Nuala Moiselle obituary: Casting director with the knack for getting the right actor

Nuala Moiselle

Born: May 4th, 1928

Died: November 5th, 2018

Nuala Moiselle, who has died aged 90, may have spent the entirety of her long life living in Dún Laoghaire, but in her distinguished career as a casting director in theatre, television and film, her influence reached every corner of the developed world.

‘I never thought I would like free jazz, but I really do’

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Welcome to the busiest maternity ward on the planet

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The beam from Baily lighthouse helped my mother sleep again

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Home from England with her new fashions, my sister was soon back to work on the farm

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While she remained not at all well-known to the general public, the actors who caught her unerring eye for talent early in their careers included such household names as Daniel Day-Lewis and Pauline McLynn. Other actors she was responsible for casting at more established stages of their careers included Kate Blanchett in Veronica Guerin (2003), Johnathan Rhys-Myers in The Tudors (2007 and following) and Jeremy Irons in Neil Jordan's version of The Borgias (2011 and following).

A pivotal moment in her working like was probably her casting of Donal McCann and others in John Huston's masterful filming of James Joyce's The Dead in 1987. Director Jim Sheridan was one of those impressed: "Having seen The Dead, we decided she [Nuala] would be perfect as [casting director] for My Left Foot," he told The Irish Times this week. Moiselle duly worked on that Oscar-winning film, which, for her, was the start of one of the most significant professional relationships of her working life, that with the actor Daniel Day-Lewis, who famously played the disabled Dublin writer Christy Brown in the title role of Brown's life so convincingly it won him the first of his three Best Actor Oscars, in 1990.

Daniel Day-Lewis

Getting Day-Lewis for the part represented a considerable achievement, as Sheridan recalls. “Daniel Day-Lewis was the lord god of English acting.. everybody was trying to get him…he was in huge demand, and turning stuff down.”

Moiselle went on to cast Day-Lewis again in In the Name of the Father (1993) and The Boxer (1997), both also directed by Sheridan. Among many other films, Moiselle was casting director for Educating Rita (1983), with Michael Caine and Julie Walters (shot in Dublin), The Field (1990) with Richard Harris, Widows Peak (1994) with Mia Farrow, The Secret Scripture (1997) and Agnes Browne.

Moiselle was still very much an active working woman in her late eighties; her death earlier this month – although she had been admitted to hospital – was, in fact, unexpected.

Jim Sheridan noted her knack for getting exactly the right actor for a particular role. "Pete Postlethwaite played Daniel Day-Lewis' father [in In the Name of the Father], even though there wasn't a great difference in their ages. The question was, could he [Postlethwaite] play his [Day-Lewis'] father? You could depend on Nuala that it wouldn't backfire." It didn't. The film receiving three Academy Awards nominations for the three leading actors, Day-Lewis, Postlethwaite and Emma Thompson.

If nothing else, Moiselle was also an inspiration to the young actors and entertainment industry professionals with whom she worked.

‘Enormously generous’

Pauline McLynn, whom Moiselle cast in the hit TV comedy series Ballykissangel, said this week Moiselle "was enormously generous to actors, us Irish especially. Indeed, whenever she was honoured with an award she would always say: 'It's all about the actors, really.'"

There were many such awards, including the Industry Contribution Award in 2007 from the Irish Film and Television Academy (IFTA) and the Angela Award for Lifetime Achievement in Casting at the Subtitle European Fil Festival last year.

Well-known actors’ agent Lisa Cook, of the Lisa Richards Agency, remembered this week Moiselle’s professionalism. “She was a tough negotiator with contracts, but always fair and with a total passion for both the films and the actors she cast in them… I will always be grateful for everything she taught me as a young agent [in the 1980s].”

Moiselle’s compassionate side very probably had something to do with the fact that she was deeply religious, with a particular devotion to Padre Pio. As Jim Sheridan put it: “She prayed a lot…you felt that she was praying for you to succeed… She was very moral, and she didn’t know how to lie. She never played games with people.”

Leave national school

Moiselle's passion for acting started when she was 12, when she announced to her parents – Joseph, a civil servant, and Elizabeth O'Neill, a homemaker – that she wanted to leave her national school at Carysfort College in Blackrock to go touring around Ireland with the fit-up theatre company run by the famous ex-boxer Jack Doyle and his wife, Movita, who would later marry Marlon Brando. Later, she joined the Royalette dancing troupe at Dublin's Theatre Royal, and made her name as an actor (highly regarded as such by Jim Sheridan) in ground-breaking production such as Sam Thompson's The Evangelist in 1966 at the Grand Opera House in Belfast, with Ray McAnally, one of her favourite actors, and the first-ever Irish production of a play by the South African writer Athol Fugard, Hello and Goodbye, at the Focus Theatre in the 1970s.

During the 1980s and ‘90s, Moiselle was a member of the Irish Film Board and the board of the National College of Art and Design.

Theatre school

In the 1960s and ‘70s, she was also acting in Christmas pantomimes at the Gas Company Theatre, and ran her own theatre school, the Nuala Moiselle Academy of Dance and Drama.

Nuala Moiselle was one of three children. Her brothers, Owen Roe and Noel, predeceased her, as did also her husband, Dublin businessman Louis Moiselle, whom she married in 1952. She is survived by the couple’s three sons, Louis jnr, Joseph and Frank, the latter also her business partner in Moiselle Casting.