http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/day-and-night/columnists/nightwatch-susan-daly-1935912.html
By Susan Daly
My Nightwatch column from Friday's Day and Night magazine in the Indo...
THERE is an assumption that journalists have a glamorous life, swanning from premiere to launch, night after night, floating along on a river of free champagne and wine spritzers.
Maybe that was the case once upon a Tiger time (and if so, my gilt-edged invitations must have got lost in the post). But it's a whole new discoball game these days. A girl's got to resort to some serious bluffing to get a free drink in this town. In fact, she's got to be a right smart arts.
A more culturally aware friend than I has taken to grooming me in the manner of Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady. I'm her Eliza Doolittle, screaming "What the frig is that meant to be?" across a hushed art gallery as others stroke their chins meaningfully at a black cube suspended in purple jelly.
I have learned something, though. I've learned that exhibition openings tend to be generously lubricated by free wine. No matter the standard of the art, its quality always improves in direct proportion to the number of glasses you have. Everyone's a winner.
There is the risk however that you will be identified for the philistine you are. An added consideration is not to insult the artist or curator of the exhibition by making it obvious that the installation you are most interested in is the man at the trestle table saying "Red or white, madam?" It's only polite and right to return the hospitality by at least looking as interested in what's on the walls as what's in your glass.
There's a great art to this. If you watch someone who looks like they know what they're looking at in a gallery, they always stand back a bit to take in the bigger picture. (Not that arty types use the word 'picture'. It's a 'piece', goddammit!) Peering suspiciously and leaning in for a close-up makes you look like a toddler trying to lick a TV screen.
Neither is it cool to touch anything which is tempting. I know this from when I was faced with a skull made of marshmallow and was feeling peckish. I think the general rule is to never eat the artwork -- unless invited to.
I read once about a German artist who exhibited a series of glass frames on a wall, each filled with a different-coloured cocktail, for all the world like an optics line-up in a bar. There was a little tap at the bottom of each frame and he encouraged visitors to the gallery to fill their glass from it. That's my kind of interactive art.
The punchline was that each cocktail drained away to slowly reveal a picture of a ... pink elephant. Nope, me neither.
This is the only possibly hiccup to hanging out at art exhibitions when you're not in the know: admitting that you just don't get it. The last piece of art I made was an ashtray out of Plasticine -- God bless the 80s when the fashioning of smoking paraphernalia was considered an appropriate crafts project for children. Badly educated as I am, the temptation can be overpowering to blurt out: "Seriously, what's it meant to be?"
It's the same if you're at the theatre with people who don't just go to plays when someone famous off the telly is in them. You mention you nodded off in the second half and they look at you like you've just gatecrashed their dinner party in a PVC gimp mask.
Kindly folk who want the arts to be more accessible and less intimidating to the general public say that there is no right or wrong way to interpret a piece of work. Well, there is. Observations such as, "Hey, my kid could do that!" or "It costs how much?!" are never welcome. If you can't see anything at all, then murmur something about negative space and how the piece is obviously about what's NOT there rather than what is. People will nod approvingly and you can wander off to top up your glass.
The more of these openings I go to though, the less worried I get about spoofing. I tagged along to the opening of a big photographic exhibition recently and it soon became clear that most people there were only interested in celebrity spotting. I suspect that some galleries are just happy to fill the room on opening night and create a bit of a buzz about an artist's name. And if that makes me a patron of the arts, then let's call me Mrs Saatchi and get it over with.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Sing hallelujah!
Paid a little visit to the Dublin Gospel Choir in St Mary's on Church Street (after a little confusion caused by the man with the lived-in face who saw me looking for an open door in the church and asked: 'Ah, are you here for the AA meeting love?' Er, no.)
This was the result of my evening (with the choir; not at AA)...
DUBLIN GOSPEL CHOIR: WE ARE FAMILY
By SUSAN DALY
WHOOPI Goldberg and inner city Dublin might seem an unlikely mix. But when Leaving Cert students in Stanhope Street School saw the movie Sister Act in 1996, they knew they wanted to do something very different for their graduation ceremony.
Out of these amateur beginnings grew Dublin’s first dedicated gospel choir. The Dublin Gospel Choir still raise the roof twice-monthly at Mass in St Mary of the Angels’ on Church Street where the Capuchin friars first gave them rehearsal and performance space. The choir itself has evolved into a musical behemoth that employs at least two people full-time and has just released a new album, Doing Their Thing.
It’s astonishing that a group of 30 or so volunteer singers have become a collective household name. “We’re so lucky with the people we have here,” says Orla Gargan, the choir’s full-time musical director. “When I think back to when we recorded our album… after months and months of hard work, we had two nights where everyone literally sang from 5pm until 11pm.
“It’s incredible what people are willing to give of themselves. Lots of things have come our way because everyone puts in such an effort.”
Some of those highlights have seen the choir rock the main stage at Electric Picnic, support Rod Stewart at the RDS, play to a sold-out Croke Park when they first switched on their new lights and provide backing vocals or artists like Paddy Casey, Glen Hansard and John Legend.
And they are still admirably in tune with their community roots. They support various charities – Barrettstown, Crumlin Children’s Hospital and Simon are favourites – and are entirely self-funded.
