Despite starting her professional career in the Abbey in 1948 she never succumbed to the awful declamatory "Abbey style" that so many of her contemporaries laboured with.

Instead, O' Hara showed an ingenious gift for delicate restraint married to an innate sense of timing, and an ability to mine even the most innocuous line for depth of meaning.

As Eunice Phelan in Fair City she could be shrewish, coquettish, childlike and sympathetic;

displaying the kind of colour and texture in performance not normally demanded of an actor in a soap. Ultimately she had the ability all great actors have of being able to make it look easy, simultaneously making her lines seem throwaway, while also investing them with that sense of verisimilitude that all performers strive for.

Fair City series editor Kevin McHugh this week gave an indication of where this gift came from . . . starting with a disciplined and inquiring approach to her craft, and yet resulting in the kind of finished product that seemed effortless: "She was terrific to work with. She thought of what she was doing all the time. It wasn't just dedication, it was her nature. She was committed to whatever she was doing and concentrated on that. In fact, if you had her in a small part she would of course focus on that, but she would want to have to be working all the time. It was a great gift that she equated her life with her work to some degree. Work meant a huge amount to her."

It was this approach that was to see Joan O'Hara become one of Irish theatre's great scene stealers. With a well-modulated quip, subtle facial gesture or intonation, she could lift a scene like a young girl shoplifting sweets, and race out the door before anyone knew what had happened.

As the opium smoking Grandma Fraochlain in Marina Carr's The Mai she was both a comic delight and the warm heart of a production that could so easily have slid into overwrought melancholy without her. Indeed, a programme from a production of the play in 1994 credits her with having "created the role". It's a generous sentiment and, as anyone who saw her in the part can tell you, it was well deserved.

In his tribute to her on Radio One's Eleventh Hour during the week, director Conall Morrison talked about having the honour of being the last to direct her in an Abbey play in 2004. How she "brought that glorious personality into the rehearsal room and then onto the stage, creating characters with great colour and individuality, but all of them marked by that special air that she had of someone having a deeper understanding than most of us of the human animal and the human spirit". All of this was topped off by what he calls a "whiff of black magic that was all her own".

And there again was another part of her essence as a performer, a mischievous and anarchic quality that probably made up the best parts of both her life and work. A life and work which she never saw as mutually exclusive.

Kevin McHugh also talks about telling her son, playwright Sebastian Barry, that the Fair City team were planning her return to the series even after she initially fell ill. "Sebastian said to me 'she'll love that. If she feels that you're thinking about her and thinking about her as work, that'll give her a great lift.' As I say work was a huge thing for her."

Fair City was to become her most public performance. And Eunice Phelan was to become her most famous and fondly remembered role. Again Joan O'Hara's commitment to her craft could not be discounted, even while working in an arena often looked upon as the most onedimensional of performance spaces. Instead, she invested her role with so much of her typical professionalism that it seemed impossible to delineate where her creation of the part began and the work of the writers ended. As former script editor Brigie De Courcy once remarked to me "everyone loves to write for Eunice". The liveliness and playfulness she brought onto the set seemed to seep into her role and allowed writers to up their game and give them freer rein when writing for her. Ultimately she managed the almost impossible task for any soap actor of transcending her role and avoiding the usually inevitable typecasting, or lack of work, that has blighted so many other careers.

Her Fair City co-star Una Crawford O' Brien who plays her long suffering daughter-in-law Renee remembers a woman who was "wonderful to work with", and recalls arriving for her first day on set nine years ago: "I was in awe of her. I was coming in and she was this well known Abbey actress, I was scared of meeting her. She took me in and she made me feel so welcome that first morning. I have to say I learnt from her as well."

Film and TV director Charlie McCarthy remembers directing her in Pat McCabe's short film A Mother's Love's a Blessing: "We offered Joan the role of the crazy mother in Pat McCabe's even crazier script without needing to hear her read it. Directing Joan was one of the most enjoyable experiences I ever had when working with an actor." He recalls her "delivering the dialogue with lightness and skill, playing wonderfully with it, and making chemistry with Pat Kinnevane her co-star. I just watched, laughed, admired and felt lucky to be working with her".

Talking to friends and colleagues about her this week it's hard to ignore the affection for a woman who was "daft as a brush" "giddy and eccentric", "warmhearted and affecting, bright and bubbly". An "eccentric" possessed of "benign lunacy", who was uncompromisingly "her own person" throughout a career that spanned seven decades. Her first stage appearance was at the age of 14 as the lead in The Demon Piper, in her native Sligo. She went on to star in over 50 stage plays, most of them at the Abbey, even managing to star in plays written by her own son, and through it all her energy and vivacity never dimmed.

It's hard to define a life. Even harder if that life has been carried out in front of the nation on our television screens and across the boards. After all, acting itself, by its very nature, involves the donning of masks. What Joan O'Hara managed was to meld her life, her masks, and art, into one seamless whole, leaving behind a body of work that is a tribute both to her professionalism and her anarchic and lively spirit.

To expand on Abbey director Fiach MacConghail's words earlier in the week "A star has been extinguished", not alone in "the Abbey's firmament", but in our broader cultural life.