometimes fearsome teacher and mentor gave them.

But all the 20,000 plus children, some as young as three, who learned tap-dancing and stagecraft from Billie Barry had their lives immeasurably enriched.

Sick husband

It all began in a small suburban house in Dublin, when a housewife with a sick husband began to look around for another source of income.

The money was small enough. Mothers with children travelled by bus from far-flung suburbs with three shining sixpences in their purse to pay for a lesson.

And it never really counted as education. When Billie Barry prepared to open her school in a rented room in a hall in Marino in 1964, Patrick Hillery was minister for education.

Though he would instigate far-reaching changes, women like Billie Barry – and later Gladys Sheehan in Bray – teaching acting, dancing and singing to little ones on Saturday afternoons, were outside the line of sight of the education minister and his academic advisers.

Yet education was what it was all about. Singer Jacinta Whyte told fellow alumna Anna Carey in a recent Irish Times feature that Miss Barry insisted that her charges learn from other performers: "Miss Barry would say 'watch and learn'. You can be taught but the best way to do anything is to get out there and watch people." Lillian Barry, who died last month in a Dublin nursing home, came from a stage family and they lived in Drumcondra, in north Dublin.

Her father, John Clarke-Barry, was what we would today call a “session musician”, playing with various bands and orchestras.

Wonder child

Her mother, Annie Hughes, was an amateur singer who put her youngest daughter on the stage at the age of five in a travelling show called “Harry Linton’s Hippodrome”. Her solo act was as “Little Billy Wonder Child” and the name stuck.

Later she toured Ireland as part of the Barry Sisters singing group and played in variety alongside Noel Purcell. She was one of 15 children. Her older brother, Dermot Barry, grew up to be an Irish Times photographer, a fact of which Billie was intensely proud.

When first married she lived in Fairview, but when her husband, Patrick, died in 1966, leaving her a young widow with four children, she moved to nearby Marino where her school had first opened in the Carleton hall.

The singing and dance troupe she founded, the Billie Barry Kids, has featured in the Christmas pantomime at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin for more than 40 years and is a regular act on the Late Late Show Christmas TV special.

Individual members have appeared in film, TV and stage shows in parts written by Samuel Beckett, James Barrie, Charles Dickens, Seán O’Casey and Leo Tolstoy – along with many musical events, highbrow, lowbrow and everything in between.

Billie handed over running of the school to her daughter Lorraine Barry in 1999. She received a lifetime achievement award from the Variety Club of Ireland in 2010.

Commemorative events

The 50th anniversary of the founding of the Billie Barry stage school will be marked by a week-long celebration in the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, beginning on October 28th.

Billie Barry (Lillian O’Farrell) is survived by her sons David and Pat O’ Farrell and her daughters Lorraine Barry and Joan Kenny.