Madam, do you want your daughter or your son to go on the stage? Actors will think about this dilemma shortly.
Acting couple Donna Dent and Joe Gallagher, with their six-month old baby, Jesse Gallagher, laughed at the idea that their son might grow up to act. "We've surrounded his crib with law books," joked Dent.
Members of Irish Actors Equity, which is 50 years in existence this year, met in the Trocadero Restaurant in Dublin this week to get the anniversary celebrations under way and prepare for a conference in October on "the status of performing artists and their role in the life of a nation".
Tina Kellegher, star of The Snapper, who will be rehearsing the part of Nora in The Plough and the Stars at the Abbey in October, says "any good actor worth their salt would be very thorough about the work and get absorbed and completely involved" in a role.
Actors want to "refine the character" and they have "a great love of story-telling". People think actors want to be famous, she said, but "a real actor wants to tell a story, to entertain, to communicate. To do that you have to open your mind to understand the characters. You always have to challenge your own beliefs."
Peadar Lamb, who gave up a permanent and pensionable job as a teacher over 50 years ago to tread the boards, says acting then was regarded as "a job of no value" but "the notion of impermanence is now totally acceptable and credible".
He and his wife, Geraldine Plunkett, have two children, Susan and Marcus, who want to act.
"They have a very hard life ahead of them but if they want to do it, you can't stop them," says Lamb.
Pauline McLynn and David Herlihy chatted away in one corner about the pleasures of acting. "We're a curious contradiction. We love the flexibility," said Herlihy. "And we're disciplined when we have to," added McLynn.
Kathleen Barrington, president of the Irish Actors Equity, hopes "this conference is going to have a significant effect on actors' lives . . . Actors are as often in work as out of work", she said.
The actor Brian Murray, who played Flurrie Knox in The Irish RM, agreed: "It's terribly depressing when you are out of work, but exciting and enlivening" as well to wonder what the next job will be.