This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Linde Lunney. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Born: 28 July 1920, Ireland
Died: 6 June 2011
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: NA
Ryan, Phyllis Carmel (1920–2011), actress and theatre producer, was born on 28 July 1920 at 79 Upper Rathmines Road, Dublin, the younger of two daughters of Thomas J. Ryan, who served in the British army and was subsequently a civil servant, and his wife May (or ‘Maisie’) (née Murphy). Thomas Ryan left his family before Phyllis was old enough to remember him, and she was an adult before she realised that he might be still living. She also belatedly became aware that Joseph Anderson, editor of the Dublin Evening Mail, who came to live with them in Rathmines, was not a lodger or uncle, but her mother’s partner.
May Ryan, unusually in that period, brought up her daughters on her own, with no acknowledged husband present, working in the Olympia Theatre and eventually re-training as a chiropodist. She managed to send her daughters to Alexandra College, and took them often to plays and music halls. When Phyllis, aged 11, met Micheál Mac Liammóir, she developed a lasting crush on him and simultaneously a lifelong love of the theatre. She was so keen to be accepted into the Abbey School of Acting that she managed to convince Ria Mooney to audition and then accept her, although at 13 Phyllis was five years below the official entry age.
Ryan’s slight stature and elfin prettiness, and her burning desire to act, led to an appearance on the Abbey stage in ‘The moon in the Yellow River’ by Denis Johnston when she was just 14. Two years later, while still at school, she was asked by the directors to join the adult Abbey company. In 1937 she took the lead in the first production of ‘Shadow and substance’ by Paul Vincent Carroll, and received rave reviews for her acting in the part of the visionary schoolgirl Brigid. A romance with the producer Hugh Hunt broke her heart, but confirmed her decision to continue to work in the theatre, instead of going to university when she left school.
However, when Ernest Blythe took over in 1941 as managing director of the Abbey Theatre, it was clear that Phyllis Ryan, with her British soldier father and poor grasp of Irish did not fit in with his plans for more Abbey productions in Irish. He advised her to come back after she had spent time in the Gaeltacht, but she departed in high dudgeon and never worked again under Blythe’s regime.
As a freelance actress, she had roles in radio plays produced by the BBC in Belfast, and also worked in ENSA and repertory companies in England during the second world war. Some work in films and in the new medium of television also came her way, and despite being typecast at first in ingénue roles, she was successful in some of the most celebrated parts in Irish drama: Pegeen Mike, for instance, in ‘The playboy of the western world’, televised by the BBC in London in 1946.
Ryan had married Seán Colleary, an actor and stage manager, on 25 May 1943, in the Church of the Holy Name in Ranelagh. He was trying to establish himself in England, and for a time she lived with him in London. However, the marriage failed early on; Colleary had health problems, found it hard to make a living and resented his wife’s success. The couple had a daughter shortly after they married, but Phyllis returned home to live with her mother again and picked up work in Dublin. She had a son in 1951, and relied very heavily on her mother and a nanny to look after the two children, especially in 1958 when she had to spend ten months touring American universities with Ronald Ibbs’s company.
For a few years from 1954, Phyllis spent most of her time accompanying her daughter Jacqueline as she acted in theatre and in Jacqueline (1956), a fiction film set in Belfast starring the 12 year old. There was even a weekly radio programme called The adventures of Jacqueline. As a child actress and celebrity from the age of 9, Jacqueline Ryan almost eclipsed her mother’s fame, but developed allergies to theatrical makeup and followed other career paths.
Phyllis Ryan appeared for several years in the mid 1950s with the Globe Theatre Company in avant-garde plays in the tiny Gas Company Theatre in Dún Laoghaire, under the direction of Norman Rodway. As the Globe’s success increasingly led to its productions being staged in larger, Dublin city venues, Ryan in 1957 established her own company, Orion Productions (the name was a play on ‘Ryan’), which for several years thereafter shared the Gas Company Theatre with the Globe, and emulated the older company’s dramatic values. The move into production and direction was very unusual for an actress at the time, especially for one who had been as successful as Phyllis Ryan.