The singers are clearly in it for the love of the joyous, foot-stamping, hand-clapping music. At their rehearsals in St Mary’s they laugh and chatter and swap stories while the backing musicians tune up. One man gives a fellow chorister a shoulder rub, while another offers someone a lift home afterwards. The air rings with an energetic buzz – it’s like a outsized family coming together for an evening catch-up.
“I joined the choir with another girl who I used to sing with in a folk group in Rathfarnham – and she ended up marrying the keyboard player!” laughs Orla. The lead soloist on the choir’s new single, Liberty Belle, is Mary Cardiff from Inchicore. She also met her fiancé Eoin McNamara in the choir nine years ago.
“We had another engagement yesterday,” adds Orla, “Kerry-Ann and Sean, they both met through the choir. I guess this is our home a bit.”
** The Dublin Gospel Choir will showcase their new album, Doing Their Thing, at Tripod on Harcourt Street this evening (SUBS: Sat, Nov 7). Tickets available from Ticketmaster.
I MET MY FIANCE THROUGH THE CHOIR – Mary Cardiff, 31, from Inchicore, with the choir over 9 years
By day: Works for Edward Dillon wine sales.
By night: Alto.
“A friend of mine saw an ad in Queen Street near Bargaintown and said: You should go for that! I love music, I went along to the audition a week later and the rest was history.
I met my fiancé Eoin McNamara here. He’s on a break from it at the moment because he had a load of other bits and pieces. It’s very time consuming – we rehearse twice a week for two hours each evening. Depending on what’s on, you might have extra rehearsals and a couple of performances at the weekend. You have to love it to do it.
I had been in the choir for about a year and a half when Eoin asked me out on a date. We’re together eight years now and getting married next October. We sing duets at Christmas time and always get asked to sing together at parties. The choir will sing at the wedding – but I’ll get a break that day!
The choir is always there for me. My dad passed away in April. He had been unwell, he got pneumonia with complications and it was very hard when I sang at his funeral. I knew he would have wanted me to.
But the biggest help was when I came back in here after two weeks. It was the best thing I ever did. We were preparing for the new album and there was loads going on. It really helps in any situation to come in here and go out with a smile on your face.”
IT’S MY LIFELINE IN A NEW COUNTRY – Matt Burney, 39, originally from England, joined the choir a year ago.
By day: Director of the British Council in Ireland.
By night: Tenor.
“My job is quite interesting in that I’ve had lots of overseas postings. My last posting was in Prague before I came to Ireland in September 2008. The difficulty in that is that you make friends and then you are plucked out of that particular environment and sent to another place.
I come from a musical background originally - I’ve got a degree in Music – and it was basically a New Year’s resolution to find a community in Dublin to get involved with. I was amazed that there was a gospel choir here!
It’s been a lifeline to me: I’ve made some great friends out of it. I realised that one of the choir members lives on my road and we’ve become really good friends.
I’m a Protestant and I haven’t been into organised religion for a long time. I was wondering if it would be a bit odd when we did our twice-monthly gospel Masses because this is a Catholic church. But what I have discovered is that I really love coming to the Masses. There are candles lit everywhere, we get great congregations, it gives you a really nice spiritual feeling. It’s just a beautiful place to be.
I have a group of friends who are dispersed all over the world and we are meeting up in Dublin in December. I am getting tickets for them for one of our gigs in Tallaght so Dublin Gospel Choir is getting known across all sorts of far-flung places!
I’m only one year into my posting in Dublin but one of the things I’m thinking is, God, in two years’ time I’ll have to go through the same rigmarole or packing up my boxes. It’s going to be twice as hard next time because I’ll be leaving Dublin Gospel Choir. It will just be really sad.”
MY PROUD GRANNY THOUGHT I WAS A CELEBRITY – Joey McAleer, 22, from Tallaght, with the choir three years
By day: Masters student in Social Justice in UCD.
By night: Tenor.
“When I was in fifth or sixth class the Dublin Gospel Choir came to my parish with the Nights of Soul – it’s funny now but I still have Mary (Cardiff) and Kevin’s (Carthy) autographs from then! After the concerts, kids are completely starstruck by what they have seen and I was one of them.
Every Christmas my dad and I would go and see the gospel choir sing. I sang in boys’ choirs before but that was always felt very reserved for me, all that standing still. I just wanted to move! When I started the gospel choir, I was just in love with it. It’s definitely my life outside college now.
You might be having the worst day - like I was having a pretty bad day today - but the thought of coming into the choir, it really picks you up.
My granny passed away last September but just before that we had a radio slot on 98fm. She was in the hospital, she had had a stroke and she wasn’t very responsive. The family were at her bedside and they turned on the radio when they knew the choir was coming up. Her eyes just lit up.
She always encouraged me. She came and saw the choir perform in Ballinteer and bought a couple of the CDs and had me sign the back of them like I was some kind of celebrity. She had a picture of the choir with Rod Stewart on her mantelpiece. She was just really, really proud of everything.”
THIS IS MY SECOND FAMILY – Caitriona Walsh, 31, born in Dublin, raised in California and Galway, with the choir for 4 years
By day: Microbiologist.
By night: Soprano.
