Maureen Potter

Actress and comedienne who began performing at the age of seven

Maria Philomena Potter (Maureen Potter), dancer, music-hall artiste, actress and writer: born Dublin 1925; married 1959 Jack O'Leary (two sons); died Dublin 7 April 2004.

For more than 70 years Maureen Potter was a much-loved Dublin theatrical phenomenon. This was some achievement in a city where histrionic talent constantly wells up and adulation can be fickle.

Potter's multiple - and durable - talents crossed class and social barriers. The nation took to its heart the Irish dancing champion who was performing in professional variety shows before she was out of ankle-socks, the mature music-hall comedienne, the skilful comic actress, the fine singer and the star, with Jimmy O'Dea, of decades of pantomimes at the Gaiety Theatre.

Maureen Potter came from Fairview on the north side of Dublin, the daughter of a commercial traveller. She was born in 1925 and from her earliest years her talent shone. At seven she was an All Ireland Junior dancing champion, who appeared on the stage in Derry for a week - for the munificent fee of 7s 6d. At 10 she was appearing in pantomime with Dublin's portly comedian Jimmy O'Dea at the Gaiety theatre - which was to become almost her theatrical home. (He had spotted her at the age of nine at an amateur concert party.)

Before she was 15 she was touring England and Europe as The Pocket Mimic with Jack Hylton's troupe. Legend has it that it was a dextrous use of a friend's birth certificate that got her on stage in England at a time when she was legally under age. In Germany she had the doubtful privilege of performing in front of an audience which included the Nazi leadership.

The coming of the Second World War brought her back to neutral Ireland and the beginning of a long partnership with O'Dea at the Gaiety. Their great joint glory was the pantomime. The show was a traditional post-Christmas outing for my Dublin family. It had all the usual Anglo-Saxon pantomime ingredients - the tenuous fairy-tale story, the ravishing sets (well, fairly ravishing), the long-legged dancers, the Principal Boy, and the demure heroine. But it also had quintessential Dublin ingredients - Jimmy O'Dea as Mrs Mulligan, the Dame, and Maureen Potter as his cheeky daughter.

She sparked and sparkled - delivering riverdancing rhythms with her feet and in her verbal pas de deux with O'Dea a nasal impudence that was utterly beguiling. Her rebellious energy appealed to the younger members of the audience, but I suspect that for the more worldly-wise adults it was her sharp political innuendoes and brilliant mimicry that they enjoyed most.

For a while post-war she continued to appear on variety bills in England - with the likes of Ted Ray and Max Wall. But Dublin claimed her more and more. She married an Irish army officer, Jack O'Leary, in 1959 and had two sons. (He also wrote most of her comic material.) In the 1960s she began to work in Irish television, sometimes with O'Dea and, after he died in 1965, with Danny Cummins, who had been a regular in the Gaiety pantomimes. She also had a hugely successful run with a show called Gaels of Laughter, which ran at the Gaiety Theatre every summer for 15 years until 1970. It was a lavish spectacular, but built around Potter and allowing her to give free rein to all her talents.

Her gifts as a comedienne intermittently brought her parts in plays and films. She was in John Ford's The Rising of the Moon (1957) and in Joseph Strick's version of James Joyce's Ulysses (1967). On stage she played Mrs Vanderbilt, another in Denis Johnston's line of formidable female servants, in The Golden Cuckoo in 1956; she was in School for Scandal at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, in 1989, and bravely took on the tragic role of Mrs Tancred in the Olympia production of Juno and the Paycock in 1990.

In the last 20 years of her life "Mo" Potter became almost an institution. When in her seventies she began a long battle with arthritis the affection increased when she put on a dazzling one-hour, one-woman show which sent up many Irish sacred cows and was not averse to political assassination (through deadly mimicry) - and even included some far from arthritic hoofing. She also began to write children's stories, which were received with great affection, particularly Tommy the Theatre Cat (1989; first published as The Theatre Cat, 1986).

In 1984 Maureen Potter was awarded the freedom of the City of Dublin, and in 1988 she was given an honorary doctorate by Trinity College Dublin. But her favourite distinction was, in 2001, having her handprints preserved in concrete outside her beloved Gaiety Theatre.

Bernard Adams