Kate Burton is totally at ease with cameras: the photo session in the hotel lounge before the interview takes about a quarter of the usual time needed for a picture. It's literally instant poise, smile, click, click, click, and astonishment on behalf of the photographer when he realises he has the picture he wants almost as soon as he has focused the camera.
Very few interviewees, no matter how famous or professional, are so relaxed or unfussy in front of a camera. It's perhaps the most telling clue to Kate Burton's background: she is the daughter of Richard Burton and stepdaughter of Elizabeth Taylor, who were the original paparazzi couple, and she grew up used to seeing rather more camera lenses than most of us.
She is in Ireland because she is currently playing the role of Maureen Folan in Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane, which has already sold out for its Dublin run at the Gaiety and looks like doing the same for its short countrywide tour. "The rain, the rain - and Garry has to have it," sighs Burton, with the resignation of one who is nightly christened for her art. She's referring to the rain which frames the play, and which falls at the back of the stage in a most convincingly west-of-Ireland way, under the direction of Garry Hynes. For the actors, as for the real citizens of Connemara, there's no escaping the wet stuff.
The comment about the rain stands out in the interview, since it's almost the only negative thing Kate Burton says about the play, her time in Ireland, or indeed, her life in general. She talks with warmth and enthusiasm and is clearly that rare and lucky breed of creature who is genuinely very happy: a sense of joy fairly shines out of her.
Now in her 40s - although she looks a decade younger - she is Richard Burton's first child by his first marriage, to Sybil Christopher. When she was five, her father met Elizabeth Taylor on the set of Cleopatra, and that, as they say, was that. Famously, her mother never spoke to him again, and they remained unreconciled until his death in 1984, by which time Kate had had three stepmothers.
"But my dad was never in one place very long anyway, because of filming, so I saw him as much as I would have had if my parents had stayed married," says Burton, who was allowed by her mother to spend a large portion of her holidays with him. Burton attended the United Nations International School in New York, where many of her classmates were diplomats' children.
"I thought that's what I would be: a diplomat." At Brown University, she majored in Russian, still with one eye on the diplomatic career. Perhaps inevitably, given the career choices of her family, acting had to be explored as an option sometime.
"My dad wasn't happy at all about it the beginning," she admits. When he finally did see her perform, it was in an off-Broadway production of Brian Friel's Winners, and he loved it. Since then, she has had many small but solid roles in a range of on- and off-Broadway productions, films, and TV, and admits with a cheerful grimace at one stage that she does voiceovers "to put bread on the table". Although Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is her own personal favourite film of her father's, she says that she "really understood what his reputation was all about" when she saw him in the stage production of Equus. "He took over roles that other actors had performed - Tony Hopkins, Tony Perkins - and he put his own stamp on them. I thought of that when I took on the role of Maureen in Beauty Queen, which Marie Mullen had really made her own. Like him, I had to try and put my own stamp on the role."
Burton's Irish accent in Beauty Queen, it has to be said, is not consistent, commuting quite a lot between Northern Ireland, America, and Connemara. It's to her credit that her performance survives the frequent slipping accent problems. She convinces as the troubled left-at-home kept-at-home daughter, whose grasp of reality is as elusive as the Connemara sunshine. So has she ever been to Leenane? Does she have an image of the landscape in which the play is set?
"I've only ever been to Ireland once before, about 10 years ago for a week, when my son Morgan was two. Now my daughter Charlotte is two - I seem to bring them here when they're two! I've never been to Connemara, but I'm going to Leenane in a couple of weeks," she says. "I imagine it to be very desolate - three houses and a pub."
Burton is over here with her small daughter, while her husband Michael Ritchie minds Morgan (11) back in the US. "Morgan looks like my dad." So what does her son think of his famous grandfather's films? "He's really only ever said one thing about them, a few years ago. A while back, I was working somewhere that had videos in the Spar, and Morgan and I used to go rent videos there; I wanted him to see some of his grandad's films. We watched The Taming of the Shrew and Anne of the Thousand Days, and a few others. Morgan came out with: `Grandpa sure does a lot of castle-ish pictures,' and that was about it."
She would like to see her mother write her memoirs. "Maybe she'll do it now, for Morgan and Charlotte; even just speak into a tape-recorder. No, she never spoke to my father again, but that was because her life had moved on, and she wanted to leave it all behind her. But she's had a fascinating life." How about writing her own memoirs at some stage? She laughs. "If I win a Tony before I'm 50, I might. Your life changes when you win one of those. Two of my friends won Oscars recently - Frances [McDormand] and Gwyneth [Paltrow] - and I've seen how their lives have changed so much, with this huge media interest that the Oscars bring. I've known Gwyneth since she was seven, and she was a movie star from the moment she stepped in front of a camera. But Frances, she was more like me, and now . . ." The rest of the sentence trails off. Well, she can take comfort in the fact that her father never won an Oscar either.
Stepmother Elizabeth Taylor celebrated her birthday recently. "We're very close, and always have been," says Burton. "She always remembers my birthday, but I forgot hers this year with all the busy-ness about the opening night here. I'll have to send her a nice little postcard from Ireland." Maybe Kate Burton will do it when she goes to Leenane: a postcard of Connemara from one Beauty Queen to another.
The Beauty Queen of Leenane continues in the Gaiety until March 11th and plays the Town Hall Theatre in Galway, March 13th-18th; An Grianan in Letterkenny, March 20th-25th; Grand Opera House, Belfast, May 8th-13th; and Waterford's Theatre Royal, May 15th-20th