“I went to college in Galway and worked for a while elsewhere but moved to Dublin about four years ago when my boyfriend did. I didn’t know anyone here. When you go to college you have mates from class, it’s kind of built-in. But it’s not like that when you’re working.
When I went to audition all by myself, I was shaking I was so nervous! But Orla told me right then and there that I was in. I haven’t looked back. I just threw myself into it.
We do it because we love it. I think it’s why it goes down so well with the public. It’s like we’re having a party on stage and everyone’s invited.
If you ask any member of the choir they’ll probably tell you that the Nights of Soul are probably their favourite. It’s a full gig, it’s two hours, but we do them generally in community areas, in churches and the like. It’s really rewarding. You probably think we’re on drugs or something we’re so happy all the time, but music is very uplifting like that and we feel like it’s a joy to give it to people.
I find it very spiritual. People come and take away what they want from it. There’s never a message forced on people at all.
I couldn’t imagine my life without it now. It’s an addiction.”
I TURNED MY HOBBY INTO A FULL-TIME JOB – Kevin Carthy, 28, from Firhouse, with the choir for over 9 years
By day: Used to work in finance.
By night: Now a full-time employee of the choir, co-ordinating wedding bookings, corporate events etc.
“I was working in the financial industry for many a year but I always wanted to be in music. I had already started singing at weddings with a group from the choir and it just got busier and busier so they asked if I could look after the administration.
It was a bit of a risk – I had just gotten a mortgage but I thought if I don’t try I won’t ever know how it might have worked out for me.
I deal with the brides and grooms too. We’ve had some strange requests for songs – Sweet Like Chocolate Boy was one that was a bit random. We had to turn that down! The Prayer by Andrea Bocelli is very popular, or Celine Dion. O Happy Day is the most popular one for walking out after the wedding ceremony. It’s pretty joyous – it gets the in-laws and the parents giving it loads!
We do backing singing for other acts, corporate gigs, even funerals. I think I have got the best job in the world. If people are ringing up it’s because they are booking for the happiest day of their lives so it’s a great phone call to be at the other end of.
There is no comparison to the job I had before, it’s just amazing. You’re working with like-minded people, your best friends. Mary (Cardiff) and I joined the same day and Mary and her fiancé are my best friends. I’ll be singing at their wedding and co-ordinating their wedding. Everyone is so close, it’s like a second family.
If this ends, I will still stay with something in music. There’s no going back for me now.”
This was the result of my evening (with the choir; not at AA)...
DUBLIN GOSPEL CHOIR: WE ARE FAMILY
By SUSAN DALY
WHOOPI Goldberg and inner city Dublin might seem an unlikely mix. But when Leaving Cert students in Stanhope Street School saw the movie Sister Act in 1996, they knew they wanted to do something very different for their graduation ceremony.
Out of these amateur beginnings grew Dublin’s first dedicated gospel choir. The Dublin Gospel Choir still raise the roof twice-monthly at Mass in St Mary of the Angels’ on Church Street where the Capuchin friars first gave them rehearsal and performance space. The choir itself has evolved into a musical behemoth that employs at least two people full-time and has just released a new album, Doing Their Thing.
It’s astonishing that a group of 30 or so volunteer singers have become a collective household name. “We’re so lucky with the people we have here,” says Orla Gargan, the choir’s full-time musical director. “When I think back to when we recorded our album… after months and months of hard work, we had two nights where everyone literally sang from 5pm until 11pm.
“It’s incredible what people are willing to give of themselves. Lots of things have come our way because everyone puts in such an effort.”
Some of those highlights have seen the choir rock the main stage at Electric Picnic, support Rod Stewart at the RDS, play to a sold-out Croke Park when they first switched on their new lights and provide backing vocals or artists like Paddy Casey, Glen Hansard and John Legend.
And they are still admirably in tune with their community roots. They support various charities – Barrettstown, Crumlin Children’s Hospital and Simon are favourites – and are entirely self-funded.
The singers are clearly in it for the love of the joyous, foot-stamping, hand-clapping music. At their rehearsals in St Mary’s they laugh and chatter and swap stories while the backing musicians tune up. One man gives a fellow chorister a shoulder rub, while another offers someone a lift home afterwards. The air rings with an energetic buzz – it’s like a outsized family coming together for an evening catch-up.
“I joined the choir with another girl who I used to sing with in a folk group in Rathfarnham – and she ended up marrying the keyboard player!” laughs Orla. The lead soloist on the choir’s new single, Liberty Belle, is Mary Cardiff from Inchicore. She also met her fiancé Eoin McNamara in the choir nine years ago.
“We had another engagement yesterday,” adds Orla, “Kerry-Ann and Sean, they both met through the choir. I guess this is our home a bit.”
** The Dublin Gospel Choir will showcase their new album, Doing Their Thing, at Tripod on Harcourt Street this evening (SUBS: Sat, Nov 7). Tickets available from Ticketmaster.
I MET MY FIANCE THROUGH THE CHOIR – Mary Cardiff, 31, from Inchicore, with the choir over 9 years
By day: Works for Edward Dillon wine sales.
By night: Alto.
“A friend of mine saw an ad in Queen Street near Bargaintown and said: You should go for that! I love music, I went along to the audition a week later and the rest was history.
