Born: April 4th, 1932
Died: August 14th, 2026
Deirdre McSharry, who has died at the age of 94, was best known as the groundbreaking editor of Cosmopolitan magazine in the UK. Originally a staid Hearst family publication in the US, it was revamped with risqué sex and glamour when Sex and the Single Girl author Helen Gurley Brown took it over as editor-in-chief in 1965.
McSharry became editor of the UK edition around its 1971 launch following a career as a fashion writer. “The package was very pretty,” she once said, “but there were sticks of gelignite inside”. Its articles on abortion, venereal disease, homosexuality, contraception with male nude centrefolds and frank discussion of all matters sexual were explosive at the time.
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It became one of the great commercial success stories of magazine publishing, an overnight success story in the UK with a circulation of nearly half a million readers. (It now has 16 different editions). McSharry had already made headlines at the Daily Express having launched the career of Twiggy, the legendary face of the 60s who became internationally famous, a fact gratefully acknowledged by the former model and actor in a recent documentary.
Famously stylish, as an editor she once described herself as bossy and said “women run businesses in the way they run their families and I like a loose and unstructured form of management”. A woman who worked with her on Cosmo said her open system of government and open plan office is like a “girl’s boarding school with herself as queen bee. She was always bursting with ideas”.
After leaving Cosmo, McSharry went on to launch Country Living magazine in 1985, another success story “putting zip into rural life” as one observer noted and remained at the helm until her retirement. Well into her eighties and living in Bath in Somerset, she became equally active in organising and promoting textile and art exhibitions in various city galleries including the Victoria Art Gallery, the American Museum and the Holburne Museum. She also brought her customary style and flair for interior decoration into any house in which she lived.
Deirdre McSharry was born in London in 1932, the daughter of Jack McSharry, a doctor who died of TB when she was seven. Her mother, Mary O’ Brien of Cork extraction returned to live in Ireland in 1939 with Deirdre and her younger brother Sean and became the editor of a women’s magazine Woman’s Life in Dublin, later remarrying another doctor, Brendan McEntee.
McSharry was sent to boarding school in the Dominican Convent in Wicklow aged seven, where the discipline of Irish convent life was to remain with her long after she left. It was there that she met the artist Pauline Bewick and art critic Dorothy Walker who became lifelong friends and whose work she later promoted in Cosmo.
Torn between acting and journalism, she first started to write while at Trinity College Dublin studying for a degree in Celtic Studies which she never completed, but she also started acting with the Gate Theatre and travelled with the company to Egypt for two years in succession and elsewhere in the 1950s.
Her career as a journalist began at the Evening Press when its editor Douglas Gageby gave her a job. Shortly afterwards she went to the US where she worked as a fashion writer for the trade magazine Women’s Wear Daily, gaining invaluable experience.
Returning to England, she started to write for Woman’s Own, then became fashion editor of the Evening News and later woman’s editor of the Daily Express where she famously spotted Twiggy and promoted the fashion designer Mary Quant, another Sixties icon. She joined Cosmo at 40 after a short spell at The Sun, but was already establishing a reputation for her style and her ability to spot a good picture having learned early the power of the image over the written word. A sharp observer of new trends, “she was deeply interested in style and was absolutely adamant about the use of pictures” was another comment from a Cosmo worker.
She was also passionate about the importance of women’s economic independence and further education, seeing it as a key to future survival – “women should come to terms with new technology, develop new skills”, she maintained. Her links with Ireland and her sister Mary McEntee remained strong and in Cosmo she promoted Irish writers Clare Boylan, Maeve Binchy and Nell McCafferty over the years.
She also remained close to many friends from her Micheál Mac Liammóir days at the Gate like Leila Doolin and the late Pat Scott and Finnuala O’Shannon. She kept in touch with her brother Sean, formerly a banker in Zurich who now lives in Australia. A cousin was Derry Hussey, husband of Gemma Hussey, former minister for education.
Her marriage to businessman Peter King ended in divorce in 1985, but her life entered a new era when she reconnected with Ian Smyth, an Irish film copyright lawyer working in London whom she had known since her Trinity days and who was part of a large circle of mutual friends. He was then a single parent living with his children after his wife, the writer Jennifer Johnston, had separated from him and married again.
The friendship between Smyth and McSharry blossomed and together they travelled widely to Australia, US, Morocco, Syria, Italy and France eventually moving from London to Bath, then to Wiltshire and finally back to Bath. “They were good for each other”, according to a family member “and she made each house they lived in even more gorgeous. The energy of the woman was phenomenal – a very positive creative energy.” After many years together they eventually married in 1999 on his 72nd birthday.
People remember her as very warm, vivacious, generous, good company, sometimes tricky, but sociable and welcoming – the door of their beautiful 18th century house at the top of Sion Hill in Bath always remained open.
Described by an artist friend as “the helium in the balloon” and fond of wearing antique ikat coats and djellabas, she became particularly active in organising exhibitions on textiles, art, embroidery, quilts and painted silks. She even managed to get Ian interested in embroidery and loved displaying the creative work of friends whether mosaics, tapestries or garden obelisks.
After Ian’s death in 2022, her health slowly declined. Her long-term carer Bill O’Connell remembers her “incredible smile – she was generous with it. She was hugely charismatic. When she smiled, the sun came out. When she didn’t smile, small animals ran for cover”.
Deirdre McSharry is survived by her sister Mary and brothers Sean McSharry, Harry, Frank and James McEntee, by stepson Matthew King, stepchildren Lucy Daniels, Malachi and Patrick Smyth and by carer Bill O’Connell and all their families.
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