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After marriage and motherhood, Pauline continued working, unusually for the period. It was by no means easy: ‘Even though she was providing this brilliant training, she got no government grants at all and the Academy had to pay its way’, says Suzanne, ‘My father was an engineer but also a good carpenter and he made the desks and furniture for the Academy.’ Students were ready to pay fees because the standard was exceptionally high — graduates over the decades include household names in Irish fashion and design: Neillí Mulcahy, Clodagh Phillips, Ib Jorgensen, Paul Costello, Louise Kennedy, Caroline Donnelly, Liz Quin, Richard Lewis, Cuan Hanly. As a schoolgirl, Suzanne was ‘entranced’ by the Academy. ‘I would go there after school and I ended up doing a lot of the course informally. I knew from a young age that, although I liked the sewing and the exactness of garment- making, I was never going to be a designer. I don’t have my mother’s talent at drawing or pattern-making. What I did love, and was always good at, was dealing with people. I was shy at college with my peers, but I wasn’t shy in the Academy managing students and teachers. It got so if anyone had issues, or something that needed sorting, people would say ‘send them to Susie’. The Swinging Sixties was a wild time in Trinity as elsewhere, but Suzanne insists that she ‘wasn’t part of any of that.’ It was the era of Mary Quant and the mini- skirt, the most radical change in fashion since the flapper girls of the 1920s. The strict tailoring and fullness of Dior gave way to something much skimpier and more unstructured but apparently Pauline was unfazed: ‘She was never shocked by the direction of fashion, and she never said the old days were better. She always embraced new trends. She was completely open-minded and I think that’s why her students were so creative.’ Suzanne married young, and soon had three children and, like her mother before her, juggled the Academy with parenting: ‘I would go in a few mornings or afternoons a week when the children were small. My mother kept working into her eighties but of course she was doing less so I needed to do more. We had excellent teachers who looked after the design and creative side and I ran the business and looked after students, which included getting them good placements after graduating.’ Like her mother, she continued working well past the age most people retire, but eventually it came time to hand it on. Both her daughters, Vicky and Janice, have inherited their grandmother’s talent and both had worked as tutors in the Academy, but having moved abroad and started families, they were not in a position to take it over. Instead, Suzanne approached two long-standing teachers, Colin Atkinson and Evelyn Rouiller: ‘I knew they would be brilliant and it was important to me that the ethos of the Academy continue. I got offers from other institutions who were after the name but I resisted. Colin and Evelyn took over in 2019 and the Academy now has a degree course, rather than a diploma, which is something we had long sought. They are about to relocate to Portobello, which I think is a great area for it, but it will still be the Grafton Academy. I know my mother would be thrilled.’
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Happy Days Theatre producer, Pádraig Cusack tells Trinity Today about his journey from music scholar at Trinity to producing critically acclaimed theatre around the world, and why he is ‘in awe of actors’ but prefers staying behind the scenes W hen Pádraig Cusack was in his early twenties and just getting started in his career as a classical cellist in Manchester, he was mugged on his way back from rehearsal. ‘There were four of them and it was a vicious knife attack which went beyond robbery – they didn’t let up even after taking my wallet and watch.’ Photo: Rajeshri Shinde Any mugging is traumatic and any significant injury is debilitating, but in Pádraig’s case it was life-altering: ‘My arm was saved from amputation, thanks to an amazing Swedish surgeon, and I got 80% use back but the dexterity in the fingers was gone. There was no way I could play the cello professionally.’ This was the career he had been set on since he was a child growing up in Dalkey, with his siblings and parents, actors Cyril Cusack and Maureen Kiely. He inherited the Cusack creative and performative gene but where his older sisters, Sinéad, Sorcha and Niamh, and his younger half-sister, Catherine, all went into acting, his obsession was classical music. Aged just 17, he arrived at Trinity to study music on a Taylor Scholarship. He loved college life but the course was an academic one, geared more towards musicology (research-based analysis of music) than to playing, which was his passion: ‘There was a lot of hope and expectation of me in the Department of Music because I had a scholarship, but I spent all my time practicing and playing in concerts, rather than reading and studying. I realised within the year that I needed to be in a conservatoire, rather than a university.’ The decision to leave to study in England was ‘quite scary’ because ‘I had a good life in Dublin: I knew loads of people and was playing weekend concerts and earning money and my older brother and sister had gone to Trinity so it was this very comfortable environment and I knew nobody in Manchester. When I went to audition for the Royal Northern College of Music, I didn’t tell anyone, not family or professors, and I sat my first year Trinity exams to show I wasn’t dropping out. Then, when I got a scholarship to Royal Northern, I presented it as a fait accompli. I don’t think my professors were surprised and they wished me well.’ It must have been devastating to have come so far only to have his dreams destroyed in a few minutes of violence, but he adjusted with remarkable stoicism and resilience: ‘I’m quite pragmatic – which is part of being a good producer, I guess – and I knew I had to make a plan. I’d always been good at maths and quite organised so I thought something Photo: Hugo Glendinning
