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HE DOESN’T SAY who the actress was; he’s too discreet to name names. But Gabriel Byrne does a mean imitation of her Hollywood twang, and an even meaner imitation of her horror-struck visage. He was on a film set, “quite a while ago now”; back, perhaps, when his own twang, that of the Walkinstown variety, was even stronger than it is today. Byrne and the actress in question were going over their lines. “So, you want me to go over to her when I say that,” Byrne remembers saying to the director. Next thing he knew, his co-star was whipping around and staring at him, appalled.

“She said to me, ‘what did you say?’” says Byrne, conjuring up the look of her at that moment: the frozen facial muscles, the tight mouth, the wide-eyed stare (if he could bottle that move, he’d put every Botox doctor in Hollywood out of a job). “And I said to her, ‘I just said that I’ll go over to you’. And she said,” – and here he lets his shoulders drop as though all the air is going out of him with sheer relief, “she said, ‘oh, thank God. I thought you called me a whore’.”