The portrait artist behind the hockey faces decorating the Hockey Hall of Fame is now 95 and something of a legend herself.

In her prime, Irma Coucill was an auburn-haired beauty who in turn saw beauty in the jawlines, hairlines and cheekbones of her famous subjects.

Some things don’t change.

“I love faces,” she says today inside the same house where she drew portraits of legends like Gordie Howe and Frank Mahovlich.

Time has turned her hair white and three strokes have stolen most of her hearing and eyesight.

Irma had been active until April of this year, when she had her third stroke, but has now retired her charcoal pencil.

“After that, she couldn’t draw anymore,” her son Tom, 61, says. “It’s tough when you’re an artist and you lose your eyesight.”

Last January, the Hockey Hall of Fame wrote to Coucill to thank her for her body of work and to say they are looking for a new artist to take her place.

Her last portrait for the hockey hall was Mats Sundin, the former Maple Leaf captain who was inducted in 2012.

From 1958 to 2012, Irma contributed 370 portraits in all.

Her son is proud of her accomplishments.

“The Hockey Hall of Fame is those images,” Tom says. “The hockey hall isn’t hockey sticks, it isn’t pucks, it isn’t sweaters or trophies. It’s the individuals and she has produced those iconic images.”

Included in his mother’s work are famous members of the Detroit Red Wings and the Maple Leafs, who are taking hockey to the great outdoors in the Winter Classic on New Year’s Day.

It was the Original Six teams in the 1950s that launched Irma’s career, but hockey grew to be only one facet of her work.

She has drawn political and historical figures from the Queen to John F. Kennedy to Pierre Trudeau.

In addition, she is the artist for the Canadian Business Hall of Fame in Toronto, Canada’s Aviation Hall of Fame in Wetaskiwin, Alta., the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame in London, Ont., and the Canadian Indian Hall of Fame in Brantford, Ont.

Most of her client base has been taken over by Tom, although another son, John, 64, is an artist as well.

Irma has also drawn for the major daily newspapers in Toronto, including the Star.

Hockey, however, was her springboard to success, and the memories of those days remain vivid.

For someone so important to the game’s history, it’s ironic that she’s not true-blue hockey fan. She prefers music, poetry and gardening.

However, her face would light up when she got to put on skates as a youngster. At that time, she turned up her nose at hockey players who hogged the ice.

She recalls going to a rink near her home on Millbrook Cres. in Toronto’s east end, where she dreamed of becoming an Olympic speed skater.

But the hockey players often got there first.

“They left the rink rutted,” she recalls with a furrowed brow.

But even then, as an aspiring artist, she used her eyes and vision to get her way.

Irma noticed that the hockey players didn’t gather if the temperature was below freezing. So on those sub-zero days she would go to the rink and skate freely by herself, unimpeded by sticks and pucks and players.

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Hockey also left a bad taste in Irma’s mouth because of the Hockey Hall of Fame’s original exclusion of women at the induction ceremonies.

Even though she was drawing the hockey portraits, it was her husband who went to the dinner and ceremonies in her place.

It was a stag affair until 1972.

Finally, the “discrimination” she felt was over.

She remembers that inductee Bernie (Boom Boom) Geoffrion spoke up at the dinner before a packed crowd at the Queen Elizabeth Building at Exhibition Place.

“It’s so nice to see the ladies present instead of looking at your ugly mugs,” Geoffrion said, according to Irma. He got a round of applause from all the guests.

Irma was so touched that she kept the scarf from the new green-and-white dress that she wore that evening as a “lovely” reminder.

“Walter (her husband), for a change, was my guest,” she recalled.

Irma grew up in a family devoted to the arts. Her father, Percival Young, was a cellist in orchestras that accompanied silent films.

Her portrait work started during World War II and she was commissioned to draw portraits of Norwegian pilots stationed in Canada.

After the war, her career didn’t get going until the hockey hall came along. It was 1958.

While her husband was lunching at his beloved Arts and Letters Club, he overheard a member mention that the Hockey Hall of Fame was looking for a portrait artist. Walter suggested Irma.

She got the job to draw the first 60 portraits. She was paid $35 for each one and each took a day to draw. As time went on, her price increased to $800.

The hall would send her photographs and she would do an outline on an illustration board.

Once she finished her assignment in 1958, she didn’t know what to do with the money, so she bought herself a new stove and a fur coat.

Drawings of Canadian prime ministers and governors general followed.

Up a few stairs, in the studio above Coucill’s garage, are her black-and-white drawings of some of the most important people of our time, like Trudeau, the Queen, J.F.K., Albert Einstein and others.

It occurs to you that if you haven’t been drawn by Irma Coucill, you’re likely not famous.

MORE:The Star’s hockey page