Born: March 29th, 1935
Died: September 5th, 2025
Irish actor Derry Power, who has died aged 90, had a long and successful career, in Ireland and abroad, characterised by an unusual versatility.
Starting as a comedy act when aged just 17 in his native Youghal, Co Cork – in a Christmas show at the Town Hall in the early 1950s – his last role was in 2016 in a two-hand stage play with Des Keogh, The Quiet Land, by Malachy McKenna.
Power was a member of the Abbey Theatre’s resident company before appearing in TV series in the UK, including some of the best-known British sitcoms of the 1960s and 1970s, and then in Irish-language television at RTÉ in the 1980s, as well as undertaking many other types of work.
After the 1980s, he again won renown in theatre. He worked with some of the best Irish directors – including with Joe Dowling, a former colleague at the Abbey, on an independent production of Joyce’s Dubliners short story The Dead.
RM Block
An intelligent man who did well in school, at CBS Youghal, Power seemed destined for a more conventional life than the precarious career of the stage, entering University College Cork to study engineering.
But, as he told The Limerick Leader in 2016 while on tour with The Quiet Land, he came to know “more about [Cork’s] theatrical venues than I did about lecture theatres”, and took the brave leap into professional acting. He started working with the “fit up” companies of the day, including the Dublin Repertory Company, which brought professional theatre to Ireland’s towns and villages.
This was at a time when there was little financial support from the State or local authorities for such theatre, apart from the Abbey. It was during this early period that he performed in the first production of Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow at Dublin’s Pike Theatre.
His talent was quickly noted and this, along with his strong command of Irish, found him recruited to the National Theatre in the late 1950s, when Irish was a prerequisite for appointment to the company.
It was to be a long association: although he left the Abbey in 1963, he was to perform in no fewer than 38 productions there, finishing with Jimmy Murphy’s Of This Brave Time in 2016.
While some other Abbey actors were content to remain in what was then a job for life with the company, Power demonstrated again his zest for adventure in pursuit of his career. He left for England in 1963 and a new career in television, appearing in the family comedy The Larkins with the then famous actors Peggy Mount and David Kossoff. The series was based on HE Bates’ novel The Darling Buds of May.
As Joe Dowling told mourners at his funeral in Foxrock earlier this month: ”this was the era of live television drama … one week’s rehearsal and, on Sunday, playing the episode to a live audience as though it was a theatre performance”.
Thereafter, Power performed in a prestigious production of Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera at the Prince of Wales Theatre which featured a stellar cast including Barbara Windsor and Vanessa Redgrave, the latter becoming a lifelong friend.
Thus, well established by then in Britain, he went on to appear in two of the best known TV shows of that time, the police drama Z-Cars and the comedy series The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin.
His British TV work led to him acting, back in Ireland, in RTÉ Television’s first soap opera, Tolka Row, adapted from Maura Laverty’s realist play of that name. He made quite an impact, as Joe Dowling remarked in his eulogy: “The country almost went into deep mourning when, after a dispute about actors’ pay, Derry left the series.”
Power found his way into some of the best-known international TV series and films of the past 60 years, including Educating Rita (with Michael Caine and Julie Walters), Remington Steele (with Pierce Brosnan), My Left Foot (the 1989 Jim Sheridan-directed biopic about writer Christy Brown, which featured an Oscar-winning performance from Daniel Day-Lewis), Far and Away (with Tom Cruise), and Irish movies Into the West, Disco Pigs (with Cillian Murphy) and Intermission.
Actor Jonathan White, in a tribute on the RTÉ website, described Power’s sheer variety of roles across all dramatic media as making him “the Swiss army knife of Irish acting”.
White acted as a young foil to his older acting colleague in the early-1980s Irish-language series for RTÉ, Anois is Arís. In the show, designed to help schoolchildren learning the language as non-native speakers, “the educational load was largely carried by comedy sketches [for] which there was neither time nor budget to do proper justice to.
“But that didn’t stop us. Which meant there were high-wire acts to be executed on a daily basis … all as Gaeilge,” said White.
It was the type of production that would have benefitted from Power’s experience in The Larkins, where there was also limited time for rehearsal.
Power was very well regarded by his fellow actors in what can be a fractious profession. He was very much an ensemble player, Joe Dowling remarking in his eulogy that “he never saw himself as a single star in the theatrical firmament. He cared for those around him and was much loved by all his colleagues.”
Power’s extensive achievements as an actor came about despite his home environment having had no tradition of involvement in performance. His parents, Joe and Catherine (née Kennedy) were publicans who ran The Blackwater Inn in Youghal, his mother’s family business, and none of his four siblings followed him into the acting profession.
Power is survived by his widow Billie, and their children Michelle and David. The youngest of five siblings, his sister Liz also survives him, aged 95. He was predeceased by his brothers, Michael, John and Kevin.