I met my fiancé Eoin McNamara here. He’s on a break from it at the moment because he had a load of other bits and pieces. It’s very time consuming – we rehearse twice a week for two hours each evening. Depending on what’s on, you might have extra rehearsals and a couple of performances at the weekend. You have to love it to do it.
I had been in the choir for about a year and a half when Eoin asked me out on a date. We’re together eight years now and getting married next October. We sing duets at Christmas time and always get asked to sing together at parties. The choir will sing at the wedding – but I’ll get a break that day!
The choir is always there for me. My dad passed away in April. He had been unwell, he got pneumonia with complications and it was very hard when I sang at his funeral. I knew he would have wanted me to.
But the biggest help was when I came back in here after two weeks. It was the best thing I ever did. We were preparing for the new album and there was loads going on. It really helps in any situation to come in here and go out with a smile on your face.”
IT’S MY LIFELINE IN A NEW COUNTRY – Matt Burney, 39, originally from England, joined the choir a year ago.
By day: Director of the British Council in Ireland.
By night: Tenor.
“My job is quite interesting in that I’ve had lots of overseas postings. My last posting was in Prague before I came to Ireland in September 2008. The difficulty in that is that you make friends and then you are plucked out of that particular environment and sent to another place.
I come from a musical background originally - I’ve got a degree in Music – and it was basically a New Year’s resolution to find a community in Dublin to get involved with. I was amazed that there was a gospel choir here!
It’s been a lifeline to me: I’ve made some great friends out of it. I realised that one of the choir members lives on my road and we’ve become really good friends.
I’m a Protestant and I haven’t been into organised religion for a long time. I was wondering if it would be a bit odd when we did our twice-monthly gospel Masses because this is a Catholic church. But what I have discovered is that I really love coming to the Masses. There are candles lit everywhere, we get great congregations, it gives you a really nice spiritual feeling. It’s just a beautiful place to be.
I have a group of friends who are dispersed all over the world and we are meeting up in Dublin in December. I am getting tickets for them for one of our gigs in Tallaght so Dublin Gospel Choir is getting known across all sorts of far-flung places!
I’m only one year into my posting in Dublin but one of the things I’m thinking is, God, in two years’ time I’ll have to go through the same rigmarole or packing up my boxes. It’s going to be twice as hard next time because I’ll be leaving Dublin Gospel Choir. It will just be really sad.”
MY PROUD GRANNY THOUGHT I WAS A CELEBRITY – Joey McAleer, 22, from Tallaght, with the choir three years
By day: Masters student in Social Justice in UCD.
By night: Tenor.
“When I was in fifth or sixth class the Dublin Gospel Choir came to my parish with the Nights of Soul – it’s funny now but I still have Mary (Cardiff) and Kevin’s (Carthy) autographs from then! After the concerts, kids are completely starstruck by what they have seen and I was one of them.
Every Christmas my dad and I would go and see the gospel choir sing. I sang in boys’ choirs before but that was always felt very reserved for me, all that standing still. I just wanted to move! When I started the gospel choir, I was just in love with it. It’s definitely my life outside college now.
You might be having the worst day - like I was having a pretty bad day today - but the thought of coming into the choir, it really picks you up.
My granny passed away last September but just before that we had a radio slot on 98fm. She was in the hospital, she had had a stroke and she wasn’t very responsive. The family were at her bedside and they turned on the radio when they knew the choir was coming up. Her eyes just lit up.
She always encouraged me. She came and saw the choir perform in Ballinteer and bought a couple of the CDs and had me sign the back of them like I was some kind of celebrity. She had a picture of the choir with Rod Stewart on her mantelpiece. She was just really, really proud of everything.”
THIS IS MY SECOND FAMILY – Caitriona Walsh, 31, born in Dublin, raised in California and Galway, with the choir for 4 years
By day: Microbiologist.
By night: Soprano.
“I went to college in Galway and worked for a while elsewhere but moved to Dublin about four years ago when my boyfriend did. I didn’t know anyone here. When you go to college you have mates from class, it’s kind of built-in. But it’s not like that when you’re working.
When I went to audition all by myself, I was shaking I was so nervous! But Orla told me right then and there that I was in. I haven’t looked back. I just threw myself into it.
We do it because we love it. I think it’s why it goes down so well with the public. It’s like we’re having a party on stage and everyone’s invited.
If you ask any member of the choir they’ll probably tell you that the Nights of Soul are probably their favourite. It’s a full gig, it’s two hours, but we do them generally in community areas, in churches and the like. It’s really rewarding. You probably think we’re on drugs or something we’re so happy all the time, but music is very uplifting like that and we feel like it’s a joy to give it to people.
I find it very spiritual. People come and take away what they want from it. There’s never a message forced on people at all.
I couldn’t imagine my life without it now. It’s an addiction.”
I TURNED MY HOBBY INTO A FULL-TIME JOB – Kevin Carthy, 28, from Firhouse, with the choir for over 9 years
By day: Used to work in finance.
By night: Now a full-time employee of the choir, co-ordinating wedding bookings, corporate events etc.
“I was working in the financial industry for many a year but I always wanted to be in music. I had already started singing at weddings with a group from the choir and it just got busier and busier so they asked if I could look after the administration.
