The late John Cowley was described during his funeral Mass in Co Meath yesterday as the rock on which the 15-year television series The Riordans was based.
Friends, neighbours and colleagues joined his brothers, sister and son Tony at Boharmeen Church outside Navan yesterday morning to remember the man who played Tom Riordan.
Tom Hickey, Benjy in The Riordans, paid tribute to the 74year-old actor who died on Friday "appropriately and wonderfully digging in the garden".
"He was the central rock of the Riordans. He was the father of the whole enterprise," Mr Hickey said.
The series' creator, Mr Wesley Burrowes, said he had heard from John Cowley for the first time in 10 years just three weeks before he died. Mr Cowley sent him a letter after Mr Burrowes described him in a recent interview with The Irish Times as the best actor he ever met.
"The whole thing was based on him," Mr Burrowes said, and his acting had a power and a subtlety that most of today's soap opera actors did not match.
Mr Burrowes remembered finding Mr Cowley before a rehearsal trying on three different pairs of braces. "I asked him what on earth he was doing."
The actor told him he wanted to get a pair of braces that would slip off one shoulder during the scene, so he could hoist it back up with a roll of his shoulder. He felt this was something that Tom Riordan would do.
Some people believed that he had never been the same after The Riordans ended its 15-year run, Mr Hickey said. "He was extremely disappointed that the show finished. Then after a while he returned to work in places like the Abbey and the Gate and toured with the Druid Theatre to Australia with The Playboy of the Western World."
Joan Sheehy, who toured with him, said she remembered Mr Cowley arriving in his tweed suit and wondered how he would cope with the weather. "But he absolutely loved Australia," she said. When she worked with him on Brian Friel's play, The Gentle Island, "he once knocked on my dressing-room door and presented me with a jam jar full of snowdrops from his garden".
The Glenroe actor, Bob Carrickford, said he and Mr Cowley had worked together in a production of Philadelphia Here I Come. "As two old men we shared a dressing room and we rambled on together for hours. My memory of John is of a brilliant actor, a life-long friend and always a gentleman."
Ms Aideen Yourell of the Council Against Bloodsports, of which Mr Cowley was a founding member, said he had been a "great inspiration to all of us".
Moira Deady, who played Mrs Riordan, was joined by fellow actors Biddy White-Lennon, Derek Young and Ann Rowan. The playwright Frank McGuinness, actors Marian O'Dwyer and Frank McCusker also attended the funeral.
The series director, Mr Tony Barry, was there as well as the film director, Mr Pat O'Connor, a former RTE director-general, Mr Joe Barry, and a former chairman of the RTE authority, Mr John Sorohan.