Irish McCalla - The Final Years

IRISH McCALLA - THE FINAL YEARS
Page 1: From Sheena To Professional Artist

Much of this story has been told in a lot of detail elsewhere on this site (see the Personal Appearances pages and the Art page). This brief section covers the decade or so after the peak of Irish McCalla's success as a nationally syndicated television star.

For almost a decade after the Sheena series was cancelled Irish toured extensively to promote the show because it continued to be screened in both the US and abroad. During this period she also appeared in a handful of films and made several guest appearances on television dramas (see the Films pages and the Personal Appearances pages). She retired from the entertainment business in 1963. In 1966 she divorced her second husband, Patrick Horgan (see Page 3: Those Three Husbands), and returned to her home town of Pawnee City, Nebraska (2000 population: 1,033) to raise her two sons away from the the hustle and bustle of Los Angeles. While there, she developed the first of her serious problems with cancer that were to plague her, on and off, for the rest of her life. In 1969, at the age of 40, she was diagnosed with having a benign brain tumour and this was successfully removed in the early-70s (Ultra Filmfax & Glamour Girls). A few years later, probably in the mid-70s, Irish returned to live in the artists' colony at Malibu and was very pleased to once again be living beside her beloved Pacific Ocean (see Page 1: California in the Modelling section). In 1978 she and one of her sisters embarked on a promotional campaign to sell her prints and collector plates and once again she struggled to establish herself as a professional artist (Glamour Girls). Read the full story of Irish McCalla's life as an artist on the Art page.

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IRISH BIOGRAPHY INTRO

SHEENA INTRO

SOURCES
• Ultra Filmfax magazine No. 66, Apr-May 98
• Glamour Girls: Then and Now magazine, premiere issue Mar-Apr 94
IMAGES
• The photo of middle-aged Irish is from Starlog magazine No. 89, Dec 84