My Childhood with Geraldine Plunkett: The death of my father when I was a child shaped my life

Geraldine Plunkett regards her life as “a series of chances”. The 82-year-old actress, best known as Mary McDermott-Moran in the 1980s television drama Glenroe, says two significant events in her early life prompted her career.

Geraldine says: “I loved acting from the moment I set foot on stage, but it didn’t enter my head that I could be an actress. You might as well have said I’d be an astronaut. It was that far removed from the realms of possibility.”

Plunkett grew up in Harold’s Cross in Dublin. Her parents, Breifne and Phyllis, met while working in the Irish Dunlop Company headquarters on Abbey St.

“My mother stayed at home after she got married and had us: First me, then Joan, and Dermot,” says Plunkett. “The three of us got on well, although my sister and brother both say I was bossy. I probably was, but I don’t think they let themselves get bossed.”

The siblings spent their time playing marbles and skipping with other children on their street. Their mother would read them stories, and Plunkett regularly borrowed books from the library.

“I also liked drawing and painting, and our father would bring us to the National Gallery from time to time,” she says.

The family’s annual trip to the panto in the Gaiety was one of the highlights of their year. Plunkett recalls seeing stage stars Maureen Potter and Jimmy O’Dea and says it was then that she realised how “magical the theatre could be”.

Geraldine Plunkett’s parents Breifne and Phyllis on their wedding day.

The first event that changed the trajectory of Plunkett’s life was her father’s death when she was nine. He was 42, and she doesn’t know “if he died of asthma, a heart attack, or a combination of both. Whatever happened, we were left without a daddy. But children are resilient, and even though we missed him, we went on to have happy childhoods. Our mother, however, never really recovered. She struggled financially and had to deal with a huge emotional loss.”

Plunkett’s father died in May and her mother returned to her old job at the Irish Dunlop Company. Initially, relatives, friends, and neighbours helped look after the children. But by September, a more permanent arrangement was put in place: Plunkett and her sister were sent to an Ursuline convent in Thurles, and her three-year-old brother was minded by his aunt.

Joan, Dermot and Geraldine Plunkett

“Mammy had him in the evenings and at weekends,” says Plunkett.

It must have been hard for her. She went from having a happy family to having no husband and hardly seeing her children. But she was strong and struggled on

Plunkett and her sister were sent to the faraway boarding school because “some grandaunt or other had been a nun there, so we had a vague connection to the place”.

Luckily, she liked the school and says the nuns were kind.

“The other girls were, too, and we all grew up together. I hated maths, but, other than that, I was happy.”

When asked what she remembers most from her teenage years, Plunkett sighs and says nostalgically, “Rock ‘n’ roll came to Ireland when I was a teenager, and I’d go dancing during the school holidays.”

Plunkett talks of the stiff underskirts that would make her skirt flare fashionably outwards, the beehive hairstyles, the high heels, and the mascara.

“Nights spent clustering around the mirror in the ladies’ putting on makeup; we thought it was wonderful and wanted more of that freedom. We were dying to leave school and get out into the real world. We thought we’d have a marvellous time when we did.”

That marvellous time started when she left secondary school in 1961. She would attend dances where the likes of Dickie Rock and Brendan Boywer provided the live music and says the Olympic Ballroom off Camden St would be “chock-a-block with young people doing all the rock ’n’ roll dances. We’d all walk home together afterwards. It was terribly exciting.”

Plunkett’s second life-changing event was landing the part of Hamlet in sixth year of school.

“One of the parents who saw that play knew that Frank Dermody, an Abbey Theatre director, was in Thurles adjudicating an amateur dramatic festival,” she says.

“He told Frank about me, and Frank visited the school, where I performed for him.”

Dermody invited her to audition for the Abbey when she graduated. “Who knows what direction my life might have taken had he not been in Thurles?” she says. “I might never have become an actress or met my husband, fellow Abbey actor Peadar Lamb.”

Plunkett is grateful for her good luck. She acknowledges that her father dying young was “hard, but mother sheltered us from the harsh realities of life. I had a good time at boarding school.

“Working at the Abbey was exciting. Peadar and I married when I was 21, and we had a happy marriage until he died in 2017. We had six children, one of whom was Jenny, who had Down syndrome. She died aged 12, which was a great sorrow.

“But she was the light of our lives, so there’s nothing I would change. There’s not a day that passes that I don’t think myself fortunate to have had a life full of such chances.”

Geraldine Plunkett, John Spillane, Francis Brennan, Anna May McHugh, at the annual Age Friendly Ambassadors Day. Picture: Alison Miles / OSM PHOTO

• Geraldine Plunkett is a Dublin City ambassador for Age Friendly Ireland, an organisation that gives older people a voice in decision-making on housing, health, and all aspects of everyday living.