Patricia Boylan: Patricia Boylan, who has died in her 93rd year, was an actor, broadcaster and writer, and took a keen interest in the visual arts.
Born in Coalisland, Co Tyrone, she was the 10th of the 12 children of Patrick Clancy and his wife, Anne (née Treanor). The family moved to Dungannon and then to Belfast where she attended St Patrick's Academy for Young Girls, which was run by the Sisters of Mercy. She learned shorthand and typing at the Municipal Technical College.
Interested in the stage from an early age, in her teens she turned up at a Belfast theatre pretending to be a journalist in the hope of meeting the visiting Abbey players. Rehearsals were in progress, and she was met by Arthur Shields, the stage manager. She described their encounter in an article that was accepted for publication by the Irish News.
Notwithstanding her ambition to be an actor, she trained as a nurse at Leeds General Infirmary (now St James's University Hospital) and qualified in 1936. Returning to Ireland, she moved with her family to Dublin where they set up home in Clonliffe Road, Drumcondra.
She was accepted by the Abbey School of Acting, and her class included Wilfred Brambell, who became famous as the father in the BBC comedy series Steptoe and Son, the future poet and diplomat Valentine Iremonger, Phyllis Ryan and Dan O'Herlihy. Maureen Fitzsimons joined for a while before she embarked on a Hollywood career as Maureen O'Hara.
Lennox Robinson invited her to join a verse-speaking class, and she began to broadcast regularly on Raidió Éireann, specialising in spoken verse and verse plays. There followed a stint as editorial assistant on a fortnightly magazine Woman's Life.
A founder member of the Dublin Verse-Speaking Society, she was elected honorary secretary while Austin Clarke took the chair. The society gave poetry recitals in the Abbey and Peacock theatres and, for more than 25 years, featured on the Monday evening radio programme Poetry Anthology presented by Clarke.
In 1941 her distinctive reading of The Three-Cornered Field by FR Higgins attracted the admiration of a Raidió Éireann administration officer. Henry Boylan asked her out and they were married later that year. He went on to enjoy a distinguished career as a public servant, earning further distinction as the author of A Dictionary of Irish Biography.
The weekly poetry programme won widespread praise, but the readers were ridiculed, too.
"Begrudgers called us 'Austin Clarke's young ladies', ignoring the men verse-speakers," Patricia Boylan recalled. "Others called us 'the elocutioners' in spite of the fact that we could, and often did, revert to our rural roots when required to speak in character."
The couple lived in a number of south Dublin locations before finally settling in Orwell Park. She continued writing and broadcasting and as "Darina" wrote a social column for the Irish Press. The first editor of Creation, the glossy magazine launched by Hugh McLaughlin, she was also a regular contributor to Hibernia.
In the 1980s she wrote a series of articles on the United Arts Club for The Irish Times. A member of the club, she was fascinated by its history: "From its foundation in 1907 it had survived cataclysms wrought by wars and resulting social upheavals. Membership reflected them all, from almost exclusively Anglo-Irish to revolutionary republican; from gun-running aristocrats to staid bourgeois to Bohemianism Irish-style."
Encouraged by the response to the articles, she continued to research the club's history and the result was All Cultivated People: A History of the United Arts Club, published in 1988. Her memoir Gaps of Brightness was published in 2003.
Deeply interested in the visual arts, she was a member of the Irish Contemporary Arts Society and knew many of the leading Irish artists of the 20th century. She was knowledgeable and discerning about the arts in general but claimed no special expertise. Thus she had little to say to a dinner companion who once slapped the table and said, "Now, Patricia, tell me all about art."
She enjoyed cooking and entertaining and was a keen gardener. Highly sociable, she enjoyed life to the full.
Her husband Henry, sons Hugo and Peter, and daughters Anna and Catherine, survive her.
Patricia Boylan: born March 14th, 1913; died February 23rd, 2006.