[3] When she was a child, the family suffered due to her father's mental health and poor financial choices, which resulted in him losing their Dublin house through gambling.

As her father had returned to South Africa, and her mother was working as a live-in nurse, O'Casey was sent to an orphanage boarding school run by the Sisters of Charity.

She took her mother's maiden name as a stage name, and performed in musical comedy in England and America and modelled under the name Eileen Carey from 1925 to 1926.

She was 17 years his junior, and he immediately invited her to take the role of Nora Clitheroe in The Plough and the Stars for its first London production.

While Eileen was continuing an affair with the married American theatre impresario Lee Ephraim, Seán began to court her doggedly.

O'Casey continued her acting career, appearing in Noël Coward's Bitter Sweet, then in The Miracle by Max Reinhardt.

[4] She was noted for having provided O'Casey with "one of the most contented home lives in literary history", supporting the family through periods of financial difficulties and her husband's blindness in later life.