Robert Carrickford: ‘Glenroe’ stalwart’s theatrical career spanned 70 years

Robert Carrickford had two unique distinctions as one of Ireland's most committed and stalwart actors in an extraordinary career that stretched back more than 70 years.

He was the last member of a strikingly unconventional theatrical dynasty that lasted over four generations until the late 1950s. His family’s company was the first, and last, of Ireland’s “fit-up” touring theatrical companies until the cinema and television finally forced its closure.

Also, he was by far the longest-serving president, from 1985 to 2001, of Irish Actors’ Equity, the trade union for performing artists in this country, and that at a crucial time for the entertainment industry when it was moving, rapidly away from traditional norms. The days of permanent, pensionable jobs in the repertory companies of the Abbey Theatre and RTÉ were fading away and television and film were making new demands on Ireland’s actors.

Carrickford played a vital role in this transformation both as an actor and as an actors’ representative, in a style which was characteristic both of his qualities as a performer and his qualities as a man. His tenure as Equity president also saw him develop a close working relationship with the International Federation of Actors, based in Belgium, where he was the Irish delegate.

Fellow actor, and former Equity vice-president, Alan Stanford, said of Carrickford’s contribution: “The most important point [for an Equity representative] is to negotiate . . . over his period Bobby always managed to handle it [negotiating actors’ rights] with tremendous diplomacy . . . he understood the nature of theatre, that it is a commonwealth.”

In a case of art imitating life, it was this quality which he brought to the role which at last made him a household name in Ireland, that of the successful local farmer Stephen Brennan in RTÉ TV's long-running soap opera of rural life, Glenroe. Stanford, alongside whom he acted in the series, said: "Wesley [Burrowes, Glenroe's scriptwriter] was clever in the way he constructed Glenroe, it had a completeness, a balance to it. He had the archetypal blow-ins, the Big House type, the publican and then the successful farmer [Stephen Brennan] so if Glenroe had been a see-saw, there right in the middle of it would be Stephen [Carrickford]." His characterisation exactly reflects Carrickford's own, gentlemanly personality.

Earlier, Carrickford had played Fr Gogan in RTÉ TV's rural series The Riordans in the 1970s, and appeared in 16 other television programmes and films, which included The Return of the Pink Panther with Peter Sellers, Quackser Fortune has a Cousin in the Bronx with Gene Wilder, and in Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon.

It might be said that Carrickford was born in to the theatre, in Ballyshannon in 1928, where his father, Nicholas Carrickford, was on tour with his wife, a fellow actor, originally from England, with whom he had two other children, Jimmy and Mary. Within a year, Carrickford’s mother returned to England with Mary, and the Carrickfords had no further dealings with her; to this day her grandchildren do not know her name, their grandmother always being referred to by Robert Carrickford simply as “Ma” or “Mother”. Neither he nor Jimmy ever saw her, or their sister, again. Mary eventually resettled in the United States, where she died six years ago.

Aged just 16, and with his father stricken by illness, Robert was “handed the keys,” as his daughter Yvonne Golding put it this week, and he effectively ran the family touring company from then on. Moving around the country constantly, young Carrickford did not attend school regularly, and had no secondary school education.

When obliged to close the company in the late 1950s, Carrickford formed The Dublin Comedy Theatre, producing revues and well-known hit plays, such as adaptations of well-known stories, including Oscar Wilde's Lord Arthur Savile's Crime.

Work at the Abbey Theatre, the Gate Theatre with Hilton Edwards and Michael MacLiammoir and, especially with Phyllis Ryan's Gemini company, followed. These productions included Brendan Behan's The Quare Fellow and George Bernard Shaw's John Bull's Other Island, (the Abbey) and, historically, in the first-ever professional productions (by Gemini) of John B Keane's The Field and Big Maggie

In this period he also worked in variety with Jack Cruise, and toured with major Irish plays such as The Playboy of the Western World and Juno and the Paycock in the US and Hong Kong.

He was predeceased by his first wife, Yvonne Cooper, who died suddenly in the early 1970s.

Robert Carrickford is survived by his wife, Mary Golding, their daughter Yvonne Golding, a brother-in-law and sisters-in-law, and by grandchildren.