EMMY winning actress, writer and producer Fionnula Flanagan was in Limerick this week to collect her latest accolade, the Richard Harris Outstanding Talent Award 2016.
She immersed herself in Harris’s film festival, participating in a public interview with Gerry Stembridge and a live script-reading with Stephen Rea and Jared Harris for Shane Connaughton, writer of the Oscar winning ‘My Left Foot’.
This Belltable exercise was a 2hr delivery by a dozen actors, Limerick based and international, of DeWarrenne Productions’ ‘Pirate Queen: Grace O’Malley’. With Fair City’s Clelia Murphy cast as the flame-haired chieftain, Flanagan was an austere Queen Elizabeth 1 and pummelled as Grace’s wise old maid, Maria.
In demand as ever, the 75 year-old thespian has made three films and two television series already this year.
Referring to the series for BBC, all she would say is: “It is called ‘Red Water’ and that’s all I can tell you. My lips are sealed. See, you are speaking to a woman with sealed lips”.
The Dublin multi-linguist is proudest of “producing and acting in ‘James Joyce’s Women’ – which was ten years of my life, on screen and in theatre. Also playing ‘the bad mother, the IRA one’ in Terry George’s film ‘Some Mother’s Son’, with Helen Mirren as ‘the good mother’.”
Now recognised by President Higgins for her work with the Irish diaspora in Hollywood (she smiles: “making them cups of tea as they go through Los Angeles”), Fionnula Flanagan reflects back on the premier of ‘Some Mother’s Son’ in London. A journalist spat in her face, even as the press largely adored Mirren in her address of the role.
Now fundraising with friend and film maker/ industry leader Lelia Doolan to develop a cinema hub in Galway, more of Flanagan’s own writing projects are finalising, “a screenplay I’ve just written and a play that I am polishing off.”
Feelings about Los Angeles? This Sinn Féinn activist is forever Éire. She pauses. “One is not allowed feelings in LA. Instead you have mileage.
“No, I go home to my garden there, I don’t go home to LA”.
