Blessed. It's a word which Liam Cunningham employs several times during our interview to describe how lucky he has been in his acting career and in the people with whom he has found himself working. The former ESB electrician certainly has found himself to be in the right place at the right time, again and again. His first professional acting job was in Dermot Bolger's critically acclaimed play, Lament for Arthur Cleary. The first time he went inside a London theatre was to play a starring role on the main stage of the Royal Court. And in movies he has had the pleasure of working with such unselfish actors as Sean Connery and Kate Winslet. Blessed, indeed.
Inevitably, there have been some exceptions along the way, but only a few. "The number of dick-heads I've worked with can be counted on the fingers of one hand," he commented when we met in Dublin last week. Their names are best left unsaid, he believes.
Liam Cunningham's profile has continued to rise in recent months, following his starring roles on stage in A Streetcar Named Desire and on television in Falling for a Dancer, and it's set to rise even higher in the weeks to come with the release of two new Irish films in which he plays leading roles - Sweety Barrett, which opens next Friday, and A Love Divided, which follows on May 14th.
The characters he plays in these two movies could hardly be more different: a decent family man downtrodden by a hypocritical system in A Love Divided, and an utterly despicable and corrupt detective named Mannix Bone in Sweety Barrett. Brendan Gleeson plays the eponymous Sweety Barrett, a man who is one of life's innocents and finds himself working for smugglers ruled by the unscrupulous Bone.
The film is an engagingly offbeat morality fable which marks an auspicious feature debut for its Irish writer-director, Stephen Bradley, and it's set in the fictional town of Dockery, a rundown port populated by eccentrics. Bone is a character wholly devoid of redeeming features and he is played with relish by Liam Cunningham.
"It was great to play that role," the actor says, "because I normally play really gentle characters who get into conflict. This guy starts out bad and gets worse and worse. Stephen Bradley didn't have me in mind to play Bone, so I had to convince him I could play someone so nasty." He credits the film's costume designer, Laura Marie Mugan, for coming up with Bone's "horribly gaudy" identity bracelet and with "that SS-type leather coat which makes him look so slick - I wouldn't get 20 feet down O'Connell Street wearing that coat."
It's his first time working with Brendan Gleeson, although their paths crossed in the past. Both featured separately in Into the West, Cunningham's first film - "I had two close-ups," he says - and in different Passion Machine productions of Studs. "I've been dying to work with Brendan for ages," he says. "He's generosity itself. We bounced ideas off each other and it was all for the good of the film. There was no selfishness involved, which you can get sometimes."
What he likes about Sweety Barrett is that "it's an art-house-looking movie with a strong, accessible narrative - and it's an Irish movie that isn't necessarily about Ireland, which is a sign of the imminent maturity of Irish filmmaking." For a first-time feature director, Stephen Bradley was "incredibly cool and relaxed," he says. "He was like someone on his 15th or 20th feature, not his first. And we had this German lighting cameraman, Thomas Mauch, who had worked on many films for Werner Herzog, and he has a lot of nervous energy. A bit of a handful, really, but Stephen knew how to handle him."
Written by Stuart Hepburn and directed by Syd Macartney, A Love Divided tells the shocking true story of Sean Cloney, a Catholic, and Sheila Kelly, a Protestant who met and fell in love in 1949, and got married three times - in a London registry office, in a Protestant church, and in the Catholic church in their home town of Fethard-on-Sea, Co Wexford.
As a Protestant, Sheila had to sign the Ne temere pledge, agreeing to bring up their children as Catholics. When their eldest daughter reached school-going age, the local priest, Father Stafford, insisted that she go to the local Catholic school. Sheila felt this was a decision that ought to be taken by herself and her husband, and a furious row broke out first in Fethard and then it spread across Ireland.
In a virulently sectarian campaign organised by Father Stafford and local politicians, the town's Protestant-owned shops were boycotted, a Protestant music teacher lost 12 of her 13 pupils, and the Catholic teacher of the local Protestant school was forced to resign. This happened in Ireland in the summer of 1957.
The film features Liam Cunningham as Sean Cloney with Orla Brady as his wife and Tony Doyle as the parish priest. Cunningham says that he has not met the real Sean Cloney who, in the early 1980s, was one of the first to complain to Bishop Brendan Comiskey about Father Sean Fortune, who committed suicide last month.
"This story was a tricky subject to get right," says Cunningham. "It would have been very easy to have overwhelmed the love story because of all that happened to these honest, decent people. They were two lambs caught among the wolves, and it's all caused by people who wanted to make capital out of insignificant differences like their religious beliefs. It shows that it doesn't take much paranoia to feed divisions between people."
Liam Cunningham was born in the North Wall area of Dublin. "I'm an inner city man, born and bred," he says proudly. Having worked for some years with the ESB, he went to Zimbabwe in 1984 and worked on rural electrification schemes in the bush.
Returning to Dublin after more than three years, he was back in his ESB job for less than a month, he says, when he realised he didn't want to do it any more. "I've always loved movies, so I tried to get into an acting school. I saw an ad for the Oscar school on the back of The Irish Times, and I went along for an audition, very pragmatically to see if I could do it or not. I had no acting background in my family and no experience of theatre. I hadn't even been in a school play. My audition piece wasn't even from a play - I did Kurtz's speech from Apocalypse Now: `The horror, the horror. . .'. And I was accepted."
His professional debut followed in Wet Paint's production of Dermot Bolger's Lament for Arthur Cleary, which dealt with an emigrant who returns home after 15 years to a changed Dublin of money-lending and drug-dealing. "It's a powerful play," Cunningham says, "and I got the part because David Byrne, who was one of my tutors, was directing it." The play won many awards and Cunningham travelled with it when it was staged in the US.
Next came one of life's blessings for him. "From that I went straight into Passion Machine," he says, still retaining an air of incredulity, as he recalls appearing in Paul Mercier's Studs and Wasters. "It was an unbelievable experience. I'm still astonished by the writing in Studs, especially. There are 12 guys in it, and each of them has these unique lines, lines which would never come out of the mouths of any of the other 11 guys.
"Paul is an extraordinary writer, and I was a baby in theatre terms at the time - and he trusted me with his baby, his play. He gave me magnificent opportunities, throwing me in at the deep end and giving me his full trust. It was then I realised I could act. It comes out of the blue when it takes you over to such an extent you hardly realise it."
Next stop was London and the Royal Court where he and Orla Charlton co-starred in the two-hander, Goodnight Siobhan, a political dialogue about Northern Ireland written by Jeananne Crowley. "That was a baptism by fire," he recalls. "Sphincter-tightening, I think they call it. I'd never even been to the theatre in London. Jeananne really had to fight to persuade them to cast me."
The first of several collaborations with the Scottish director, Robin Lefevre, followed, in the Dublin production of The Rocky Horror Show. "I just had a cough and a spit," Cunningham says, "but I was supposed to take over from Stephen Brennan as Frankenfurter after a few weeks when he went on to a play in the Dublin Theatre Festival. But it never happened because Rocky Horror went belly up - and not because of the production, which was incredible."
Liam Cunningham had never acted in Shakespeare before he went to London for a year and a half at the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he was in The Herbal Bed and played "a very mature Orlando" opposite Niamh Cusack in As You Like It. And he worked with Lefevre again, in Billy Roche's remarkable Wexford trilogy.
The last time Liam Cunningham worked in theatre was last summer when he played Stanley Kowalski opposite Frances McDormand and Donna Dent in Robin Lefevre's production of A Streetcar Named Desire at the Gate. "I was OK," he believes. "It wasn't my finest hour. But we had a ball. Frances McDormand is just so generous to work with and there was nothing she wouldn't do to help."
Meanwhile, he was making his mark in television and in movies. In one of the finest episodes of the Cracker series, he gave a beautifully judged, tender and moving performance as a factory supervisor who has suppressed his homosexuality and takes an unfortunate orphaned teenager played by John Simm (from The Lakes) under his wing. "The job I had was to convince the audience to have sympathy for this character who has viciously killed two people," he says. His performance rightly earned him a best actor nomination from the Royal Television Society.
He is bemused by the divided response to his recent TV work, playing the inarticulate farmer, Mossie Sheehan in Deirdre Purcell's Falling for a Dancer. "I really liked the fact that you couldn't figure out what that guy was really like until the end of the series," he says. "It got excellent ratings here and in Britain, but it was given a very hard time by some people in Ireland and it was much better received in Britain. I think Deirdre did a great job. It was very honest writing. Everyone - except the intelligentsia in Ireland - took it to their heart."
A leading role in the Warner Bros movie, War of the Buttons, unexpectedly led to Liam Cunningham making his Hollywood debut in Alfonso Cuaron's charming 1995 film of the Frances Hodgson Burnett novel, A Little Princess.
"It was a lovely film to do and they're still milking millions from the video," he says. "For all the terrible things they say about the Hollywood studios, it was actually Warners who put me up for the part. The story is about the girl and they didn't want it unbalanced by having stars playing the adults, so they sent Alfonso War of the Buttons. Then I did a taping for him in London and I didn't meet him until I arrived on the set in Burbank."
In another 1995 release, Jerry Zucker's film, First Knight, Liam Cunningham played Sir Agravaine, the close cohort of King Arthur, who was played by Sean Connery, with Richard Gere and Julia Ormond in the roles of Lancelot and Guinevere. "I'd always admired Sean Connery," says Cunningham. "Even though I wonder about some of his choices, I like him even in bad movies. I played his right-hand man, so we spent a lot of time together. He has a great sense of humour and he doesn't suffer fools gladly."
A year later Cunningham was impressively low-key in Michael Winterbottom's uncompromised and heart-breaking treatment of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure. In Jude he played Phillotson, the teacher and mentor of Jude Fawley (Christopher Eccleston) and the secret admirer of Sue Bridehead (Kate Winslet).
"Kate was only 20 at the time, but she is really mature and a joy to work with, an absolute delight," he says. "She is what you see. There is no hidden agenda. She loves acting, loves working with her fellow actors. Blessed I've been."
Not so blessed with a recent US project, though, except in financial terms. It's something he lets slip, but he doesn't want to talk about it, or even reveal its title.
"It's this American mini-series I did, and I only did it because of a house I wanted to buy."
He is altogether happier with his latest project, Benjamin Ross's story of the making of Citizen Kane in the Home Box Office production, RKO 281, now shooting at Shepperton Studios outside London. The very attractive cast features Liev Schrieber as Orson Welles, John Malkovich as Herman J. Mankiewicz, Melanie Griffith as Marion Davies, James Cromwell as William Randolph Hearst, Brenda Blethyn as Louella Parsons, Fiona Shaw as Hedda Hopper - and Liam Cunningham as the brilliant, innovative lighting cameraman, Gregg Toland.
Dublin is very much his home and he doesn't see that changing, he says. And he returns to Dublin shortly - to play one of the criminal kingpins in John MacKenzie's contemporary crime thriller, Though the Sky Falls, starring Joan Allen as a journalist loosely based on the late Veronica Guerin. "Give it confidence and give it your best shot," is Liam Cunningham's credo as an actor. "I like to go into a job with an open mind. Having a career plan is death."
