The following is a combination of the brief autobiography of Margaretta D'Arcy which appeared in her book, Tell Them Everything, along with other passionate facts of Margaretta's life as told to Donna Hoffman via telephone on March 6, 1997.

Margaretta D'Arcy was born in 1934 in London.

Her father, Joseph D'Arcy came from a Dublin working class family. He fought with the Dublin Brigade of the old Irish Republican Army in the Irish War for Independence and on the anti-Treaty side in the Irish Civil War. He was later posted to London by the DeValera government as an official of the Irish Department of External Affairs where he met Margaretta's mother, Marie Billig D'Arcy in the London School of Economics. Marie Billig's Russian Jewish family had emigrated from Odessa and were living in the East end of London. Billig's brother, a socialist, had moved to Israel and later to Palestine where he helped to build kibbutzes in the hopes that Jewish Israelis and Arab Palestinians might live together.

Margaretta D'Arcy was mainly brought up and educated in Dublin in various schools including five years in an enclosed Dominican convent. D'Arcy's mother put her daughters in the convent for protection when the President of Ireland Eamonn De Valera said during World War II that he would turn Jewish people over to the Nazis in the case of an invasion.

In 1949 at the age of 15, Margaretta left school to work in Irish theatre where she was influenced by French existentialism, Samuel Beckett, and Brendan Behan. In 1953, she immigrated to London to work in English theatre. There, she met the writer John Arden and became a member of a special acting group at the Royal Court Theatre in 1958. This was at the beginnings of the modern, socialist committed theatre in Britain and D'Arcy came under the influence of the New Left Review, Doris Lessing, Lindsey Anderson, and others. She was a member of the Irish and British Actors Equity union.

From 1958, D'Arcy decided to break with authoritarian, patriarchal established theatre because she found it exploitative. In 1960, she joined the Committee of 100, the non-violent, direct action section of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The Committee founded by Bertrand Russell, was comprised mainly of artists.

D'Arcy came under the influence of anarchist and pacifist communities' ideologies, using theatre and film to forward these. She began conceptualizing and practicing "house theatre", in which artists, neighbors, and friends bring theatre into homes in a vibrant, living mix of life, art, and activism.

In the 1960's, Margaretta worked at community theatre projects in Dublin, Yorkshire, Somerset, New York, London and Scotland. She has continued this approach in passionate variation to the present.

In 1967, D'Arcy and Arden travelled to New York to protest the Vietnam war and helped to organize "13-Hour War Game". As a result of this work, she was influenced in the United States by the Black Panther cultural movement, Bread and Puppet Theatre, San Francisco Mime Troop, and in London, by Action Cinema.

In 1968, Margaretta D'Arcy decided to live permanently in Ireland to concentrate her energies there because of the civil rights movement and the revival of the national question. In 1969, she joined the civil rights movement in County Galway and made a film for the Land League.

In 1969, D'Arcy went to India to study non-violent and self-sufficiency movement in rural areas. She "discovered this to be non-viable in practice". She also studied the use of folk theatre in political agitation. When she was arrested and imprisoned with her family in Assam, D'Arcy gave notice of a hunger strike in order to secure the release of her children. They were with her husband in the men's jail and had political status whereas there was no political status in the women's jail which also served as the local madhouse.

In 1970, she returned to Ireland and joined the official Sinn Fein helping to set up theatre, film, and newspaper in Galway. She joined the Society of Irish Playwrights. In 1972, D'Arcy was expelled from the official Sinn Fein with hundreds of others because of disagreements over the national question. She went on strike at the Royal Shakespeare Company with John Arden as members of the Society of Irish Playwrights. This was the first strike ever of playwrights at a British theatre. D'Arcy and Arden's play The Ballygombeen Bequest was withdrawn from 784 Repetoire when a British Army Commander brought a libel suit against them.

In 1975, D'Arcy worked in the U.S.A. and Canada in community theatre and film projects and in Currandella, County Galway. The same year, the official Sinn Fein and the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union sponsored The Non-Stop Connolly Show in Liberty Hall. This twenty four hour play was the first ever mammoth, left wing cultural statement in Irish stage. D'Arcy and Arden toured the north and south of Ireland with the show. In 1976, she formed the Galway Theatre Workshop and presented the Non-Stop Connolly Show in London. In 1977, she toured with the Galway Theatre Workshop in Ireland, north and south in anti-repression, anti-imperialist plays. A group including D'Arcy was arrested by the Gardai in Galway and an attempt was made to have them lynched by the Fine Gael crowd. The libel case concerning The Ballygombeen Bequest was settled that year.

Pinprick of History a play about the Galway Theatre Workshop and Irish repression was presented in London. The British press attacked the play and D'Arcy and Arden for its rampant Republicanism.

In 1978, 784 presents Vanderlip Folly tour of Belfast. Margaretta was arrested that year for making artistic statements in the Ulster museum in protest against banning of Art for Society exhibitors and H-Block march. D'Arcy spent three weeks among the political prisoners in Armagh jail. Upon her release, she was invited to an international writers' conferences in Norway and Greece.

On International Women's Day in 1979, Margaretta was arrested with the Armagh 11 protesting the EEC elections. Her trial was postponed three times. In the meantime, D'Arcy worked with an international tribunal on Britain's presence in Ireland.

In 1980, the Armagh trial was postponed again and D'Arcy travelled to New York sponsored by the War Resistors' League, an anti-nuclear movement organization, to do theatrical agitation work about the H-Blocks in Armagh. This culminated in a thirty-hour marathon protest at Washington Square Church, the founding of New York's Armagh H-Blocks Committee, and a visit by the Berrigan brothers to Ireland.

While she was away, D'Arcy was sentenced to prison and went to Armagh jail and served time with cell mate Breige Anne McCaughley. McCaughley, Jerry Adams sister-in-law, had attended a Galway Theatre Workshop performance in Belfast and enjoyed it.

In 1983, Margaretta joined the anti-nuclear protestors at a women's encampment for peace called Greenham Common outside a British airbase in Berkshire, England. She was arrested during her first non-violent, direct action there in 1987.