MAUREEN GRANT IS today celebrating her 90th birthday.
The veteran theatre worker has been employed at the Olympia since 1949 and, despite it being her birthday, will be working this evening at the performance of musical ‘Once’.
Over her 66 years of service she has become a feature of the theatre in her own right, rubbing shoulders with the great and the good.
“Oh yes, everybody comes and looks for me,” she told TheJournal.ie, “They all like to know about the ins and outs. I’m the longest there I suppose.”
Well of course I’ve met a lot of famous people but naturally you always have one or two [favourites] . One would be Kris Kristofferson. And the other fella is Bono.
While some of us might look forward to retirement, Maureen plans to “keep going ’til I die. Unless they throw me out.”
Asked if she still enjoys the work, she said:
I do indeed. More so now… after all it isn’t everybody who is still working at 90 and still be happy doing it. I might get a fella yet, you never know!
Noelle Fox, the office manager at the Olympia, has been working with Maureen for the past eight years.
“It has been an absolute pleasure because I deal with her quite a bit,” Noelle said about Maureen, “She gets a lot of people asking after her wanting to do interviews and meet with her. I deal with her quite a bit as well as seeing her in every night. She basically works every show at the Olympia as long as she is in the mood for it.”
Over the years her children have become part of her life at the theatre.
In total ten members of her family have been on the books, with her son Jimmy the current manager.
Maureen started working at the Olympia only a short time before giving birth to current manager Jimmy.
“I got married and I was pregnant,” she said, “Nobody asked me any questions. Married women weren’t allowed to work in them years…. [The manager] turned around and says it is only for three weeks, and it’s a bar job, and it’d suit you down to the ground.
Now remember I was only a couple of weeks away from giving birth to the baby. I was always very small and neat, so nobody knew, and he didn’t ask. I just answered the questions that he asked me truthfully. So I got the job for two weeks. And it turns out then that I’m here at 90 years now.
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