John pays a tribute to Renee Prime

I want to express my sincere sorrow after reading your article in last week’s Leader of the passing of Renee Prime who worked at the Iveagh Cinema.

I lived at Ashfield (near Dromore) and attended Banbridge Technical College in the 1960s. As a young teenager in those days, I like many paid my weekly visit to the Iveagh and to this day I can still clearly remember the welcoming friendly smile and greeting I like all others got from Renee.

She was a really lovely lady and someone who quite obviously loved her job; when the cinema closed there was a feature in the Leader which included an interview with Renee and I can clearly remember her not surprisingly comments that she really enjoyed her job there.

I now live in Lisburn, but the amazing thing I remember most about Renee was returning to the Iveagh in the early 1990, not as a young teenager - but as an aging parent of young twins to see the popular Disney film ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’, a film which I watched at the Iveagh in the 1960s; I was surprised, but absolutely delighted to once again see Renee in her familiar role and once again receiving the same welcoming friendly smile and greeting that I got so many years previously.

I recall asking her, ‘Do you remember me from all these years ago?’ to which she replied, ‘I certainly do’.

I can also recall that she arranged for me to take the twins all the way to the very top of the cinema to the projection room to see the then aging large film projectors – a treat which frankly I think I enjoyed even more than the twins.

Renee was truly a wonderful lady and I am quite sure she will be greatly missed around Banbridge.”

John Kelly