First things first. Fionnula Flanagan looks tremendous. Dressed in gorgeously soft woollens, her fingernails manicured to immaculate pearl drops, she makes her corner of the Merrion Hotel bar into a regal enclave.
“I saved you those,” she says, gesturing to a pair of lozenge-shaped sponge cakes.
Flanagan, one of our busiest actors, was, for about 50 years, a sort of unofficial consul for the Irish creative industries in the Hollywood Hills. As she will later explain, raised in Dublin, she never really intended to move to Los Angeles. But marriage to Dr Garrett O’Connor, a distinguished addiction specialist who died nearly a decade ago, sealed the deal in 1972, and the couple became famously keen hosts.
Already acclaimed for her stage work, Flanagan forged a notable career in TV and film. She became a celebrated interpreter of James Joyce. She had roles in Star Trek. Flanagan now arrives to Four Mothers, Darren Thornton’s charming follow-up to A Date for Mad Mary, as something of a legend. She is permanently back on the old sod. In Annacurragh, Co Wicklow. Do I have that right?
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“Well, in so far as anything in this world is permanent, you know, and in so far as anything is permanent for an actor, yes,” she says, smiling.
What eventually brought her back? Was that a wrench?
“No. In a word, no,” she says. “I could see the political writing on the wall – as many people could. First of all, most of my work for the last four years or so has been in Europe. So it behoved me to be closer to that. And I couldn’t face living under an administration which has now proved itself so appalling. Appalling! And it’s going to get a lot worse.”
Flanagan has never been reticent about asserting firm views. This isn’t just a case, at 83, of feeling she has nothing left to lose. Charming and soft-voiced she may be, but there has always been an underlying grit to her delivery. Once or twice in our conversation, she reveals a reluctance to take any prisoners.
“I have dual citizenship,” she continues. “So, from that point of view, I am an American – and I’m Irish also. But, no, it wasn’t difficult. My grandchildren and my great-grandchildren are there. I’m concerned about them, because things are going to get really ugly in that country. It’s a very sick society. It’s no wonder they elected the orange one. It’s a very sick place. But the weather there is wonderful. Ha ha!”
I gesture across to blue skies over Leinster House. But look!
“Yet today is wonderful,” she says with another chuckle. “And yesterday was wonderful.”
Four Mothers offers Flanagan a new challenge. Based on Gianni Di Gregorio’s Italian comedy Mid-August Lunch, Thornton’s film, written with his brother Colin, stars James McArdle as a gay Dubliner compelled to care for four elderly women while attempting to promote his new novel.
As the hero’s own mum, mute after a recent stroke, Flanagan is reduced to the gentlest of gestures and the least demonstrative of facial expressions.
“Darren, whom I hadn’t known at all, and his brother modelled the character on their mother, who had a stroke,” she says. “So that was interesting. It was the first time I’d ever done a part where I didn’t have the use of my most powerful instrument. And that was terrifying, not to be able to call on that and use it effectively or use it at all. That was frightening.”
The shoot sent her bustling about a greatly changed Dublin. Born in 1941, raised in Whitehall, on the northside of the city, she grew up in an age of sour smogs and social conservatism. She laughs approvingly when I note how accepting the four mothers in the film now are of their sons’ homosexuality. But the physical texture of the city has also greatly altered. Is any of that older Dublin still visible?
“I think many of the aspects of it are gone forever,” she says. “But I saw there was a protest being held outside the Department of Education. And I thought, oh, that’s where I went to school. I went to Scoil Mhuire [on Marlborough Street]. The gate is still there and everything. So there are things about it that haven’t changed. There are things that will always be and then there are things that are gone forever.”
It sounds as if Flanagan had colourful parents. Her mother, a civil servant before marriage, loved the arts and used to bring her to the Gate Theatre as a girl. For all the gloom then around, Flanagan seems to have grown up in an atmosphere of creativity and expanse. Her father, an open-minded nationalist, fought for the International Brigades during the Spanish civil war.
“He was an old IRA man,” she says. “He was in the Army and was in the Curragh Camp when I was a baby. And he went to Spain. He went to Spain before I knew him. He was very young and very handsome. He went there, and I’m so proud of that. I really am. I discover that there are people dotted around Europe whose parents or grandparents fought in Spain. And I know I could turn up on their doorstep and they would welcome me in. It was a rite of passage.”
She reckons her passion for acting came from “being poor and having no entertainment other than the radio and books”. She remembers listening to Bart Bastable, the actor who hosted the Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstakes programme, and falling in love with his voice.
“Then my mother pointed him out to me at the GPO and I was horrified, because he was rotund,” she says, still astounded. “He was the shape of what’s-his-name ... Hitchcock. His stomach started out here. But that was our entertainment. I would write little plays when I was six or seven and insist I wasn’t practising to be an actress. I was practising to be a mogul.”
Flanagan seems to have made her debut in Máiréad Ní Ghráda’s An Triail at the much-missed Damer Theatre on St Stephen’s Green in Dublin, in 1964. She subsequently appeared in an adaptation of that piece for RTÉ and picked up a Jacob’s Award for her troubles.
