Fiona Shaw on Ireland: ‘It is one of the most successful countries in the world. It wasn’t when I left it’

Fiona Shaw on Ireland: ‘It is one of the most successful countries in the world. It wasn’t when I left it’, reasonable contender for the accolade of Ireland’s best living actor, to a luxury hotel in central London. The space has been done up to rhyme with the film’s aesthetic. Faux-period sofas. Plush toys. At the centre of it all, Shaw generates a reassuringly normal vibe. As if she’s sitting you down in any old parlour in any old town.

That makes sense. Yet you do now meet young actors who have extremely precise plans. This director. That studio. That franchise. “It is a different job,” she says. “I’ve always done films in between plays. But the commitment to plays takes a long time. You’re in one place for a long time, particularly if you’re leading it – because you’re responsible for a whole lot of people. But when I stopped doing the theatre, which I did, after doing Testament of Mary, Colm Tóibín’s play, I just thought I’d take a break. And in that break I entered another world – and I’ve become more and more comfortable in it. I love it.

“There was no obvious career path in Ireland. There was nothing,” she says. “It was quite stagnant. Things have taken off phenomenally in the last 20 years there. I did My Left Foot at the end of the 1980s in Ireland. There were no other films going at that time. Then I did Mountains of the Moon for Bob Rafelson in America.

When Brenda Fricker took the opening Oscar of the 1990 ceremony she became the first Irish acting winner since Barry Fitzgerald in 1944. That sort of thing wasn’t supposed to happen to us.“It was like when Dana won the Eurovision. The whole country stopped,” Shaw says. “Seán Doran is a wonderful producer,” she says of the veteran organiser. “So whenever Seán asks me to do anything I do it. I just did a part in a film of the Molly sentences, which are very long. Mine is 22 minutes. Nonpunctuated. Quite hard to do. We did it in a day.”“I think what we’ve been saying in this conversation is that you’re always trying to throw yourself off the path,” she says. “Go off the path. Find more interesting things.

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