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Career
After moving briefly to London, McCormick returned to Dublin, where he worked in the Civil Service. He also took acting roles in the Workmen's Club on York Street, and for the first time under the pseudonym by which he became known for roles with the Queen's Theatre, Dublin. By May of 1919, he had a leading role in an independent production at the Abbey Theatre (The Curate of St. Chad's by Constance Powell Anderson). An attack on Irish acting by Edward Martyn was answered by McCormick in the pages of the journal Banba in June, 1921.

McCormick acted in over 500 plays at the Abbey, and was its stage manager from 1923–1925. There he became particularly associated with the plays of Sean O'Casey. Of his performance as Seumus Sheilds in The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), O'Casey said that the actor had created a character greater than that O'Casey had written. His Oedipus (1926) and Lear (1928) were admired by Yeats and Lady Gregory. He played Capt. Brennan in the filmed version of O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars but it was his return to film in Carol Reed's Odd Man Out (1947) that saw him singled out for praise in contemporaneous reviews. The Irish Times wrote that "the acting of the Irish players was unremittingly professional, and, in the case of F. J. McCormick, as Shell, a weak-minded and elderly corner-boy, quite outstanding." The Times of London found "... it is Mr. F. J. McCormick as a sly, bird-like creature, who stops just the right side of informing, who catches most surely at the imagination."

In their review of the film Hungry Hill (also 1947), The New York Times wrote, "As the butler who served John Brodrick, his sons, and their sons in turn, the late F. J. McCormick is truly magnificent, giving an even more subtle portrayal of Irish character than he did as the wily tramp in Odd Man Out."