Orla Brady Interview - What's On Where, July 1999

What's On Where

Interview by Paul Byrne

July 1999

Original Online Interview Available from Site Search Engine under Cinema

In typical hyperbole fashion, Ireland's leading tabloid, The Sunday Independent, recently announced Orla Brady's arrival on the big screen with the headline 'Move Over Meryl - Orla Brady Is Here'. It's the sort of trumpeting that no actress would want hanging over them, being a comparison that merely sets them up for a spectacular fall. Such heralding meant Oasis went from being tomorrow's Beatles into yesterday's Shakin' Stevens. Talking to the young Dublin actress face to face, you can see that becoming a regular in the tabloids is the last thing she wants in her life.

Charming, self-effacing and rather striking to boot, Brady's far more excited about her work, and in particular, her debut feature film, A Love Divided, than she is about the prospect of becoming cinema's latest babe. Having spent the last eight years building up a reputation as an actress in theatre and television, Brady knows that the best tool an actor can have is anonymity.

Based on a true story, A Love Divided is set in Fethard-on-Sea, Co Wexford in the early 1950s, and centres around a young married couple, Sean, a Catholic, and Sheila, a Protestant. Having signed the Ne temere pledge, agreeing to bring up their children as Catholics, when the local priest (Tony Doyle) insists that their eldest daughter go to the local Catholic school, Sheila's insistence that it should be their decision leads to her taking her children and running. Leaving behind a devastated husband (played by Liam Cunningham) and a divided, angry town, a virulently sectarian campaign organised by the priest quickly makes international news.

ORLA BRADY: "No, I wasn't. When I told my mother about it, she remembered it. So it's the previous generation who know it, largely because, of course, they lived through it. I think it has a lot of relevance to today though; it's still a problem to some extent in Ireland. The peculiarity of these two very close religions coming into conflict is something that remains a mystery to a lot of people. There was an article three or four years ago by the South African writer Rian Malin, who came to Northern Ireland to write about the situation there. And he began it - and I remember just loving his opening - by saying, 'I don't get it. Everyone's white, everyone worships the same God, and the customs are the same'. It's very clear cut in South Africa, that there's a clash of cultures that have to reconcile, but we're so, so terribly close, and I think that was what was kind of interesting when looking back on articles about Fethard from abroad. The bemusement of people who were commenting on it from the outside"

OB: "If you like something, it always feels like a big step, because you have the challenge of doing the part justice. Really what you respond to is the role, not the medium, and I just responded to the script here. So I was very, very intensely happy doing it. In a strange way, it was like doing it for a TV drama, or for the stage. I didn't feel any added pressure, just because it was a feature film."

PB: Talking to other members of the cast and crew, A Love Divided seems to have been something close to a labour of love?

OB: "There was feeling of special-ness on A Love Divided because we all loved the story. We were all working for very little money, and there was a sense of everyone being for it, which you don't get with every job. And also for me, it was the most enormous treat, because it was the first time I've worked in Ireland for several years. I've been offered stuff in Ireland before, but it never fitted into my plans. So to be able to spend the summer in Dublin and Wicklow and Antrim, it was pure heaven."

OB: "Airports mainly [laughs]. I've been travelling a lot over the last few years, going from job to job."

OB: "Yeah, I would like to get to that point. I've now got to the point where, because I stay in hotels so often, and eat out, or on planes, my idea of complete heaven is to stay in for an evening and order a takeaway, and watch some telly. That really is my idea of bliss, to be domestic a bit."

OB: "I've been out of the picture. I took three months off work and went away, because I had been working solidly for almost two years really, from one job to the other and so on. So when I finished a BBC four-part drama at Christmas, I spent some time with my family and then I headed off around the States. Usually something only takes on a life form when it comes out, and you see whether people like it or they don't, or they just ignore it or whatever. And you just cannot predict that. People either come or they don't."

PB: When it comes to homegrown movies, Irish people have a habit of not going to see them. Do you think A Love Divided will be one of those rare exceptions?

OB: "I saw it for the first time last night. To be honest, I don't know what people here will go and see it, because I haven't been here in a while. I remember the first time I told this story to somebody, and he said, 'Jesus, that's very, you know, Catholics, Protestants, sectarianism', but actually, this is told as a love story. It is told in terms of the couple's love for each other, the effect that this bigotry has on them, and the effect of all these things on what was a very close couple. So on that level, I would be interested in seeing it. Hopefully, others will feel the same."

OB: "Well, in one way, of course you think about the kind of things you'd like to do. I would like to do more of this sort of thing, to be in good committed films. This is a wonderful role for an actress to play, because frequently you read scripts and there's a central male role and then there's the girlfriend. And this is a wonderfully equal gig, so I would love to be doing more of this kind of role. But other than that, I don't have a game plan. I think if you have a game plan, it will always go belly-up anyway [laughs].

OB: "The first thing I did on television was a police TV series, and it was fine, and it was well received, but then you can find yourself locked in for several years on one thing. And for some reason, I'm allergic to that now. I don't want to get locked into something where I don't know where the script is going. It's tempting because it's always big money, but I don't want to go down that road."

OB: "I'm really curious about film; I love doing it. All the same time, you're wary of staying away from theatre too long, because it's scary and it's a test, and you feel that if you don't keep exercising the muscle, you might lose that. The last play I did was about a year and a half ago, and I do feel maybe I should do another one before the year is out. But if anyone out there has a script as good as A Love Divided, please, send it my way [laughs]."