It was a bit of a risk – I had just gotten a mortgage but I thought if I don’t try I won’t ever know how it might have worked out for me.
I deal with the brides and grooms too. We’ve had some strange requests for songs – Sweet Like Chocolate Boy was one that was a bit random. We had to turn that down! The Prayer by Andrea Bocelli is very popular, or Celine Dion. O Happy Day is the most popular one for walking out after the wedding ceremony. It’s pretty joyous – it gets the in-laws and the parents giving it loads!
We do backing singing for other acts, corporate gigs, even funerals. I think I have got the best job in the world. If people are ringing up it’s because they are booking for the happiest day of their lives so it’s a great phone call to be at the other end of.
There is no comparison to the job I had before, it’s just amazing. You’re working with like-minded people, your best friends. Mary (Cardiff) and I joined the same day and Mary and her fiancé are my best friends. I’ll be singing at their wedding and co-ordinating their wedding. Everyone is so close, it’s like a second family.
If this ends, I will still stay with something in music. There’s no going back for me now.”
Whishaw on a star (sorry)
From Friday's Irish Independent, Day and Night magazine...
http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/day-and-night/features/the-eyes-have-it-1935917.html
The eyes have it
By Susan Daly
Friday November 06 2009
Star quality is an elusive factor, just ask the hundreds of thousands of kids who prostrate themselves before the altar of Simon Cowell every year. But there is no doubting that whatever 'it' is, Ben Whishaw has it in bundles. Not that he'll be turning up in X-Factor or whatever the thespian equivalent is (Grease Is The Word, perhaps?) -- Whishaw is classical acting talent more in the vein of Laurence Olivier than Zac Efron.
Only 29, he's already been this decade's most lauded Hamlet, played screen versions of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards that make the real deals pale by comparison and is now Oscar-nominated director Jane Campion's favourite muse.
It takes a moment to pinpoint the source of his magnetism. He does not cut an imposing physical dash when he enters a room. His thin frame, swaddled in an oversized sweater, almost disappears into the sofa. He twitches with nervous energy, looking out the window for long stretches as he grapples with a question he finds uncomfortable. (Anything about his personal life, for example.)
We are sitting in the front drawing room of a house in Hampstead where the young Romantic poet John Keats actually lived for a spell towards the end of his life. Whishaw plays the tragic Keats in Campion's new film Bright Star. It's an intense exploration of Keats's relationship with his 18-year-old neighbour Fanny Brawne, the source of inspiration for his most beautiful sonnets. Their love affair was thwarted, first by social disapproval and later by the onset of his tuberculosis which saw him carted off to the more clement climate of Rome, where he died at the age of 25.
It is easy to picture Whishaw as the consumptive Keats. He has a face made to express pain: hooded, mournful eyes and cheekbones that cast gaunt shadows on his thin face. (Apologies -- the romance of sitting in the room where Keats once wrote poetry with his friend Charles Brown can get to a girl.) Even his thatch of dark hair -- ruffled into the 19th-century quiff that he sports as Keats -- seems to weigh too heavily on his fine head.
But the eyes have it. They pin you to the seat the moment he first appears in Bright Star, the intensity behind them striking Abbie Cornish's normally ebullient Fanny Brawne dumbstruck. Move over Bette Davis -- there's a new set of peepers in town.
"I keep my head down from all that kind of talk," he says softly, when I suggest that he's being touted as the Next Big Thing (his portrayal of Keats is already being talked of as a possible Oscar contender next year). He's heard it all before. Barely out of his teens, at RADA, he was awarded a "most promising newcomer" award for indie movie My Brother Tom in which he played a brutalised young man. At 23, his Hamlet at London's Old Vic had theatre critics swooning as they described him as "electrifying", "stunning" and compared him to Richard Burton, Laurence Olivier and Peter O'Toole.
He was then riveting as the amoral killer Grenouille in Perfume, a role that had originally been earmarked for Leonardo DiCaprio. Unphased by acting against the likes of Cate Blanchett and Heath Ledger as one of several Bob Dylans in I'm Not There, he also took on Keith Richards in the biopic Stoned. For all his outward frailty, he is puzzled by the thought that he should have been intimidated by portraying real-life icons.
"For me, I don't get too bogged down by it," he says casually. "It's exciting to have those people as launch pads for something but even this character ... I don't know if Keats was anything like this, but it's the sum of me and Jane and the whole energy of making the film. It's not good to be driven by too much fear. It's good to jump in."
There doesn't appear to be room for self-doubt, at least not where his craft is concerned. When he explains how "Keats has this line in the film that if poetry doesn't come as naturally as leaves to the tree, it had better not come at all", he could as easily be talking about himself.
Remove him from this domain, though, and he begins to wonder if he shouldn't go have some "real experiences" instead of wrapping himself up in the fictitious lives of others.
"I had a picture of a short film that I did on my wall, where I was dressed as a Hare Krishna," he remembers. "Someone was around my house, a friend I didn't know that well, and she saw it and said, 'Oh my God, so did you study yoga or go to India or something?' I could see her eyes light up, thinking, 'Oh you've had this amazing life experience', and I had to say, 'Oh no, that was a film'. And I had this crushing feeling that all my experiences have been fictional."
