The death of Maureen Potter breaks a link that goes back almost two centuries to the old "free and easies", the singing and performing pubs of the 18th and early 19th centuries, writes Fergus Linehan
They were followed by the music halls in which singers, dancers and comedians performed, and they in turn by the variety theatre, a more structured version with its touring circuits all over Britain and Ireland. Television saw the death of this kind of theatre and Maureen was to be its last star.
She was also probably its greatest. Singing, dancing, being achingly funny, she could do them all to a world standard, but there was more to it than this. Not every performer is as charming offstage as on, but she was the same warm, generous and wonderful company no matter where or when you met her.
To Dubliners she was the most loved person in the city, and if ever anyone deserved its Freedom, it was her.
Maureen Potter was born to be a comedian and singer. From a very early age she was entertaining people, and pictures of the tiny girl show the same elfin face, twinkling eyes and boundless good humour that she was to have to the end of her life.
After starting on various stages around Dublin she was spotted by the impresario Jack Hylton and found herself touring the huge variety theatres that were a feature of every large town in Britain in those days.
There she would learn her trade, much to her chagrin often having to do impersonations of Shirley Temple, the precocious Hollywood child star of the time.
Despite occasional breaks with routine, such as the celebrated time she played before Hitler, Goering and Goebbels and "their fat wives", as she said, the life must often have been hard and lonely for a child.
Perhaps that is why, when she returned to Ireland, married and had a family, she was always unwilling to take up the offers she got to work abroad.
The war meant that many Irish variety artistes who had worked across the water returned, and also the end of the British touring acts which used to come here. It also gave a boost to native talent at a time when variety was hugely popular in Dublin, regularly filling the stages of the Gaiety, the Olympia, the enormous Theatre Royal, and the old Capitol and Queen's theatres.
Of the many comedians who appeared in these shows Jimmy O'Dea was regarded as the best, and it was with him that Potter started to work. His shows took her touring all over Ireland.
At first she was his "feed", but as time went on they worked more and more as a team, and she always paid him tribute as the person who taught everything she knew about comic timing.
After O'Dea's death, she soon became regarded as Ireland's top entertainer and started her long career in the Gaiety Theatre, that packed the house for six months a year.
Before that she had married Jack O'Leary, an army officer from Cork, who was to become her main scriptwriter and whose dry sense of humour perfectly matched her own ebullient one. Summer was given to "Gaels of Laughter", a traditional style of variety show and Christmas, of course, to pantomime.
To generation after generation of children she was their introduction to the theatre and an unforgettable annual treat.
In her early touring days 'panto' was easier on the performers, as the same show was on every year, moving from town to town. Now a new one had to be produced each Christmas and this at a time when rehearsal was limited and previews unknown.
Maureen took it all in her stride, never stinting in her commitment and never failing to delight. Many of the best-known people on the Irish stage were first bitten by the theatre bug through seeing her and would come back later in life to marvel at her performances.
Eventually, of course, it had to end, and what caused it to do so was ill-health, chronic arthritis of the knees, probably exacerbated by years of pratfalls and heavy duty dancing. But there was to be a coda to her career in which Maureen Potter showed that, in another life, she could have been a great actress of the "legitimate" stage too.
She appeared in, among others, Joe Dowling's celebrated production of O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock and Hugh Leonard's Da and, though funny as ever, showed she could also move an audience to tears.
When I think of Maureen I think of many things. Sitting laughing at her stories of theatres and theatre folk. Amazed as, without a note, she rattles off the names of 30 children whose parents have asked her to mention them at the end of the panto.
Squashed in the green room after a show while she sits surrounded by admirers, a kind word for them all, while she sips her glass of milk (with a tot of whiskey in it, because she wouldn't like children to see her drinking.)
Most of all though I remember, well, gales of laughter. It echoes around and around the old walls of the Gaiety, focused on that tiny, loveable, indomitable woman, whose passing leaves us all so much poorer.