Born: 12 March 1913, United Kingdom
Died: 23 February 2006
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: Patricia Clancy
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Turlough O’Riordan. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Patricia Boylan (1913–2006), actor and journalist, was born 12 March 1913 in Coalisland, Co. Tyrone, the youngest girl of twelve children (four girls and eight boys) of Patrick Clancy, a general and wholesale draper and JP, and his wife Anne (née Treanor). Moving to Dungannon, she was educated at St Patrick’s Girls’ Academy (run by the Sisters of Mercy), where she greatly enjoyed studying English. Drawn to the stage as a teenager, she doorstepped Arthur Shields, who was visiting Belfast with the Abbey Theatre company, by impersonating a journalist, and wrote up the encounter, which was published in the Irish News. After training as a nurse at Leeds General Infirmary (1932–6), she graduated from the Royal College of Nursing, London, and in 1937 moved with her parents to Clonliffe Road, Drumcondra, Dublin. A deep yearning to act led her to audition successfully for the Abbey Theatre’s school of acting. She profiled the director of the school, Lennox Robinson, for the Irish Press (30 September 1937); such occasional journalism helped pay her fees. Enamoured with the spirit of the Abbey Theatre, she was among a group chosen by Robinson to form a verse-speaking class, and appeared as Deirdre in ‘Deirdre of the sorrows’ by J. M. Synge on Radio Éireann. She was honorary secretary and central to the founding of the Dublin Verse-Speaking Society founded by Austin Clarke and Robert Farren in December 1939. Giving poetry recitals at the Abbey and Peacock theatres, and appearing on a Radio Éireann Monday night poetry show introduced by Clarke for twenty-five years, the society adopted poet Gordon Bottomley’s dictum that ‘the sound of poetry is part of its meaning’ (Gaps of brightness, 136). It was while working in Radio Éireann that Patricia met Henry Boylan in 1941. She also worked as an editorial assistant on the bi-monthly Woman’s Life, ghosting an agony aunt column and managing beauty pageants; she was also an accomplished cook and gardener. Regularly appearing on talk shows and in a variety of Radio Éireann productions from the 1940s, she wrote a social column as ‘Darina’ for the Irish Press. She was a regular contributor to Hibernia, editor of the short-lived glossy Creation, and contributed to the Irish Times, the Irish Press, the Irish Arts Review and Books Ireland. A series of three articles in the Irish Times (29–31 August 1973) on the origins of the United Arts Club, of which she was a member, resulted in her All cultivated people: a history of the United Arts Club (1988). In 2003 she published a well-reviewed memoir, Gaps of brightness. She died in Dublin 23 February 2006.