The first bunch of students in the Abbey Theatre School of Acting quickly learned that when established actors from the repertory company took training sessions, those sessions quickly became accounts of how wonderful the actor had been under extraordinary pressure in some celebrated production. 

When Deirdre Purcell visited, however, it was quite different. She never mentioned anything she’d ever appeared in. Instead, she would work with the group to understand a scene, to analyse the emotions in it, to help young actors move from the shallow obvious to a full understanding of what the writer intended. 

We, the students, knew better actors among her peers, and groped towards the guess that perhaps her capacity to analyse, to see subtle shading, might contribute to the slight distance she brought to every role.

Then she went to America, coming back married with two little boys, went into television, and became the first woman to anchor the nine o’clock news on RTÉ. (This was only a few years after it had been believed that no woman could ever read TV news because her appearance would be such a distraction to the nation.) 

You might think she’d be happy to sit in the anchor’s chair for years, but she was in love with words — always reading, from the time she was a child — and so ended up writing major profiles for Vincent Browne’s Sunday Tribune. 

Forever, those profiles took to craft. She would record lengthy interviews, transcribe them, study the transcript, then begin to draft what would run over a front page of a broadsheet section and an inside page. Every one of them revealed the subject in a newly engaging way.

Then she moved away from newspaper work and wrote novels and film scripts — again with enormous success. Her novels dealt with difficult subjects such as sibling loyalty to a rapist and how mental illness in a family member can not only destroy the sufferer but those around the sufferer.

It was widely varied career.  It was the product of diligence and devotion to different crafts. 

The same diligence and devotion characterised her fulfillment of the requirement to give interviews to publicise her books. But the distance was there, too, the need not to be craven. She never sought to be loved, except by those closest to her. Nor did she need the reassurance of constant media presence or the parading of her private griefs.

The one thing she never talked about was the thing she did best. Friendship. 

She adopted people as she went through life and gave them what they needed at different times, whether that was the buggy and bouncy chair her two sons had grown out of, or advice to another novelist fighting with a publisher, or a quick text to congratulate someone on a TV appearance. 

The phenomenally successful woman who had so many careers arguably put more effort into quietly helping other professionals than will ever be known.

Her death will rightly cause respectful recollection of just what one talented hardworking woman could achieve. But for anyone who experienced her quiet opportune generosity, the sadness is simpler and deeper. It’s the loss of someone whose life was a lesson in friendship.