Mary Josephine O'Malley, born on St Joseph's Day, 1941 is English, of Irish-Lithuanian heritage, and brought up in Harrow, Middlesex. Her early experience of theatre as a child was singing and dancing. In the early 1960s she studied drama at the City Lit and joined a group performing plays created through improvisation. In the early 1970s, after marrying and following the birth of her two sons, Mary J wrote three short plays for the fringe theatre: SUPERSCUM; A BENEVOLENT SOCIETY and OH, IF EVER A MAN SUFFERED - in which, at short notice, she took over one of the parts at the Soho Poly and Hampstead theatres. BBC Birmingham commissioned two half hour TV plays: PERCY AND KENNETH and SHALL I SEE YOU NOW? 

In the mid 1970s, The Royal Court Theatre commissioned ONCE A CATHOLIC, which transferred to the West End's Wyndham's Theatre, where it ran for over two years. Before production this play won a Thames Television award and after production, an Evening Standard award, a Plays and Players award, the first Susan Smith Blackburn award and, later in the USA, a Hollywood Dramalogue Critics award. During the same era, Mary J wrote OY VAY MARIA for BBC TV, which won a Pye Television award. About the ONCE A CATHOLIC, Mary says: "An epitaph - to the fifties, to the teachings of Catholicism before the Second Vatican Council and to the Irish living in London as I remember them with affection". It has since been widely produced, including a run at The Tricycle (now The Kiln) in 2013/4, directed by Kathy Burke.

Following an injury which restricted the use of her right arm in the late 1970s, Mary J wrote LOOK OUT HERE COMES TROUBLE for the RSC, a few short articles, a play for radio and a film script of ONCE A CATHOLIC.  In