Pat Leavy : Pat Leavy, who has died aged 66, was one of Ireland's best-known actors having played the role of Hannah Finnegan in the RTÉ soap Fair City for 11 years.
Her previous television work included a three-year stint with The Riordans in the late 1970s.
One of the highlights of her stage career was her performance in the title role of Big Maggie at the Abbey Theatre in 1989. Describing the performance as superb, one critic wrote that "through her coldness and rasping tongue", she successfully brought the woman in Maggie to the surface.
He went on to praise her for a "studied performance, forcefully sustained throughout".
She made her name as a character actor. "Even when I was younger, I always played character parts," she recalled in 2000. "Always somebody's mammy or auntie or dragon; even prostitutes. Never a glamorous model or anything like that."
From Belvedere Place off Mountjoy Square, Dublin, she was born Patricia Judge in 1936. When she was 2½ her father died in a car crash.
Her mother became the family breadwinner and she and her brother were cared for by their grandmother. She was later sent to boarding school in Carlow, completing her education at the Dominican Convent, Eccles Street, Dublin.
She was married at 17. "That was the way it was in my day," she explained. "You did a line, got engaged and got married."
In her early 30s she joined a local amateur dramatic group in south Dublin.
She took to acting "like a duck to water" and her first role was as Ellen in T.C. Murray's Autumn Fire. She decided to pursue a stage career, taking part in several productions at the Lantern Theatre, Merrion Square, and in time she qualified for an Equity card.
She did the rounds of mainstream and fringe theatre, taking part in plays in the Gate Theatre and the Project Arts Centre. Her first big break came in 1975 when she was cast in the title role in the Gate production of The Real Charlotte.
"The role gives Pat Leavy her first major opportunity to play under direction of the calibre of that of Hilton Edwards," a critic wrote, adding that she had acquitted herself "with more than honour".
Another tremendous performance followed in 1976 in Patrick Galvin's We Do it for Love at the Gaiety Theatre.
Two years later she was outstanding as the Widow Quinn in the Abbey production of The Heart's A Wonder, the musical based on The Playboy of the Western World. Among the other Abbey productions she took part in were A Crucial Week in the Life of a Grocer's Assistant, The Honey Spike, Sive, The Wake and By The Bog of Cats.
She acted in several Druid Theatre Company productions, including Conversations on a Homecoming, which was staged at the Gate in 1985 and later travelled to Sydney. She also toured abroad with The Shadow of a Gunman and The Well of the Saints.
In 1989 her earthy, worldly-wise drudge in Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba at the Gate won high praise.
Her feature films included Fools of Fortune (1990), The Commitments (1991), Hedda Gabler (1993), Moll Flanders (1996), The Butcher Boy (1998) and This is my Father (1999).
Two weeks before her death she completed work on Spin the Bottle, a film sequel to the television series Paths to Freedom in which she reprised her role as Rats's mother.
A true professional, she loved acting and thrived on work. She was very happy to be involved with Fair City and did not object to the attention of the soap-conscious public.
However, she insisted on civility. "If someone slagged me off in public, I'd have no problem telling them where to get off." She had no hobbies outside work but did enjoy a game of poker.
"I have a great life and I'll work until I drop," she said in 1999. "And when I do drop I'll be thankful for what I have had."
She is survived by her husband, George, daughter Siobhán, sons Alan and Gary, and brother Bernard.
Pat Leavy: born 1936; died April 2nd, 2003