He did manage to take some time off earlier this year after four jobs back-to-back playing "pretty unhappy characters of one kind or another". So did he climb Everest, wrestle polar bears, sail solo to Australia? Well, no, but he spent some quiet time painting and hanging out with friends and family. And, in a nod to how consumed his life normally is by his various acting masks, he learned something basic about himself.
"When you have time off you have some time to focus on how you feel. What I recognised was that my energy is unsteady. I swing from ... I'm up and then I'm down and all in the course of a single day, although sometimes the periods can be longer than that.
"I think acting is all about a release of your emotional energy or something or a direction to put it in. It was interesting to me to realise that is some of the reason why I did it."
He's evidently a sensitive soul "of the earth and the ether", as he describes Keats. He found Campion's famously maternal style of direction a nurturing force. She has a track record of coaxing stunning performances from her cast, with Anna Paquin, the Oscar-winning child star of The Piano the most famous.
Although Bright Star forces Whishaw to jump through some fairly painful and emotional hoops as the dying Keats, he remembers it as a "fun" time.
"I've loved working with women," he says enthusiastically. (The cast of Bright Star is female-dominated, as is Campion's long-time production team.) Then, desperate not to generalise, he stares out the window for the right words. "I don't get on so well with, um, sort of, sometimes when it's a load of men. I think I would rather be with a load of women in a room on a film set. I think with men, I don't think it's always very creative -- other things come into play."
What those things are I never find out, because Whishaw seems embarrassed to have put across anything like a forceful opinion. And if he's reticent about that, he's even more so on the subject of anything outside the sphere of acting. Raised in Bedfordshire, his mother is a cosmetic salesperson, his dad in IT, both very supportive of his acting ambitions but not in the least bit luvvie. He has a twin brother James who is in finance -- "Or he was. Um, yeah."
Okay then. Moving swiftly on, press profiles always seem to mention that Whishaw once owned 13 cats. "Yes, that's true," he confirms. He had two cats who simply went on to have kittens. "The thing is it's not a lie, it is the truth, but it gets out and it becomes a dominant thing," he says, baffled.
I suggest that the fact that he reveals so little about himself means that celeb watchers obsess about whatever little detail that they have on him. He doesn't want to agree. "I know that I'm not the sort of person that they would have any interest in. I'm not the kind of person that sells papers." But if he continues flashing those magnificent eyes about the place, he'll certainly sell out the box office.
Bright Star opens in cinemas today
http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/day-and-night/features/the-eyes-have-it-1935917.html
The eyes have it
By Susan Daly
Friday November 06 2009
Star quality is an elusive factor, just ask the hundreds of thousands of kids who prostrate themselves before the altar of Simon Cowell every year. But there is no doubting that whatever 'it' is, Ben Whishaw has it in bundles. Not that he'll be turning up in X-Factor or whatever the thespian equivalent is (Grease Is The Word, perhaps?) -- Whishaw is classical acting talent more in the vein of Laurence Olivier than Zac Efron.
Only 29, he's already been this decade's most lauded Hamlet, played screen versions of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards that make the real deals pale by comparison and is now Oscar-nominated director Jane Campion's favourite muse.
It takes a moment to pinpoint the source of his magnetism. He does not cut an imposing physical dash when he enters a room. His thin frame, swaddled in an oversized sweater, almost disappears into the sofa. He twitches with nervous energy, looking out the window for long stretches as he grapples with a question he finds uncomfortable. (Anything about his personal life, for example.)
We are sitting in the front drawing room of a house in Hampstead where the young Romantic poet John Keats actually lived for a spell towards the end of his life. Whishaw plays the tragic Keats in Campion's new film Bright Star. It's an intense exploration of Keats's relationship with his 18-year-old neighbour Fanny Brawne, the source of inspiration for his most beautiful sonnets. Their love affair was thwarted, first by social disapproval and later by the onset of his tuberculosis which saw him carted off to the more clement climate of Rome, where he died at the age of 25.
It is easy to picture Whishaw as the consumptive Keats. He has a face made to express pain: hooded, mournful eyes and cheekbones that cast gaunt shadows on his thin face. (Apologies -- the romance of sitting in the room where Keats once wrote poetry with his friend Charles Brown can get to a girl.) Even his thatch of dark hair -- ruffled into the 19th-century quiff that he sports as Keats -- seems to weigh too heavily on his fine head.
But the eyes have it. They pin you to the seat the moment he first appears in Bright Star, the intensity behind them striking Abbie Cornish's normally ebullient Fanny Brawne dumbstruck. Move over Bette Davis -- there's a new set of peepers in town.
"I keep my head down from all that kind of talk," he says softly, when I suggest that he's being touted as the Next Big Thing (his portrayal of Keats is already being talked of as a possible Oscar contender next year). He's heard it all before. Barely out of his teens, at RADA, he was awarded a "most promising newcomer" award for indie movie My Brother Tom in which he played a brutalised young man. At 23, his Hamlet at London's Old Vic had theatre critics swooning as they described him as "electrifying", "stunning" and compared him to Richard Burton, Laurence Olivier and Peter O'Toole.
