THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW:Possessed of a steely resolve bron of adversity and adventure, Fionnuala Flanagan has lived as vivid a life as any of her roles
‘STAND UP and tell me your name,” says the nun to the little red-headed girl on her first day in the convent. “My name is Manon Flanagan,” replies the little girl, confidently.
“What an unusual name,” says the nun. “Can you tell me about it?” “I was named after a French whore,” says the little girl, impervious to the consequences of telling the truth.
Fionnula Manon Flanagan (Manon being the eponymous heroine of Jules Massenet’s 18th-century opera) approaches tentatively across the foyer of her favourite Dublin hotel, the Burlington. Tiny, glowing, she reaches out her manicured hand to shake mine.
Her eyes are an extraordinary colour, blue but not blue, turquoise, with pupils like miniature lasers. White-blonde hair frames a delicate, heart-shaped face. She looks like a beautiful and savvy cat.
Later, curled in her suite, scripts scattered on the coffee table, her reading matter piled high (history books written in Spanish and English, resting on an alluring-looking read about Cuba), she tells me the above story of her first day at the Holy Faith Convent in Dublin’s Whitehall, and of how the nun, recovering from this pert little child’s response to the question about her name, then called her mother.
“We went to the convent for about 20 minutes, but my brother cried all the time,” Flanagan says. “I don’t think the nun said ‘you have to take them out’, but it was an unhappy situation; it wasn’t going to work.”
Flanagan, like a piece of well-crafted and durable glass, is one of our best exports. The actor who made her Broadway debut in Brian Friel's The Loversin 1968 has, over the past 40 years, had a hugely successful career in US film and television. ("I have made a place in the industry," she modestly describes it.) Having established herself as one of the foremost interpreters of James Joyce's work (including Ulysses in Nighttownon stage and James Joyce's Womenon film), Flanagan's muscular career has also taken in TV films and series, with an Emmy-award winning role in Rich Man, Poor Manand several spin-offs from Star Trek, in one of which she gamely managed to mother a robot.
Currently on TV screens on both sides of the Atlantic, she is appearing in The Brotherhoodand in the epic modern fairy tale Lost("You spend 40 years in theatre and television, and people stop you in the street to talk about Lost," she bitches good-humouredly). The series seems endless, I say, a little wearily. "That's because modern life isn't finished yet," she replies enigmatically, and there, with apologies to all the geeks in the audience, we bring down a spooky veil on the subject.
FINDING HERSELF living in Los Angeles in the 1970s, Flanagan began the difficult process of breaking into feature films. She describes a city with a strict, if unspoken, professional ethic, which at that time more or less insisted that TV actors knew their place and stayed on TV, while a delicate core of elite actors got to suck the honeyed roles in movies. Flanagan recalls a gradual influx of British theatre actors into Hollywood and an opening-out of the industry to European and arthouse films.
Steadily, her career began to gain momentum, and now, at 68, she has a bevy of superb films under her belt, including The Others, with Nicole Kidman ("I had seen her work in Dead Calmand thought 'yes, she's very good, she has craft'"), and Transamerica, with Felicity Huffman ("a consummate actor and an important film about something that mattered, about prejudice, about living in stealth, living under the radar of everyday life").
Other films now in the can include a new version of A Christmas Caroland The Invention of Lying, with Ricky Gervais.
The problem about discussing Flanagan’s career with her is that it can devour conversation like quicksand. She has worked with so many fantastic directors and writers, trudged to so many trailers with such a rattlebag of Hollywood faces, that you want to put time on hold and consume her memories unedited.
A puerile question, and one that I know the answer to, but which I ask anyway, is: do you ever feel intimidated by these megastars? "If you feel intimidated, you shouldn't be there," she says, fur bristling. "They are playing their parts, I am playing mine. I wasn't asked to work with Nicole, but with the director [Alejandro Amenábar]. He had seen Some Mother's Son. When I read his script, I thought, 'now he has an interesting take on life'."
FLANAGAN WAS born a long way from the verdant hills of Hollywood, a long way from the red earth of California and a long way from the dazzling roar of New York City. From the vantage point of her comfortable suite on this balmy morning, we pad gently back to the past, to Whitehall on Dublin’s northside, and a corporation estate bathed in post-Emergency hardship and conformity.
Flanagan’s mother, a genteel woman from Co Dublin who had worked in the civil service prior to her marriage, wanted to “break us out of the confinement of the projects, the corporation scheme”. Flanagan recalls a woman who believed in the power of song and theatre, and wanted that for her children. “We used sit in the back row of the Gate on a Saturday, for 1/6d, my mother and I, and that was when I knew that they were having much more fun up there in the light than we were having in the dark.”
Her mother favoured the Gate, and the European drama produced there, over the Abbey, which, under the yoke of Ernest Blythe, seemed tethered to endless kitchen-sink cottage dramas. “Dublin was so divided, class-wise, in the 1950s. You felt it in the air; it was pervasive,” Flanagan says. “But my mother really did believe that education was important. The world is large, she told us, get out and see it; the only way to develop respect for other people is to get out and meet them.”
Although Flanagan’s mother had only a smattering of her native language, and her father communicated as Gaeilge solely with the word “tá” (“he used it for everything”), both of her parents instilled in their five children a love and respect for the Irish language, and gave them an education that helped them master it. “They believed that a country without a language is a nation without a soul, and I am profoundly grateful to them for that access to that language, literature and metaphor.”
Flanagan goes on to describe a childhood rich in culture, pulsing with life, but also riddled with insecurities, where finances ebbed and flowed with the unpredictability of the weather. At the helm of this loving, capricious family was her father, Terry.
“We always called him Terry, never dad or father,” she says. “He was Terry, and he was the one who called me Manon, while my mother called me Fionnula – a split identity right from the beginning. My father was old IRA, a member of Saor Éire. He went to Spain as a member of the International Brigade to fight against Franco. He was wounded, came back, joined the Irish Army and became a captain during the Emergency.”
She goes on to describe an expansive nationalist, a man who was a passionate defender of Ireland but who befriended and chose to socialise with an emigre community in Dublin, people who had escaped fascism and now found themselves living under the shadow of the bishop’s palace.
“My parents’ friends were socialists, communists, old republicans,” she says. “They were a small population – writers, painters, refugees – not the normal friendships you would find in Dublin’s corporation schemes. I had an awareness of a sense of difference. My mother was a Catholic socialist, but my father had such a hatred of the Catholic Church that no priest would ever cross our door. He was not in favour of us going to Catholic schools – that was one of the reasons that we didn’t stay at Holy Faith.”
Instead, the children went to a “model school”, Scoil Mhuire, on Dublin’s Marlborough Street, which was populated, according to Flanagan, by the children of old-school republicans bussed in from the suburbs, and by city children from the area. Run directly by the Department of Education and staffed by lay teachers, the teaching was entirely in Irish. “We got a slap on the hand if we were late,” she recalls, “but there was none of the horror and brutality we now know existed.”
A man prone to great bursts of enthusiasm and entrepreneurial fervour, Manon's father started several businesses, including the joyously named Flanagan Floral Enterprises, the vehicle for his plan to install and maintain window boxes around a predominantly grey city. "He also developed a little magazine, Furniture and Floor Covering," Flanagan says. "He wrote, say, about Irish rope, encouraged the advertising and promotion of Irish products. He understood that Irish industry needed accelerated promotion."
Terry Flanagan went on to work for a time at the Irish Press. "Then he crashed some cars," says Flanagan wryly. "He drank, disastrously." Her piercing eyes watch me, like a hunched cat over a trapped bird. She is searching for recognition, knowing well that there is none of us in this sodden country impervious to the consequences of drink.
“Drink defeated him,” she continues, evenly. “Our fortunes fluctuated: sometimes it was great, sometimes we didn’t know where the next meal was coming from. His ability to connect with moneyed support was not very good, or maybe people just thought, ‘I’m not going to give Flanagan money’. I was ashamed and I was frightened, but learned to cope with the fluctuations of fortune.”
Shame is a resonant and chillingly honest word, one which Flanagan repeats more than once when discussing her father and the vagaries of their family life. Candidly, she talks about the shame of poverty, the shame of covering up poverty, and fear of the bravura among people on the estate who didn’t try to cover up the difficulties of poverty. She recalls with tender clarity her anxiety that people might be laughing at her father behind his back, and her need, as a little girl of 11 or 12, to “protect him from ridicule, knowing my friends and neighbours were capable of laughing at him – that was searing pain”. She speaks poignantly about Terry selling long-stemmed wine glasses from a small leather suitcase – she does not know how or to whom, or indeed if a single goblet was ever sold.
“People who are revolutionaries for the most part have difficulties with the day-to-day arrangements of life,” she says. “In his quest to change the world, he very often neglected to look after what was right there under his nose, a wife and five children.” She pauses and smiles. “But I never considered us poor, although I knew when we didn’t have money.”
The coffee in the metal pot is cold, but I pour it anyway. I need to look away from her, afraid that my empathy will be misconstrued as sentimentality.
“Certain colours I will never have in my house,” she says, accepting the cup. “A certain dark green that was on the inside of all the doors of all the houses in Whitehall, a dark green that was put there by the corporation, and to me that symbolises the grey 1950s of Ireland. It symbolises poverty.”
THAT THIS remarkable woman, when she was just 13 years old, had the chutzpah to audition for Ria Mooney, who then ran the Abbey Theatre School, is perhaps unsurprising, given her background and already well-established tenacity. Rejected then because of her youth, she was accepted years later, when Donal McCann was a student. She “almost survived” Frank Dermody, the then head of the school, who Flanagan describes as an “irascible, volatile man”, but when she disputed his decision to expel her friend and fellow student, film director John Lynch, she too was shown the door for having the temerity to question his authority.
"I was young. It was very heartbreaking. I thought I'd never get into theatre," she says. "Then one day, on O'Connell Street, I met Tomas Mac Anna, a brilliant director – he had been working in Berlin and Reykjavik. Knowing I was bilingual, he offered me a job in the Damer Hall, in An Triail." Flanagan's resounding theatrical success in the production, as a young woman thrown on the pyre of extra-marital love and unwanted pregnancy, catapulted her to London and the start of an international theatre career.
In the late 1960s, six months into the US tour of Friel's The Lovers, the cast were falling apart with colds, aches and pains. Cast member Eamon Morrissey brought a friend, Dr Garrett O'Connor, to their Baltimore hotel to give the cast medical advice and Flanagan met her future husband. O'Connor (brother of Ulick) is now an eminent psychiatrist and chief executive of the Betty Ford Clinic (a not-for-profit organisation helping families blighted by alcoholism, Flanagan is quick to point out, not just another of the many rehab clinics strung like fairy lights along the Malibu coast, boasting a celebrity clientele).
O’Connor had been living in the US for more than 10 years when he and Flanagan got together. Coming out of a marriage and with two sons, early in their relationship, he was offered a job in UCLA and the decision that the couple would move to Los Angeles was made.
“I have developed a career there that I might not necessarily have had here,” she says. “My career happened. Life is what happens when you’re making other plans.” Garrett O’Connor has been in recovery for more than 30 years. His alcoholism, as Flanagan describes it, is “an illness that requires daily vigilance”. Was he drinking when you met him, I ask?
“I wouldn’t have had anything to do with him if he hadn’t been drinking,” she says. “I was suspicious, contemptuous, of people that didn’t drink. When I look at the disasters in my family from obsessive drinking . . . well, you’re not equipped with the language of sobriety, it’s an emotional language.”
Was his sobriety more difficult than his drinking? “When Garrett was drinking, I was keeping him company, and using a lot of dope. He stopped. I still felt there was something wrong with my life, and I realised it wasn’t him. I cleaned up my act, stopped drinking [26 years ago]. I do it a day at a time, and I’m grateful for that. And things changed for us in our lives, and it was about coming to terms with having grown up in a culture where drink permeates everything and dictates everything.”
This does not sound like the happy-clappy, arms-around-addiction talk so beloved of Hollywood A-listers, but the considered opinion of a woman who has walked a long road to peace of mind.
I have to leave; hours have passed, the coffee has blackened the cups. Flanagan walks me to the lift. She tells me before I go that, in his latter years, her father made a career as a movie extra in Ardmore studios in Wicklow. “We used to laugh together at his grandiosity when he would tell us that he and Rex Harrison had just completed filming.” There is so much more to talk about, so many conversations unexplored. Sunshine strays into the lobby. Framed in the gloom, Manon looks luminous.
BornDublin, 1941
Personal lifeResident of California Married to Dr Garrett O'Connor
Film highlightsJames Joyce's Women, The Others, Transamerica, Some Mother's Son
Television highlightsRich Man Poor Man, Star Trek,The Brotherhood, Lost
