Cluskey, Mary Elizabeth (‘May’) (1927–91), actress, was born 18 May 1927 at 83 St Ignatius Road, off Lower Dorset St., Dublin, one of three daughters and two sons of Francis (‘Frank’) Cluskey, butcher and trade unionist, and Elizabeth Mary Cluskey (née Millington). Her father, a close friend and associate of James Larkin (qv), was a long serving secretary of the butchers’ section of the ITGWU (c.1917–24) and the WUI (1924–54). Educated locally, she commenced her stage career c.1950, appearing in various Dublin city theatres, and in the Dublin Globe Theatre of Godfrey Quigley (qv) at the Gas Company Theatre, Dún Laoghaire. A sixth-generation Dubliner on both sides, she attained national prominence playing the quintessential inner-city ‘Dub’, Queenie Butler, perpetually bedecked with headscarf and chain-smoking cigarettes, in RTÉ's first serial television soap opera, Tolka Row (1964–8). She received a Jacobs award as best television actress for the role in 1966. During these years she frequently appeared at the Eblana Theatre in Busaras in premieres of new plays by emerging Irish writers. In the mid 1960s she performed regularly in the Dublin theatre festival, often with Gemini Productions, in works by Hugh Leonard (qv) (‘Dublin One’, a Joycean adaptation (1963), and ‘Mick and Mick’ (1966)) and Tom Coffey (‘Gone tomorrow’ (1965)). She was named best actress in the 1967 festival for her performance in ‘The noon-day devil’, a one-act play in the Eblana, by Maurice Davin-Power.
Cluskey was particularly adept at comedy; her perennial capacity to generate laughter appeared so effortless that audiences often overlooked the subtlety of her comic technique. In the early 1970s she demonstrated wider versatility in a diversity of roles with the Abbey Theatre company (which she joined in 1972) and elsewhere: as a robust Meg in ‘The hostage’ by Brendan Behan (qv) at the Lyceum, Edinburgh (1972); as a prim Miss Prism in ‘The importance of being earnest’ by Oscar Wilde (qv) (1973); and, most remarkably, as the avenging mother, armed with a broken bottle, opposite John Kavanagh's eponymous ‘Hatchet’ in Heno Magee's chilling urban drama (1972). Her performance in the Dublin theatre festival (1971) and a subsequent London production (1972) of Leonard's ‘The Patrick Pearse Motel’ elicited enthusiastic critical acclaim in both cities. Subsequent years saw her as the tipsy Americanised Aunt Lizzie in Brian Friel's (qv) ‘Philadelphia, here I come!’; as a proper Mrs Furriskey in Audrey Welsh's stage adaptation of the novel At swim-two-birds by Flann O'Brien (qv) (1981); and in a memorable Abbey production under guest Russian director Vladimir Monakhov of Chekhov's ‘Uncle Vanya’ (1978).
Cluskey won particular praise as Tish, the aging tart, in the first production of Leonard's ‘Time was’ (1976). She devised and performed a solo show, ‘Mothers’ – a compilation from works by such authors as William Butler Yeats (qv), Sean O'Casey (qv), John Steinbeck, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller – at the Peacock Theatre in 1976; a 1983 revival toured the USA. She wrote a play, ‘Or by appointment’, which ran at the Peacock in 1986. Her Abbey performances included first productions of Edna O'Brien's ‘The gathering’ (1974), Tom Murphy's ‘A thief of a Christmas’ (1985), and, on the Peacock stage, ‘The factory girls’ by Frank McGuinness (1982). Overseas, she appeared in Paris in Hugh Leonard's ‘Stephen D’, in Helsinki and Brussels in ‘The silver tassie’ by O'Casey (1972), in the USA in Friel's ‘Lovers’ (1976), and in Hong Kong in O'Casey's ‘Juno and the paycock’. A skilled and unselfish ensemble player, she was cited as ‘bearing out Stanislavsky's dictum that “there are no such things as small parts”’ (Hunt, 231). Her film credits included several such ‘small parts’ in Young Cassidy (1965), Ulysses (1967), Ryan's daughter (1970), Un taxi mauve (1977), and On a paving stone mounted (1978). She was unmarried. Her younger brother was trade unionist and Labour party politician Frank Cluskey (qv). Devoted to her extended family, for many years she helped care for an invalid brother-in-law. After a long illness she died 15 May 1991 in the Meath Hospital, Dublin.