Her daughter Jacqueline starred in one of Phyllis Ryan’s early productions for Orion, a Christmas 1958 revue topically named ‘Guided mistletoe’. Amid the pervasive censorious atmosphere that followed the controversial production by the Pike Theatre of ‘The rose tattoo’ (1957), both Orion and the Globe fell foul of the conservative views of the gas company directors, who attempted to exert control over artistic policy. After the Globe’s demise, Ryan and Rodway co-founded Gemini Productions in 1960. Over the years, Orion and its longer-lived successor, Gemini, staged scores of plays, revues and entertainments of all sorts, for twenty-six years mostly in the Eblana Theatre, below Busáras in Dublin city centre. Rodway moved to England in the mid 1960s, and Ryan found other partners and colleagues to assist with ambitious and complex productions: Richard Hallinan, Brendan Connellan and especially the director Jim Fitzgerald, all helped to make Gemini Productions the most successful theatre company of the time, putting on more plays than any group except the Abbey. (In some seasons Gemini even surpassed the Abbey’s total, and generally attracted bigger audiences.) Orion or Gemini plays were the staples of the annual Dublin Theatre Festival, run by Brendan Smith, and they were compelled to set up Libra Productions to hide the fact that they had three plays in one festival. In a tribute written in 1965, Ryan was credited with keeping theatre alive in Dublin, as she commissioned, redacted, produced, revived and toured with dramas which often came to be regarded as classics of twentieth-century theatre in Ireland and internationally. Her artistic vision and leadership skills were ably supported by ambition and a keen entrepreneurial awareness of business possibilities.
Ryan persuaded such authors as John B. Keane and Hugh Leonard to provide plays for her company, and almost all of Keane’s plays were first put on by Orion or Gemini. She took pride in the fact that she had discovered, employed and encouraged most of the rising generations of actors in the forty years that Gemini flourished. Her 1996 autobiography, The company I kept, is a useful source (though almost entirely date-free) for all aspects of Irish twentieth-century theatrical history, with succinct and occasionally sharp judgements on her rivals and even colleagues.
Some of Gemini’s productions were particularly successful and celebrated, including Leonard’s ‘Da’ and ‘Stephen D.’ (an adaptation of A portrait of the artist as a young man by James Joyce). Both won awards and were transferred to London and New York. Ryan supported Mary O’Malley, who founded the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, and Gemini put on a ground-breaking and greatly appreciated production of ‘Da’ in Belfast in 1974, at the height of the Northern Ireland troubles. Gemini also produced world premieres of ‘On trial’ by Máiréad Ní Ghráda (1965; another company had staged the author’s Irish-language original, ‘An triail’, the previous year) and Tom Murphy’s ‘The orphans’ (1968).
Instrumental in securing the establishment of the Irish Theatre Company – the first state-supported theatre company, set up in 1974 to support theatre in Ireland and tour professional drama round the country – Ryan was briefly its first artistic director. She was also artistic director or advisor to several other groups, and ran a theatre festival in Limerick (1970–75), using mainly Gemini productions, until finances and audiences faltered. Her grasp of the business of theatrical production was complete: she ran her companies with a ‘will like spun steel’, a filing system in her head, and a finance department in her handbag (Ir. Times, 12 February 2002). Despite her keen awareness of financial necessity, expenses mounted unsustainably and, in 1988, without any subsidies and unable to find £20,000 to keep the Eblana Theatre going, she reluctantly had to close it down. She did, however, keep her company going for a few more years, and marked the fortieth anniversary in 2001 with a production of Keane’s ‘The matchmaker’.
Ryan was invited to go on a lecture tour of the US in 1981, and enjoyed touring productions to Northern Ireland and to New York. She still occasionally acted, especially in Michael Scott productions, up until 2000, when she appeared for the last time, aged 80, in the chorus in ‘Medea’, for the Abbey. She received numerous awards, including the 2002 ESB/Irish Times special tribute award and an honorary life membership of Irish Actors Equity. She was a shareholder of the Abbey Theatre for many years, and was one of the five founding patrons of the newly renamed Irish Theatre Institute in 2006.
She managed to keep her personal life, like her background, out of public knowledge, in a period when catholic morality demanded conformity or secrecy. After she met (c.1953) the prominent journalist and poet Liam MacGabhann, the two embarked on an affair that lasted until his death in 1979. Neither was free to marry, since divorce was then impossible, and even after Phyllis’s husband died in London in 1964, she and MacGabhann continued to lead separate lives.
Phyllis Ryan died in Naas General Hospital, Co. Kildare, on 6 June 2011, and was accorded a huge funeral in Dublin’s pro-cathedral (where she had been a lay reader), a fitting tribute to someone who had sustained independent theatre in Ireland for more than half a lifetime.