Deirdre McSharry

Deirdre Mary McSharry was born on 4 April 1932 in West Ham, east London. Her father, Jack McSharry, was an Irish doctor who cared for tuberculosis patients and later died of the disease. Her mother, Mary, nee O'Brien, was widowed by 1939 and moved with her two children to Dublin.

Deirdre was sent to a convent school while her mother went to work, becoming editor of the magazine Woman's Life. In the holidays she and her brother Sean were taken to the theatre and to the magazine office, where she learned to type and to paste up pages. Her mother encouraged her to paint and pointed her towards biographies of clever women. She later recalled that her mother "always made work seem very special and glamorous".

She studied English at Trinity College Dublin, where she started to write and act. Her mother died shortly before Deirdre turned 21, and she left without graduating.

McSharry first worked in the theatre, performing with the Dublin Players and in late-night revues at the Pike theatre. She joined the Gate theatre company of Hilton Edwards and Micheál Mac Liammóir and was part of its two-month tour of Egypt in 1956, which left her with a lifelong love of textiles and pattern.

After moving to New York she made the switch to journalism with a job at Women's Wear Daily. Returning to London later in the 1950s, she wrote about fashion for women's weeklies, sometimes modelling the clothes herself, and was then hired by the Daily Express as fashion editor. In 1966 she was struck by a teenage model photographed for a short haircut by Leonard's of Mayfair, commissioned a shoot and called her, Twiggy, "the face of 1966".

When the British edition of Cosmopolitan launched in 1972 she was its fashion editor, and within a year she was editor. Her Cosmo addressed women's careers, style, health and sex lives with wit and directness. Its occasional nude male centrefolds were notorious; she told a 1973 documentary that men had long looked at magazines of busty women "and we thought it was a good joke to simply reverse the role and make the man the sex object." She won the Professional Publishers Association's editor of the year award for Cosmopolitan in 1981.

Ill health after the breakdown of her second marriage led her to leave Cosmopolitan. In 1985 she became editor of Country Living, launched the previous year under Jane Kirby, and aimed it at a growing middle-class readership drawn to restoring rural homes. She championed designers, makers and artists, and the designer Kevin McCloud later said his career started in no small part thanks to her. She was named editor of the year again in 1987.

McSharry married Linton Stone in 1955; the marriage was brief. In 1967 she married Peter King, and that marriage ended in 1984. In the mid 1980s she met Ian Smyth, with whom she lived in a series of homes in the UK and the United States before settling in Bath, where she became a fixture of the city's cultural life. They married in 1999 and remained together until his death in 2022.

She was survived by her sister Mary, her brothers Sean, Harry, Frank and James, and her stepchildren Matthew, Lucy, Malachi and Patrick.

Deirdre McSharry died on 14 August 2026, aged 94. Her obituary in The Guardian, published on 26 August 2026, did not give a cause of death, and none has been made public.

McSharry is remembered as the editor who made British Cosmopolitan a cultural force in the 1970s, speaking to young working women about ambition, health and sex with humour and confidence. The writer and artist Caroline Coon said she "promoted actual change that could be achieved, with a dollop of glamour and fun". Former staff, among them health and beauty editor Pattie Barron, recalled a formidable but generous boss who could not tolerate a lack of ambition and pushed her team out of the nest to succeed elsewhere.

She is also credited with an early role in Twiggy's fame and with shaping Country Living in the 1980s as a showcase for craft and individual style.