Hilton Edwards

[2] As an actor he played leading parts, including the title roles in Peer Gynt, Cyrano de Bergerac and Macbeth and Sheridan Whiteside in The Man Who Came To Dinner.

Their productions were innovative and experimental and they offered Dublin audiences an introduction to the world of European and American theatre as well as classics from the modern and Irish repertoire.

The company played for two seasons at the Peacock Theatre and then on Christmas Eve 1929, in Groome’s Hotel, the lease was signed for the 18th Century Rotunda Annex –– the 'Upper Concert Hall', the Gate's present home, with Goethe's Faust opening on 17 February 1930.

In 1961, he took a two-year break from theatre to become the first Head of Drama at Telefís Éireann, Ireland's national broadcaster and, a year later, he won a Jacob's Award for his television series, Self Portrait.

[citation needed] The academic Éibhear Walshe of University College Cork notes that MacLiammóir and Edwards did not ever identify themselves as gay as "Irish cultural discourse simply didn’t accommodate any public sexual identity outside the heterosexual consensus", noting that Irish society at the time only recorded lesbian and gay communities and cultures "in police records, prosecutions of men for same-sex activities or medical records of institutional committals of men and women for the mental illness of inversion".

[6] They were, however, prominent features on the Dublin social scene and as Walshe notes elsewhere "MacLiammóir and his partner Edwards survived, and even flourished, as Ireland's only visible gay couple".

[7] Walshe goes on to say that "when MacLiammóir died in 1978, the president of Ireland attended his funeral, as did the taoiseach and several government ministers, while Hilton Edwards was openly deferred to and sympathised [with] as chief mourner".