He joined the company of the Abbey Theatre in 1908, and was promptly cast in the lead part in The Man Who Missed the Tide, taking the stage name Fred O’Donovan.

The same year the Abbey was premiering Bernard Shaw's one-act The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet because the censor had banned it from London theatres on the grounds of blasphemy, and O'Donovan took the leading part of an American cowboy.

[4] O'Donovan continued to appear with the Abbey company in Ireland and England in such plays as Deirdre of the Sorrows, The Countess Cathleen and The Workhouse Ward as well as revivals of the Playboy while taking leading parts in Maurice Harte, The Whiteheaded Boy, John Bull’s Other Island and Man and Superman.

Bioscope commented,The film, which was expected to prove a good draw, actually surpassed all anticipations, a record being established for the week, and queues being the rule every evening.

[9]Encouraged by the public reaction, Film Company of Ireland proceeded to make a series of comedies in which O'Donovan and the others appeared, followed by a drama, The Eleventh Hour.

Irish Limelight published a detailed description of a day spent at the film shoot, including a cartoon by Frank Leah of O'Donovan directing.

[12] The company's next step was to take a major leap forward in ambition: a full-length adaptation of Knocknagow, Charles Kickham's epic novel set in the time of the Irish famine and land clearances in the 19th Century, that was published in 1873.

Commented the critic in the Cavan Anglo-Celt:With a true appreciation of the artistic, the various degrees of tone have been lifted from the novel, and placed on the screen just as Kickham would have done it himself.

The Australian online journal Screening the Past has a special issue devoted to Knocknagow with a comprehensive selection of articles and links.

W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory presided over the Abbey but found it a constant struggle to find the right person to handle the day-to-day workings of the theatre.

[18] Peter Kavanagh describes this period: A notable event was O'Donovan's bringing on to the company F.J. McCormick, who was to become one of the Abbey’s all-time great stars.

Greatly played, as he is here, he is intolerance incarnate.”[29] Of O'Donovan as Joxer Daly in Juno and the Paycock in 1929, the same critic said: “His portrayal of the furtive sycophant is quintessential.

"[30] Of his performance in And So To Bed, The Times commented, “His richness of voice and gesture and his sly fun as Samuel Pepys remain in the memory as something perfect of their kind.”[31] In 1927 the New York impresario Lee Shubert engaged O'Donovan and an entire company, including O'Donovan’s (third) wife Joyce Chancellor,[32][33] to take the boat to New York and stage the play there.

[37] Of a revival of the Playboy in 1925, the Manchester Guardian commented: O’Donovan still reveals the exquisite marriage of realism and romance which the Abbey Theatre created.

[38]From Ireland’s Abbey Theatre by Lennox Robinson: Fred O’Donovan from the moment of his first appearance on the stage was an actor par excellence.

There must of course be selection of and emphasis in acting to make the essentials stand out with sufficient boldness to carry the dramatist’s thought into the mind of the audience, but we seek to use as little exaggeration as possible.

It transmitted two hours of TV a day from Alexandra Palace, a Victorian exhibition hall in north London, to a range of about 25 miles around the capital.

We were in the workhouse ward with the two old vagabonds and we could note every emotion fluttering across the features of Fred O’Donovan or Harry Hutchinson as they quarrelled deliciously together.

[45] So the directors had to work out in detail in advance how the set would be constructed in the studio, how the movement of the actors would be “blocked”, and how the cameras would move around to get the desired sequence of shots.

The Times wrote that it was “staged by Mr Fred O’Donovan in the style of an ancient saga come to life, beautiful to look at and to listen to, remote and not too strange.”[48] One of O’Donovan’s cast in Deirdre, playing the part of the Dark-faced Messenger, was Robert Adams, an actor from British Guiana, who soon after starred in The Emperor Jones by Eugene O’Neill, becoming the first black actor to play a leading dramatic role on the new medium of television.

[51] After a time O'Donovan came up with the idea of eliminating the mixing between cameras by using only one: dollying up and down from close-up to long shot, walking the actors in and out of vision when they happened to have a line coming, sometimes for as much as 10 or 15 minutes.

Commenting on this “One Camera” technique Michael Barry said, “By reducing the mechanical complication to a minimum he obtained a smoothness and a serenity that became the O’Donovan hallmark upon the screen.”[52] O'Donovan himself told the Radio Times: "Mind you, this means much more work at rehearsals and it is more exacting in that the cast have to be grouped to suit the camera position, but I do contend that this method makes for a smoother and sometimes more polished performance.

"[53] Many more plays followed, including the much-anticipated The Fame of Grace Darling, about the Victorian heroine who, with her lighthousekeeper father, saved thirteen people from a shipwreck in 1838.

[59] Asa Briggs describes continuing doubts and indeed suspicion among radio broadcasters about the value of television,[60] nevertheless the service strove to grow, and by 1950 over 30 hours of programs a week were being transmitted and between 30% and 50% of the British population were within range.

Along with Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie and Shaw’s Candida came Sierra’s The Kingdom of God[62] and Yeats’s perplexing The Player Queen.

The next day came an irate phone call from the movie mogul Sir Alexander Korda, who claimed to own the film rights for the story, and demanded that the BBC's footage be destroyed.

[72] Lennox Robinson tells how he was on a trip to London in 1931 when Hazel Lady Lavery invited him to a luncheon at which one of the guests would be the Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald.