Betty Ann Norton, Irish drama teacher and founder of the Betty Ann Norton Theatre School and actor agency, is born on July 5, 1936.

Norton grows up in Dublin near the South Circular Road. Her mother, Frances, plays the violin and her father, Eugene, is a baritone singer. Frances is a full-time homemaker while Eugene works as manager of the Bacon Shops on Grafton Street. One of two children, her younger brother, Jim Norton, also becomes a successful actor. She attends school at St. Louis High School, Rathmines.

Norton attends the Ena Mary Burke School of Drama and Elocution on Kildare Street, Dublin, where Hollywood star Maureen O’Hara had also trained. Her acting school offers an annual Ena Mary Burke scholarship in Burke’s honour.

Norton is a Licentiate of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama (LGSM) in London and Associate of the Royal Irish Academy of Music (RIAM) in Dublin. She is a member of the Dublin Shakespeare Society.

Norton originally plans to become an actor, but her family does not approve and her mother encourages her to become a teacher. In 1959, she establishes the Betty Ann Norton Theatre School on Harcourt Street in Dublin. Her husband, Michael, is co-director of the school. According to Norton, changes to traffic by the new Luas tram system causes the business to change premises to her childhood school, St. Louis High School in Rathmines in 2006.

Norton meets her husband, Michael J. Cunneen, on the Aran Islands in 1965 and they marry in 1967. They lived in Dún Laoghaire. Michael dies in the Blackrock Clinic on May 12, 2017.

Norton dies in the Beacon Hospital in the Sandyford suburb of Dublin, on June 5, 2020, at the age of 83. She is cremated and interred at Mount Jerome Cemetery and Crematorium. President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, pays tribute to Norton, describing her as a “theatre legend” and “one of our foremost theatre teachers.”