He was then riveting as the amoral killer Grenouille in Perfume, a role that had originally been earmarked for Leonardo DiCaprio. Unphased by acting against the likes of Cate Blanchett and Heath Ledger as one of several Bob Dylans in I'm Not There, he also took on Keith Richards in the biopic Stoned. For all his outward frailty, he is puzzled by the thought that he should have been intimidated by portraying real-life icons.
"For me, I don't get too bogged down by it," he says casually. "It's exciting to have those people as launch pads for something but even this character ... I don't know if Keats was anything like this, but it's the sum of me and Jane and the whole energy of making the film. It's not good to be driven by too much fear. It's good to jump in."
There doesn't appear to be room for self-doubt, at least not where his craft is concerned. When he explains how "Keats has this line in the film that if poetry doesn't come as naturally as leaves to the tree, it had better not come at all", he could as easily be talking about himself.
Remove him from this domain, though, and he begins to wonder if he shouldn't go have some "real experiences" instead of wrapping himself up in the fictitious lives of others.
"I had a picture of a short film that I did on my wall, where I was dressed as a Hare Krishna," he remembers. "Someone was around my house, a friend I didn't know that well, and she saw it and said, 'Oh my God, so did you study yoga or go to India or something?' I could see her eyes light up, thinking, 'Oh you've had this amazing life experience', and I had to say, 'Oh no, that was a film'. And I had this crushing feeling that all my experiences have been fictional."
He did manage to take some time off earlier this year after four jobs back-to-back playing "pretty unhappy characters of one kind or another". So did he climb Everest, wrestle polar bears, sail solo to Australia? Well, no, but he spent some quiet time painting and hanging out with friends and family. And, in a nod to how consumed his life normally is by his various acting masks, he learned something basic about himself.
"When you have time off you have some time to focus on how you feel. What I recognised was that my energy is unsteady. I swing from ... I'm up and then I'm down and all in the course of a single day, although sometimes the periods can be longer than that.
"I think acting is all about a release of your emotional energy or something or a direction to put it in. It was interesting to me to realise that is some of the reason why I did it."
He's evidently a sensitive soul "of the earth and the ether", as he describes Keats. He found Campion's famously maternal style of direction a nurturing force. She has a track record of coaxing stunning performances from her cast, with Anna Paquin, the Oscar-winning child star of The Piano the most famous.
Although Bright Star forces Whishaw to jump through some fairly painful and emotional hoops as the dying Keats, he remembers it as a "fun" time.
"I've loved working with women," he says enthusiastically. (The cast of Bright Star is female-dominated, as is Campion's long-time production team.) Then, desperate not to generalise, he stares out the window for the right words. "I don't get on so well with, um, sort of, sometimes when it's a load of men. I think I would rather be with a load of women in a room on a film set. I think with men, I don't think it's always very creative -- other things come into play."
What those things are I never find out, because Whishaw seems embarrassed to have put across anything like a forceful opinion. And if he's reticent about that, he's even more so on the subject of anything outside the sphere of acting. Raised in Bedfordshire, his mother is a cosmetic salesperson, his dad in IT, both very supportive of his acting ambitions but not in the least bit luvvie. He has a twin brother James who is in finance -- "Or he was. Um, yeah."
Okay then. Moving swiftly on, press profiles always seem to mention that Whishaw once owned 13 cats. "Yes, that's true," he confirms. He had two cats who simply went on to have kittens. "The thing is it's not a lie, it is the truth, but it gets out and it becomes a dominant thing," he says, baffled.
I suggest that the fact that he reveals so little about himself means that celeb watchers obsess about whatever little detail that they have on him. He doesn't want to agree. "I know that I'm not the sort of person that they would have any interest in. I'm not the kind of person that sells papers." But if he continues flashing those magnificent eyes about the place, he'll certainly sell out the box office.
Bright Star opens in cinemas today
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Just tired - or chronically exhausted?
From today's Irish Independent
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/are-you-really-really-tired-its-not-all-in-your-head-1932557.html
Are you really, really tired? It's not all in your head. . .
Often dismissed as hypochondriacs, ME sufferers have been vindicated by science, says Susan Daly
Tiredness is a common complaint in the modern world. Shift work, long commutes, offices shut away from natural light, hectic social lives: all of these factors can wreak havoc on our energy levels.
But what if the exhaustion becomes so severe that it stops you from looking after your children, going to work -- or even getting out of bed?
For decades, the medical world has wrestled with the idea of defining such extreme fatigue, along with a host of other debilitating symptoms such as muscle pain, digestive problems and inability to concentrate, as a real disorder.
In Europe, we refer to it loosely as ME (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis); in the States they use an umbrella term called CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome).
Yet there has been bitter debate and division between sufferers, the sometimes disbelieving 'healthy' public and doctors on the symptoms and causes of such a syndrome -- or if indeed it really exists as a purely physical condition.
As sufferer Marie Coffey explains, ME feels like one is constantly living with an excruciating hangover and it can be difficult for people to take it seriously as a physical ailment.
There was some excitement then last week when Science journal published a study that seemed to establish a link between ME/CFS sufferers and a recently discovered virus called XMRV.
