Ardmore Studios, in Bray, County Wicklow, is Irelands's only four wall studio.It opened in 1958 under the management of Emmet Dalton and Louis Elliman. Since then, it has evolved through many managements and owners. It has been the base for many successful Irish and international productions, including The Spy Who Came in from the Cold to Fair City, Braveheart, My Left Foot and Veronica Guerin.
After the lapse of its initial business plan in the early 1970s, the studio became the government-backed National Film Studios of Ireland, under the management of Sheamus Smith. During Smith's tenure, notable movies based there included Michael Crichton's The First Great Train Robbery, starring Sean Connery. When government funding was withdrawn in the early 1980s, a consortium led by Tara Productions (Ireland) Limited, among whose partners were producer Morgan O'Sullivan and writer Michael Feeney Callan, and MTM Hollywood acquired the studios in November 1986. O'Sullivan then spearheaded a campaign to attract major international films to Ireland – a strategy Dalton and his partner, the entrepreneur Louis Elliman, had pioneered in the 1950s – and succeeded in securing important co-production investment which revived the studios during the 1990s.
O'Sullivan's successor as managing director of the renamed Ardmore Studios was the accountant Kevin Moriarity. In 1990, the MTM shareholding was sold to Ardmore International Ltd., a company owned equally by Paul McGuinness and Ossie Kilkenny. Ardmore Studios had several successful years from 2006 to 2010 during the filming of The Tudors and Camelot. However, from 2011 to 2013 the studios suffered losses, and in 2013 Siún Ní Raghallaigh was appointed CEO. She implemented immediate cost cuts and restructured the company to enable it to compete more effectively with a lower cost base. The studios are now operating successfully.
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