EXCLUSIVE: Lynne McGranger opens up about leaving Summer Bay.

Home and Away’s Lynne McGranger / Ada Nicodemou, Lynne McGranger, and James Stewart.

Home and Away’s Lynne McGranger opens up about her emotional exit. Photos: Channel 7 / Instagram/adanicodemou

After almost 33 years playing Irene Roberts on Home and Away, Lynne McGranger will officially say goodbye to the beloved character in Tuesday night’s episode. The 72-year-old, who recently won the Gold Logie for Most Popular Personality on Australian Television, announced her departure in February to pursue her passion for theatre.

She filmed her final scenes in Summer Bay the following month and is currently touring across Australia with her musical comedy show The Grandparents Club 2. Ahead of her emotional on-screen farewell, Lynne tells Yahoo Lifestyle that the hardest part of leaving Home and Away was no longer getting to work with her co-stars.

“I miss the camaraderie and the joyfulness and the laughs, and just sharing the good times and the bad times, the highs and the lows, and knowing that there’s a second family there for you,” she reflects. “But you know what? I still feel like they’re here for me. I still feel like nothing’s changed in the months since I’ve left.”

Having been a part of the cast for over three decades, making her the longest-serving female actor in an Australian drama series, Lynne admits there are elements of the show that she’s grateful to have left behind.

“There was never any regular routine, that’s the thing with Home and Away,” she remarks. “With a show like Home and Away that is filming so jam packed all the time, and if one person gets unwell – and hell, it’s winter, it’s flu season, it happens a lot – you just have to be ready to drop whatever you were you learned last night, and, ‘Here’s some scripts, learn then, because we’re filming them in five minutes’. So I don’t miss that. I don’t miss the cramming for the exams.”

Home and Away’s Lynne McGranger and Ada Nicodemou / Ray Meagher, Ada Nicodemou, Lynne McGranger, and Emily Symons.

‘I miss the camaraderie and the joyfulness and the laughs.’ Photos: Instagram/adanicodemou

Irene’s exit storyline has been playing out on the show over the past few months, with a series of concerning memory lapses leading to a shock Alzheimer’s diagnosis. She has since decided to leave Summer Bay and travel the world, with her nearest and dearest pulling out all the stops to organise the ultimate send-off.

Many fans around the world have praised Irene’s “powerful” storyline on social media, which Lynne says has been “very rewarding”.

“I wanted the lead-up to her exit to be something that could be experienced by the audience as well,” she details. “I feel like the whole Alzheimer’s dementia thing hasn’t really been touched on or dealt with much on Australian television, because it is a sensitive subject, and I just think the writers and the producers have done such an honourable job with it. They’ve really treated it with delicacy and with honesty, and that’s what we wanted to do.”

Lynne, who previously revealed that she was the one who came up with Irene’s exit storyline, adds that she’s “so proud” she’s been able to tell this story with the help of the show’s “genius” writers.

“In an ideal world, I would have been hit by a bus outside the diner, and it would have been all over red rover. And maybe I’d be in the coffin, knocking on the door, going, ‘Oi, I haven’t gone yet!’. But they were never going to do that,” she says.

“The fact that [the writers] can keep a being like Home and Away afloat and buoyant for so long, and still bring new innovation to it and be brave enough to tackle a story as potentially delicate as something like Alzheimer’s… It’s amazing.”