As long ago as 1967, in Joseph Strick’s film of Ulysses, she was already exercising what turned out to be a lifelong obsession with Joyce. She later scored a Tony nomination for Ulysses in Nighttown, based on the 15th episode of the novel, and, in 1977, first appeared in her own (self-explanatory) play James Joyce’s Women. Nobody else has a voice – resonant, flexible – better suited to those poetically serpentine sentences.
“Well, I went to school in Eccles Street,” she says of the street where Leopold Bloom, hero of Ulysses, lived. “If anyone had stopped me and said, ‘Where do the [Blooms] live?’ I would have been able to say, ‘They live right there. Go up and knock on the door.’ They were as real to me as you are. The whole adventure, the whole journey to Glasnevin is wonderful. His writing is magic. It’s magic. And, at the same time, it was familiar.”
It was, however, Brian Friel who brought Flanagan to the United States. She had been touring with his play Lovers for six months when her fellow actor Eamon Morrissey introduced her to Garrett O’Connor, brother of the late polymath Ulick O’Connor.
The man who became her husband was a fascinating individual. A psychiatrist, who had himself struggled with alcoholism, he eventually became chief executive of the Betty Ford Clinic, where so many of Hollywood’s elite went to dry out.
It is not too much of a stretch to suggest the couple became southern Californian royalty (not that, as a proud Irish nationalist, she’d appreciate that comparison).
“I never actually made the decision to stay in America,” she says. “I met Garrett O’Connor and then I married him. He was probably the most fascinating man I’ve ever met in my life. I learned so much from him. He was a Dubliner. He was, as he reminded me often, from the southside. He used to tease me about that, because I was from the northside. But he was a brilliant, brilliant psychiatrist. And he treated alcoholics in his last years. He was the best. We were married for 50-plus years.”
She muses a little on the roads not travelled. It was more usual then for domestic actors to make the much shorter journey across the Irish Sea. To the Royal Shakespeare Company. To the National Theatre. To the BBC. The United States was, figuratively speaking, a lot farther from Dublin then than it is now. It was on a whole other planet.
“I didn’t want to go to London,” Flanagan says. “I had lived in London – in Baker Street of all places – and I remember looking for a place to live. I remember the signs in the windows that said ‘No Irish or dogs‘. I didn’t want to live in a country that took that attitude towards me or mine – though it was not fired by deep feelings of resentment. So I went to America because Hilton Edwards offered me the [Lovers] role.”
Ah, Hilton Edwards. Yes, I suppose the sums do add up. Flanagan is just about old enough to have overlapped with Edwards and Micheál MacLiammóir, legendary founders of the Gate. They now seem as distant as Yeats and Lady Gregory.
“Oh, they were wonderful!” Flanagan says. “I remember, when I first went up to Earlsfort Terrace, where they lived, to have a meeting with Hilton before I was cast in the play. And he said, ‘Dear boy! Dear boy!’ He called everyone ‘Dear boy’. He asked if we’d have tea, and this very old man who worked for them pottered up with a teapot and milk and sugar. And this huge plate, with doorsteps of bread and jam. And he said, ‘Eat up!’ Ha ha!”
We have become, in recent years, blase about the presence of Irish actors in Hollywood. No need to list the Ronans, Farrells and Neggas in full. You know who we mean. But the Irish presence was much slimmer in the early 1970s. It would be overstating it – but not by much – to say it was just Flanagan.
“Yes, and not just that,” she says. “If you played in television, you couldn’t play in a movie. And vice versa. It was so ridiculous. And it wasn’t until the long-forms came in that that changed.”
By long-form she refers, I assume, to the current school of television where, rather than being strictly episodic, story arcs stretch across a whole season. Flanagan helped kick that movement off as a star of the 1976 TV miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man. That adaptation of an Irwin Shaw novel was a sensation.
“I got an Emmy for that!” she says merrily. “It was a book that translated well to the screen. And the second one was Roots, which just blew the whole thing open. Suddenly you had black actors who could get jobs in television. They couldn’t yet get jobs on the big screen, but that was to come. So, yes, in many ways I’ve seen a lot of changes come about in Hollywood.”
It has, indeed, been quite a ride, with precious few quiet patches. She tells me about bringing a group of Trekkers (what the rest of the world would call Trekkies), admiring of her performance as Juliana Soong, mother of Data in Star Trek, to watch her in a play in Galway. “They never took their eyes off me,” she says. “The other actors could have gone up in flames! They never even looked at the other side of the stage. They never laughed.”
She was in hit Irish films such as The Guard, Song of the Sea and Some Mother’s Son. As recently as 2018, Sam Mendes directed her on Broadway in Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman. Just two years ago, she turned up opposite Rachel Zegler in the latest Hunger Games flick. A good career. A good life. But, I wonder, did she ever satisfy that early ambition to be a mogul?
“No, I haven’t been a mogul. Ha ha! But you never know. Any day now.”
Four Mothers is in cinemas from Friday, April 4th
