Career
American television audiences best knew her as Maeve Ryan"s sister, Annie Colleary, on the soap opera Ryan"s Hope in 1979 and again in 1981. She later returned to the show as Sister Mary Joel. Her family was deeply political and supported the Republican (anti-Treaty) side during the Irish Civil War.
Flanagan spent much of the early 1950s touring with Anew McMaster, where she met Harold Pinter at the Gate"s Pinter Festival.
She appeared in many Broadway plays, starting in 1957 with Dylan Thomas" Under Milk Wood. She starred in the 1976 Broadway revival of The Innocents.
She appeared on Broadway in Philadelphia, Here I Come! in 1994. Other Office-Broadway work included Yeats: A Celebration.
She appeared in the play Summer, by Hugh Leonard at the Hudson Guild Theater, directed by Brian Murray.
(Summer premiered at the Olney Theatre, Maryland, in August 1974)
A resident of Glen Rock, New Jersey, she died at The Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, New Jersey one day before her 78th birthday of heart failure following a battle with lung cancer.