The Irish connection

Hollywood diaries

It’s a mystery to Saoirse Ronan why she’s one of the few Irish actresses to burst onto the world’s stage in the past 50 years or so.

Irish actors are another story: They’ve been coming up in droves. Colin Farrell, Michael Fassbender (who is half German but was raised in Ireland from the age of 2), Pierce Brosnan, Liam Neeson, Cillian Murphy, Stephen Rea and Gabriel Byrne are just some of the Emerald Isle’s menfolk to find Hollywood success. A few Irish actresses have, too, albeit to a lesser extent — among them Sinead Cusack, Fionnula Flanagan, Fiona Shaw and Brenda Fricker, who won an Academy Award for her role in My Left Foot (1989). But at least in the US, none are exactly household names.

“I think a lot of it comes down to luck; I think a lot of it comes down to timing,” Ronan, who is 21, said. “I don’t know why some of the male actors moved ahead while we didn’t.”

Ronan’s might not be a household name quite yet, but that’s partly because Americans remain largely incapable of pronouncing it (it’s “SEER-sha”). She was the young baker with the Mexico-shaped birthmark in The Grand Budapest Hotel, the luminous teenage assassin in Hanna, the slain girl who narrates the The Lovely Bones, and the tweenage aristocrat who set the plot in motion in Atonement, a performance that earned Ronan an Oscar nomination at the age of 13.

Her visibility will probably get another lift from the new film Brooklyn, a critical hit on the festival circuit that has been described as “stunning,” “wondrous” and “lovely.” Ronan’s emotionally nuanced performance has been repeatedly singled out for plaudits and largely solidifies her transition from ascendant child star to actress to watch. “She was in the very best sense of the word the obvious choice,” said John Crowley, the film’s director. “She’s sort of like a lightning bolt and kind of from another time in a weird way.”

Adapted by Nick Hornby from the best-selling novel by Colm Toibin, Brooklyn tells the story of a young Irishwoman, Eilis Lacey, in the 1950s caught between a new life and love in New York, and a paramour back home. After setting off a bidding war among distributors at Sundance, the film charmed audiences at the New York Film Festival, where Ronan could bear to watch only the final five minutes, sobbing all the while. Now there is chatter that Ronan and possibly the film might gain Academy Award nominations.
“It’s so personal — it’s my mam’s story and my dad’s story, and it was what I had gone through when I moved away,” Ronan said. “The journey she makes is what I’m still going through.”

With her milky skin, smattering of freckles, disarming brogue and quick wit, Ronan comes across as every bit the Irish country girl she is. Ronan was born in New York to struggling Irish immigrants. Her mother, Monica, worked as a nanny, while her father, Paul began working as an actor, and the family moved back to Ireland when Saoirse was three, settling in County Carlow.

Growing up amid her father’s actor friends, Ronan developed a yen for the craft. After a few appearances on Irish television, she was cast in her first feature when she was 10, across from Michelle Pfeiffer in I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007), and soon after in Atonement.

Brooklyn represents the first time Ronan is playing a lead role as an Irishwoman, which she said upped the pressure to play the part exactly right. She had long been looking for “a good Irish project,” she said, that told a fresh tale. “So many things have been done about the RA,” Ronan said, using the Irish slang for the Irish Republican Army. “Certain moments of history are always focused on.”

Crowley, the director, said that Brooklyn traced one of Ireland’s biggest untold stories — mass emigration mid-century — and that by focusing on Eilis’ struggles and wrenching choices, the film brings alive a much more sweeping tale. The 1950s was considered one of Ireland’s toughest decades since the famine, and about 15 per cent of the country’s population was forced by economic hardship to move abroad.

“Everybody feels they know the emigration story because they know of the vast numbers that actually left, but it actually hasn’t been done that much and certainly never from a female perspective,” Crowley said. “And they’re sad stories. They tended to be individuals going off on their own, and it was quite a shameful chapter for a while, that Ireland’s biggest exports were the brightest and best of its young people.”

About a year passed between Ronan’s casting and the beginning of production. Crowley said he soon noticed a difference in his star when she arrived on set. “I didn’t know myself she was going to turn up with the level of emotional depth that she did,” he said. In the intervening time, Ronan had gone through many of the things Eilis had: She had moved away, to London, found an apartment, and, Crowley said, gotten “really knocked sideways” by homesickness. She had asked Crowley, who is from Cork but has lived in London for 18 years, whether homesickness eased. He replied that it did but that she would never quite be the same.

Looking ahead, Ronan will soon be returning to New York; she’s been cast in a spring 2016 Broadway production of The Crucible.

“No pressure,” she said wryly, “just a little American classic.”