The Times We Lived In: The mischievous matchmaker

Never mind Sally O'Brien and the way she might look at you – how about this for the ultimate sleeveen glance? This is one of the "mystery" images we come across every now and again in the depths of the archive. All we know about the picture is that it was taken in Mayo in 1951, on the set of John Ford's film The Quiet Man.

The photographer has eschewed the glories of the Cong countryside to focus on the face of Barry Fitzgerald, all dressed up and ready to steal the movie from John Wayne as the mischievous matchmaker Michaleen Oge Flynn.

It really is as good a portrait as you will ever see. It is Michaleen Oge in miniature. The shrewd, calculating look from under the eyebrows while apparently engaged in something else entirely. The flamboyant lighting of the pipe. The bowler hat pushed back at a gravity-defying angle. The quality of stillness, striking even on screen – check out the scene in which he informs Mary O’Hara:

“When I drink whiskey, I drink whiskey and when I drink water I drink water.”

Born in Portobello in 1881 as William Joseph Shields, Fitzgerald was friends with Sean O'Casey – who wrote the role of Captain Boyle in Juno and the Paycock for him – and he and his brother Arthur both worked with John Ford on his film of The Plough and the Stars.

Fitzgerald had a glittering movie career in the US, making Tarzan's Secret Treasure with Johnny Weissmuller, starring in the quirky Agatha Christie adaptation And Then There Were None and winning an Oscar in 1944 for Going My Way.

He didn't enjoy being a celebrity. "He finds it all rather bewildering," an interviewer from the New York Times noted in 1945. "He resents the disruption of his previously inconspicuous private life . . . His old clothes and cloth cap, which once kept him inconspicuous, now make him a marked man."

Marked – but very, very memorable. Arminta Wallace