A Night To Remember for Mary

THERE aren’t too many people today who can say they survived the Titanic but Ennis’ Mary Poirier managed to make it all the way from the depths of steerage to the lifeboats, albeit on the silver screen.
Mary starred in the film A Night to Remember in 1958, recounting the final night of the RMS Titanic. With the anniversary of the disaster coming up, Mary, who was then Mary Monaghan, recalled her experiences of working on the Golden Globe-winning film and brushing shoulders with the stars when she was just a teenager.
“I was studying in Trinity at the time. I had to get permission from Bishop Rogers to attend lectures there and I ended up being very involved with the drama group called the Trinity Players. We went to the Edinburgh Festival and a casting director from Ranks came and saw the play and asked me would I go down to Pinewood Studios to do a screen test. I wasn’t able to go because we were going to another festival in Monte Carlo. I remember saying, ‘oh my God you’ll lose your chance’. But I rang them and asked could they keep it open until I got back and I got the part,” Mary explained.
The film starred Honor Blackman and Kenneth More. However, they weren’t the only celebrities Mary encountered during her time on the film.
“When I went for the screen test I was in a room in costume waiting. I was told to go and have lunch and I met another person in costume too. I thought everybody in the area was like me and going for a screen test and I asked was he here often and had he done a test? ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘ages ago’ and I said, ‘I hope they are paying you well’. Then we got to the restaurant and somebody said to me ‘oh Mary, you’ve met Dirk Bogarde’. I thought ‘oh sweet Jesus’ and there was me asking if he was making money,” she laughed.
She got the part of Kate in the film, part of an Irish family who embarked at Cobh, travelling in steerage on the doomed ship. Mary spent about eight months on and off working on the film, moving back and forth between Dublin and London.
“It was a great experience and it was really interesting to see how it was all made. There was no ship involved but there was a model of the Titanic in a huge tank. There were different sets for various parts of the ships that were put at different angles, depending on how far the boat had sank. Kenneth More, the main star, was very kind. I went to his home for dinner with some others once and he had a butler. All of the people on the film were very friendly,” she said.
“I went to the gala opening in London and it was great even though I was a very small fish with very important actors and actresses. The main actress was Honor Blackman and everytime you saw her you knew the action was in first class and every time you saw me it was steerage. But we made our way up from steerage into first class and got into the lifeboat. I was saved so I was one of the lucky ones.”
When the film opened in Ennis, Mary and her family became akin to celebrities in the town. She recalled, “When the opening of the film came to Ennis, an invitation was sent to my parents to come and see it, with reserved seats for them. My Dad thought, it starts at eight so we will go in at quarter past because it will be dark. But they didn’t put the lights on until after my parents came in and they gave them a big clap. My father was mortified. Anytime even the tip of my nose appeared on the screen the whole town would clap. It was great.”
While Mary enjoyed her time in the spotlight, it was her first and only film as she concentrated on raising her children. However, acting is still very much her passion, with the stage now replacing the bright lights of the silver screen.
After her appearance in A Night to Remember, she moved to Scotland with her family, producing the plays of the children in the school she worked in, as well as taking part in amateur dramatics. Her return to Ennis after spending time living in the Middle East, among other places, saw Mary continue her love of acting by joining the Ennis Players.
“Both my mother and my brother were members of the Ennis Players. We all have great fun. We recently performed The Lonesome West and it’s being taken to a few festivals. We’re hoping to get to the All-Ireland with it. Theatre is the thing I love best.” She is also a member of the Forever Young singers.
While A Night to Remember is highly regarded among Titanic historians for its realism, the Oscar-winning James Cameron film Titanic is the one that springs to most people’s minds when they think of a movie depicting the disaster.
So what does Mary think of the Kate Winslett and Leonardo DiCaprio epic? “When the film came out in Ennis I got an invitation to attend. I think it was from the Chamber. I thought it was a magnificant spectacle but I didn’t particularly like it. Ours was done in black and white, quite deliberately to have it of the period. It was very authentic. It was written by a man called Walter Lord, whose uncle had gone down in the Titanic so he was passionate about getting the facts right, unlike the other movie, which was a romance and totally improbable.”
She added laughing, “There was no way a girl from first class would have ended up in the back of a car with a guy from steerage after a few hours. That wouldn’t have happened, no, no, no.”