SUMMER MEMORIES:'I DISCOVERED DUNMORE EAST back in the 1980s while filming the television miniseries Echoes. I stayed in the Haven Hotel and had such a good time that for years afterwards my family and I came back to holiday there. It was a real family establishment – there were so many kids on site one year we turned the sauna into a creche. In the bar, owner John Kelly would play the guitar and get everyone to join him in the chorus of Cigarettes and Whiskeyand Wild, Wild Women.
“About five years ago I spent several weeks in the blistering sun in the desert in Morocco, in boot-camp training to be a Macedonian soldier, before we filmed Alexander. We slept in army tents and cooked all our meals on wood fires.
"During filming, my wife and children came out for a holiday. I wasn't scheduled that week so we spent the time exploring Marrakech and dining in good restaurants. I entertained the family with boot-camp stories of racing dung beetles by torchlight for money. And when they got bored, I'd regale them with military history, paraphrasing Dale Dye, our military adviser, who worked on every Hollywood movie with a military theme since Platoon.
“Colin Farrell, who was also on the film, is a great friend and became great friends with the kids during that time. They used to go to casinos and clubs together.
“Another summer we went to Positano. We flew into Naples and travelled out past Vesuvius along a road that was the lava flow that wiped out Pompeii. It really made you think.
“I love Italy, Rome especially. I always visit Keats’s house at the foot of the Spanish Steps, which remains exactly as it was when Shelley was visiting him there.
“Summer for me is also the element of surprise. Years ago, when the kids were still small, we took them to visit my sister, who was living in Jersey at the time. At breakfast we said ‘you’re not going to school today’ and gave them their airline tickets. They couldn’t believe it. Jersey was in the middle of an Indian summer and empty. We had the place to ourselves.
“When I’m not working I like to spend a summer’s evening outside O’Brien’s bar on Sussex Terrace.
"At the moment I'm in Death of a Salesman at the Gate Theatre. I read on the bus on my way into the theatre – Lincoln: The Biography of a Writerby Fred Kaplan and John Coldstream's biography of Dirk Bogarde are two of the books I have on the go.
“Christmas will be when I take my summer holidays. I might go to London. The Wolseley on Piccadilly is a wonderful restaurant. I’m not so keen on the nearby Ritz Hotel. They wouldn’t let me through the door because I wasn’t wearing a tie. They offered me one – I told them to keep it.”
In conversation with Alanna Gallagher
John Kavanagh is appearing in Death of a Salesmanat the Gate Theatre, Dublin.
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