Home & Away Shock: Lynne McGranger Quits After 32 Years as Irene — Her Real Reason and What’s Next

Summer Bay is losing a pillar. After almost 33 years as Irene Roberts, Lynne McGranger is saying goodbye to Home and Away. Irene has been through the wringer over the decades — booze, cancer, the works — and her final chapter might be the most tender: an Alzheimer’s diagnosis that pushes her to leave town and travel while she still can. It’s a big swing for a long-running soap, and yes, there’s a story behind how it came together.

The exit: Irene chooses the open road

Irene’s farewell is built around choice, not decline. Instead of watching her deteriorate on screen, the show sends her off with a hopeful plan to see the world before her condition worsens. It’s deliberately not a doom-and-gloom ending — more like a curtain call with sunlight. Behind the scenes, McGranger pitched Alzheimer’s as a meaningful exit, and the writers steered it toward something gentler to avoid traumatizing half the country at 1:45 in the afternoon. The message is basically: real, respectful, but not bleak.

"Let’s not make it so depressing that people are in trauma, and let’s give a message of hope."

Why Lynne McGranger decided to go now

She’d been thinking about leaving for a year or two. The reasons are very human: she wants a shift in pace, to get back to the stage, and to stop waking up at 4am to film in the rain. A recent stint touring the play The Grandparents Club reminded her how much she missed theatre — it’s where she started, and it’s where she wants to spend time again.

Choosing Alzheimer’s — and doing the homework

McGranger suggested the Alzheimer’s storyline because it feels omnipresent now — almost everyone knows someone affected — and it has not been covered much on Australian TV. She did not have personal experience in her family, so she leaned on research and on castmate Jessica Redmayne, whose mum was diagnosed in her mid-50s. That inside-baseball bit matters: Redmayne became a key sounding board, which helped ground Irene’s story in reality and kept it from sliding into TV-movie-of-the-week territory.

The hardest days on set

If you like behind-the-scenes quirks: the last scene McGranger filmed was not her final scene on air. Because soaps shoot out of order, her actual wrap day was the moment Irene signs the diner over to Leah. She and Ada Nicodemou could barely keep it together. The earlier scene where Irene tells John and Leah about the diagnosis was another emotional gut punch — for the characters and for the actors playing them.

From a 3-month gig to 3 decades

McGranger never planned to stick around this long. She initially signed on for three months when her daughter Clancy was a toddler, came back for another short stint, and then the extensions just kept coming. Her husband Paul even left his job to look after Clancy as the show kept asking for another six months, then a year, then two... and here we are, three decades later.

Would she actually be friends with Irene?

Probably, though it would be a yin-yang pairing. Irene is direct to the point of loving a confrontation; McGranger says she is opinionated but more circumspect. She even admits Irene is partly inspired by a friend who calls a spade a frontend loader — which honestly explains a lot.

Why Irene stuck with fans

She is flawed in a way that feels real. Irene has made terrible choices and owned them, and she is capable of shocking things when pushed — remember when she nearly beat a home invader and ended up facing an attempted murder charge? She is messy, tough, and honest. That combination is hard to fake, and it is why people rooted for her.

• Irene’s final episode: Wednesday 1 October on 5
• Home and Away schedule: weekdays at 1:45pm on 5
• Lynne McGranger’s run as Irene: nearly 33 years

It really is the end of an era. Reenie leaves with a suitcase and some hope — which feels exactly right for a character who never stopped fighting, even when the story got tough.