She once added spice to 'Glenroe'. Now, with Ken Loach's new film, Eva Birthistle goes from farm to fame, writes Ian Kilroy
One day Regina Crosbie boarded a bus to leave Glenroe for ever. The posh farmer from the big house had captured a few hearts as she drove her tractor - and added a bit of spice to the sleepy soap. So whatever became of her? Did she go on to open ploughing festivals and present Ear To The Ground? Hardly. When she hightailed it out of Glenroe, in the mid-1990s, little did we know that Eva Birthistle, who played Regina, was on the brink of stardom. At 30 she already has a string of feature films behind her. Now, as the star of Ken Loach's Ae Fond Kiss, her profile is such that bigger and better work seems sure to follow. It's a farm-to-fame story she shared at this year's Galway Film Fleadh, which Ae Fond Kiss opened.
"I enjoyed Glenroe for a year," she says in something akin to a Dublin accent. "The second year I kind of got itchy feet. But it did kick-start my career in Dublin."
A native of Bray, Co Wicklow, Birthistle moved with her family to Derry when she was 14, hence her hard-to-place accent. Although raised a Catholic, she attended a mainly Protestant school in the city before going on to study stagecraft. Lighting design kept her attention for a while, but then acting became the draw. She moved on to the Gaiety School of Acting, in Dublin, being snapped up by Glenroe after she graduated.
"I went very quickly into TV," she says. "I think I've only done two plays. It wasn't a conscious decision, I just started getting the work in TV." Maybe that's proved an advantage. On film she plays small, for the intimate camera. The overblown performances that some Irish actors deliver on celluloid come from years in theatre. Birthistle never had to unlearn theatre: it had never taken hold.
Her style in Ae Fond Kiss is a good example. An intimate film, chronicling the all-but-smooth path of an affair between an Irish Catholic teacher (Birthistle) and a Glasgow DJ from a Pakistani Muslim background (Atta Yaqub), it is full of close, private scenes between the lead characters. Yaqub's character, Casim, is divided between the imminent marriage to his cousin that his family has arranged for him and his passion for Roísín, Birthistle's character. He must betray either his respect for the traditional ways of his family or his personal feelings.
It's a film that explores all the complexities of identity, issues Birthistle pondered as a Catholic southerner in a Northern Ireland Protestant school. "It was all thrust upon us - myself and my brother - when we went to school in Derry: identity and who you are, religion and what group you belong to. It gave me something to draw off, I suppose."
Given that Loach relies heavily on improvisation, having personal experience to draw on must have been useful on set. Shooting in chronological sequence - an unusual approach - Loach gives his actors details only of the scenes that are relevant to them - and only the night before they are to be shot. There are no rehearsals, and Loach gives his actors great leeway to improvise. That - and not knowing what's going to happen next - can bring great spontaneity to the performances. It also makes for a strange atmosphere.
"A lot of the time it's quite cloak and dagger," says Birthistle. "There'd be times I'd be taken to the set through a back door. I couldn't have lunch with anybody, because the actors playing the Asian family were there, and they couldn't see me, because that would give away the plot that I'm an Irish girl. I was kept separate from the family so they wouldn't know what was going on."
With the Alan Gilsenan films All Souls' Day and the soon-to-be-released Timbuktu behind her, Birthistle should be used to strangeness on set. All Souls' Day was her first feature: a good hedge school in unconventional film-making for any actor, with the film's fragmentary, experimental style. Now, in Timbuktu, Birthistle returns to the bizarre, low-budget work of Gilsenan - a director she feels a fierce loyalty to.
"Alan gave me my first feature-film job. I just think he's really talented and has a wonderful eye," says Birthistle. "I love the way he shoots things. He's always willing to push the boat out." In Timbuktu, which was shot in Ireland and Morocco, Birthistle plays a young Dublin woman seeking her kidnapped brother (Liam Ó Maonlai) in North Africa. A kind of road movie on Moroccan hashish, Timbuktu is a characteristically dark vision from Gilsenan - and one that must have been hard to shoot in the desert.
Birthistle recounts how the challenges nearly brought an end to filming. "There was a lot of travelling in it - and extreme heat. Then, one day, there was a sandstorm, and all three cameras got messed up. They got sand in every bit of them. We missed, I think, two entire days of filming. They had to take the cameras apart and clean them completely, then hope to God that they worked."
No doubt Birthistle's experiences filming Saltwater, Borstal Boy and Jimmy McGovern's Sunday were a lot easier, as was making the many television series she has appeared in in Britain, where she now lives, such as In Deep and Trust. The latter, a legal drama that starred Robson Green, was a turning point in terms of profile. But it is her role in Sunday that most excites her. She is partly a Derry woman, after all. "Sunday was a brilliant experience. It brought me back to Derry, and I was working on something that was just really important."
She played Maura Young, whose brother was shot dead by the British army on Bloody Sunday. With the real Young on set, says Birthistle, filming was an emotional experience. "It felt more important than a job. It felt like you were involved in something that was about change."
Yet despite working with the ever political Loach, and with McGovern on Sunday, Birthistle says she is not, essentially, a political person - "although it's very interesting to work on things that provoke," she says.
Perhaps that's why she seems less than excited when I ask if she's ever considered moving to Los Angeles - hardly a factory for provocative film. "I've never been to LA. But from what I've heard I think I'd hate it. I'm going in September, however. Ask me when I come back. I might return with a boob job and whiter teeth." She quickly adds that she'll follow the work, be it to a tractor in Glenroe or to the edge of the Sahara. It's easy to imagine that, wherever the work takes her, it will take her far.
Ae Fond Kiss opens on September 17th
