Marjorie Fitzgibbon

Fitzgibbon left the family home in San Francisco to move to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career.

[1][2] Fitzgibbon met her first husband, Huntington Hartford, while working part-time as a cigarette girl in Ciro's Nightclub on Sunset Strip.

She stopped acting, but socialised with her husband's colleagues from the theatre, including Joan Littlewood, Peter O'Toole, John Hurt and Richard Harris.

Encouraged by her friend Micheál Mac Liammóir, she started sculpting heads of prominent Irish literary figures.

Her first exhibition was in 1970 at The Brown Thomas Gallery, Dublin, going on to be described as "one of the foremost exponents of traditional sculpture in Ireland achieving an authentic, formal likeness in the treatment of her subjects".

[1][2] She was commissioned by the Royal Dublin Society to create a series of 12 busts of living Irish artists in the early 1970s.