Rachel Sarah Murphy opening the Irish Film Academy on Tuesday
Rachel Sarah Murphy got a phone call from a doting father recently. "My daughter wants to be a movie star," he told her. The young Cork actress told him bluntly: "Send her along to me and we'll get that out of her, and if she doesn't like the reality of acting then you will save yourself a fortune if she can find out this way." Although the Irish Film Academy, her ambitious venture on East Essex Street, in Temple Bar, Dublin 2, does not open until Tuesday, Murphy already has bookings into next year.
The past few months have been bedlam. There have been days when she has shot 10 scenes of Fair City, the RTÉ soap, in which she plays Jo Coughlan-Fahey, and then switched to business mode as soon as recording stopped. In November she handed over the keys of her "beautiful Victorian town house" in Cobh, Co Cork, to a tenant and moved to Donnybrook, Dublin 4, to enable her to be fully hands-on.
She has poached David Pope from the New York Film Academy to be the director of education, she says. She is adamant it will not be another stage school. "It's very much geared at adults, especially the digital-film-making course." The teachers, her "business people, who are all from Cork", friends, families and, she is hoping, Jonathan Rhys Meyers - "He's a fellow Corkonian, and if he says no I have a problem" - are all expected at the launch.
The courses, of between four and 12 weeks at the start, will cost from €1,800. "That's an awful lot cheaper than the New York Film Academy." Students will cross disciplines, with actors learning to direct and vice versa. "I've worked with so many directors who don't understand actors. I think actors make the best directors, as they understand what you're trying to do."
She would "never do a start-up again" she says after the stresses of the past few months. Nor is she leaving the small screen. "From a business point of view I wouldn't give up Fair City, because of its profile." See www.irishfilmacademy.com.
