It has been the base for many successful Irish and international productions, including The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Fair City, Braveheart, My Left Foot and Veronica Guerin.
[1] During Smith's tenure, notable movies based there included Michael Crichton's The First Great Train Robbery, starring Sean Connery.
When government funding was withdrawn in the early 1980s, Ardmore was briefly owned by the Indian producer Mahmud Sipra, before the studios were taken over in 1986 by a consortium made up of Mary Tyler Moore Enterprises, Tara Productions (Ireland) Limited, and the state National Development Corporation.
[4] In 2018, Ardmore was sold to Olcott Entertainment, an Irish company headed by businessman Joe Devine, who had developed another rival studio, Troy, in Limerick during 2017.
Olcott continued Irish filmmaking, with most of his films shot in County Kerry, specifically in the towns of Beaufort, Dunloe and Killarney.
Finally, in the late 1950s, Emmet Dalton and Louis Elliman, with funding from the Irish government and the promise of production finance from the United States, acquired a 10-acre site in Bray, Co. Wicklow, about 25 kilometres south of Dublin city centre.
Renowned British director George Pollock shot the next two productions at the studio, Sally's Irish Rogue and The Big Birthday, both based on popular Abbey Theatre comedies.
[6] The studios landed its first major motion picture with 1959's Shake Hands with the Devil, starring Oscar winner James Cagney and Dana Wynter.
[6] In 1981, Boorman filmed his $11.5 million epic Excalibur, where he cast a then-unknown Liam Neeson, Gabriel Byrne and Ciarán Hinds, at the studios and in the local hills of Wicklow.
Thereafter, the renamed MTM Ardmore Studios made its mark again on the global scene with the success of My Left Foot, directed by Jim Sheridan, which earned Oscars for Daniel Day-Lewis for his portrayal of the cerebral palsy sufferer Christy Brown and for Brenda Fricker, for her portrayal of Brown's mother.
Under O'Sullivan's management, the range of Ardmore-based service and facility companies increased to include other specialised related businesses.