Heartbroken Fair City star Mick Nolan told mourners at the funeral of his late wife Carol Anne Lowe how she had lived “a dozen lives”.
The actor’s wife, who played Francesca da Silva on the hit RTE soap, passed away last week on January 5. Her devastated husband Mick told mourners at her funeral service yesterday that Carol Anne lived “a dozen lives”.
He said: “About five months ago around August, it was a very warm, beautiful summer’s day. Carol Anne and myself were having tea in the back garden. It was one of those days you remember fondly as a kid, real summer’s day, no dogs barking, you couldn’t hear traffic.
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“We just sat there, drinking tea and she just looked at me and said, ‘I’ve lived a dozen lives.’ I looked at her and that’s all she said… she went back to sipping her Earl Grey and eating her cheesecake. I never knew what that meant. I was always thinking about it.”
He told how late Monday night, while sipping tea, he went over Carol-Anne’s illustrious life as an opera singer and actor in his mind.
“I remember from the other night watching the 1985 Lombard and Ulster which she won when she was only 22 and within the year, she moved to London, sang at Covent Garden, then off to Hamburg to live and sing, then settle down in South Africa, where she sang at several of the embassies there.
“Apart from being an opera singer and having a beautiful voice, she was an actor, a dancer, she started her own communications business, Blue Moon, where she coached some of the top CEOs of the country, while living in South Africa and through her embassy connections, she co-wrote a speech for Nelson Mandela when he came to Dublin. A dozen lives, that’s a lot of hats to wear.”
Mick told her grieving family and friends that Carol Anne had a magnetism, adding: “When you met her once, you never forgot her”. He recalled the moment she ended up sitting beside Plácido Domingo when she attended the opera in Verona with several of her friends.
The ticket collection office had only left five tickets for them instead of six so Carol Anne told her pals to go in and she would meet them later. “They went in and she stood outside watching all the different people and she heard the orchestra warming up.
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“She was standing there and she was just about to turn to go across to one of the little restaurants and this woman walking very fast towards her, dressed in black looking very stern, she had folders under her arm with a name badge and she said ‘do you have a ticket’ and she said ‘No’.”
The woman offered her a ticket, which was in the front row, after a party of opera lovers were stranded at an airport unable to make it. “She brought Carol Anne down right down the front to the best seats in the house.”
He told friends and family at her funeral service in Mount Jerome Crematorium in Dublin how she was sitting beside a gentleman with “strange wavy hair” who later introduced himself as world renowned opera singer Plácido Domingo. Mick also recalled the moment Carol Anne told him she loved him in a ”dingy little pub” – more than friends. “We were very close friends as actors are in the very early episodes of Fair City.”
He told how one Saturday he was working at home and was having a bad day when Carol Anne texted him and asked to meet him for a drink in their local after she was having a bad day herself. “This pub is like something from the early 70s…… we sat down and she was in all her finery….
“She looked at me and said ‘Do you know something, I love you very much’ and I said ‘Yeah, I love you’. Actors love everybody. She put her hand across the table, pushed the ashtray with the butts in it across the way with her beautiful manicured fingernails and she put her hand on my hand and she said ‘No, I’m saying that I’m telling you that I actually love you’. And that’s when the magnet set in. I could feel myself being drawn. Something happened.”
Mick told how he was “always struck” by how she always put in a half an hour every morning to warm up her singing voice before going out to work “in her business suit”. “That’s my beautiful Carol Anne,” he added.
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Also paying an emotional tribute to her “baby sister”, Jeanette said Carol Anne always “saw the best in people” and described her as a “beautiful young woman who could turn heads in any room.” She said: “Not many people know but Carol Anne was considered legally blind if she didn’t have her glasses on, she never told anyone that because she never wanted to be defined by the weaknesses in her life.
“I watched her grow from a child with thick glasses who through her early years and teens grew into this beautiful young woman who could turn heads in any room. Perhaps because she was aware of the weaknesses people could have and of her own transformation, she always saw the best in people and some people actually wondered why Carol Anne would choose them as friends but Carol Anne looked at the inner person.
“Even when she had no money, she was generous to a fault. It was impossible to leave her house without her packing something for you, whether it was home made biscuits or something you might take a fancy to. When our sister Barbara was dying, Carol Anne dropped everything selflessly, her business everything. When she was dying, I saw another side to her. I saw a braveness, I saw somebody who never said ‘why me’.
“In her last couple of weeks, she never said this shouldn’t be happening to me. She just said ‘I’m so grateful, I’m grateful that I managed to get married to Mick, I’m so grateful that I got another year, that I got to Seville, that I went to Italy and that I’m so grateful that I’m going to see another Christmas’ – and she did.”
She added that she was a “very spiritual person”, adding: “I’m incredibly grateful that I got to have this talented, beautiful and incredibly kind person as my little sister.” Her brother Henry read the famous funeral poem by Mary Elizabeth Frye called Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep, while thanking everyone for coming out to celebrate “my glorious sister’s life”.
Her younger brother David also thanked mourners for all their help throughout Carol Anne’s illness. Soloist Eilís Dexter also sang while a montage of Carol Anne’s life was played in front of mourners. A clip of Carol Anne’s stunning operatic vocals on the Late Late Show when she was 22-years-old after she won the Lombard and Ulster’s singing competition was shown at her funeral, while another was shown of her time on Fair City.
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