"Since the original Science paper was submitted, we have continued to refine our test for XMRV and have surprisingly found that 95pc ME/CFS samples tested positive for XMRV antibodies in the plasma," said Dr Judy Mikovits, who led the research at the Whittemore Peterson Institute (WPI) in the University of Nevada, Reno.
"This finding clearly points to the retrovirus as a significant contributing factor in this illness," she added.
Tentative though the findings are, they seem a vindication of what sufferers have been saying all along: it's not all in our minds.
Because of the difficulty of diagnosing someone with ME, and the reluctance to see it as a definite syndrome anyway, there has been a tendency to dismiss sufferers as hypochondriacs.
In fact, when Dr Daniel Peterson of the WPI started a practice in Nevada in the 1980s and began diagnosing a large number of patients coming down with a new type of chronic fatigue illness, the media derogatively tagged it 'yuppie flu'.
The implication was that it was a type of psychological burnout particular to the social circumstances of Dr Peterson's affluent patients in the Lake Tahoe area.
This was incorrect, as the illness was being documented across lots of other areas, but it stuck for several reasons, some of which were to do with the health insurance industry in the US who didn't like the idea of categorising a new illness that they would have to pay out for.
Declan Carroll of the Irish ME Trust explains that the symptoms being diagnosed by Dr Peterson were not actually new to Europeans who had been loosely coining the term ME since a study in a London hospital in the 1950s.
A population study taken by a Prof Leonard Jason in the US of figures for CFS worldwide concluded that it affects a mean of 0.3pc of the population. In Ireland, that figure translates to around 12,000 people.
Questionnaires submitted to Irish GPs by the Irish ME Trust came up with a similar number, although the Trust admits that this is not conclusive.
"Basically what the uncovering of this new virus has done is to further demand a proper diagnostic approach," says Declan Carroll.
The best way forward for ME sufferers here -- at least to diagnose them -- is for doctors to apply Canadian guidelines which set out a number of fixed criteria for diagnosing the illness.
"What happens fairly regularly," says Declan Carroll, "is doctors are busy, they can't see anything untoward in regular blood tests, and they pass the patient onto a consultant that deals with the prevalent symptom, say a person with muscle pain gets sent to a rheumatologist.
"Otherwise they take the view: you have muscle pain, you're tired all the time, it may be burnout, stress, so go exercise and I'll give you an antidepressant. And that is not really satisfactory."
The Irish ME Trust is an information and support service for ME sufferers. See www.imet.ie for more details, or lo-call 1890 200 912.
'Let me get better, I thought, or let me go, because this is hell'
MARIE COFFEY (47) lives in Enniscorthy, Co Wexford. She began experiencing ME when she was just 31.
"I had been suffering from chest problems and some bad colds but I just collapsed one day in a friend's house in April 1993. I spent two full years in bed. I couldn't walk, I couldn't move, it was hell.
"My husband Tom had to carry me to the bathroom, and the doctors were telling me to exercise.
"I had been a very active person, I worked, I had two children. Dominic was six and Christina was eight. My son wouldn't remember me as a healthy mammy running around the place. I knew it wasn't psychological. I was pulling my hair out listening to doctors saying, 'Ah Marie, you just have to get up'. I did try but it got to the stage where I couldn't hold a cup.
"I never considered suicide but at one point I did ask God to take me if this was what it was going to be. Let me get better, I thought, or let me go because this is hell. My own mother dismissed me. I remember her looking at me one day and saying: 'Marie, you can't be that bad'.
"I'm still recovering -- it's baby steps. I like to say that ME doesn't manage Marie, Marie manages the ME! I speak to people on the phone, trying to help them go through it. I tell them to listen to their body, and I would beg doctors to listen to their patients.
"My son was a great man with the football -- I used to sit in my car watching him but other days I would be in bed crying because I couldn't go see him. I missed weddings. I missed my mother's funeral. We weren't close but I would have liked to have gone.
"I know now to give the body time to recharge. I meditate, I do stretches and yoga and I practise Emotional Freedom Therapy, which is like acupuncture without needles.
"When you first wake up you can be in burning pain. There is no doubt in my mind it's a virus -- your lymph nodes swell up, you're continuously dehydrated. You feel out of this world, they call it a 'brain fog', like your body has been invaded from outer space.
"I don't think ME should be fobbed off as a psychological problem. I have learned to be assertive and if a doctor doesn't listen to me today I just walk out.
"But I'm a firm believer that if the spirit is good, the body can recover. I have a grandson who is a wonderful boy of seven months. I can't hold him but I can still love him. It was a rough journey but I am thankful for where I am now."
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/are-you-really-really-tired-its-not-all-in-your-head-1932557.html
Are you really, really tired? It's not all in your head. . .
Often dismissed as hypochondriacs, ME sufferers have been vindicated by science, says Susan Daly
Tiredness is a common complaint in the modern world. Shift work, long commutes, offices shut away from natural light, hectic social lives: all of these factors can wreak havoc on our energy levels.
But what if the exhaustion becomes so severe that it stops you from looking after your children, going to work -- or even getting out of bed?
For decades, the medical world has wrestled with the idea of defining such extreme fatigue, along with a host of other debilitating symptoms such as muscle pain, digestive problems and inability to concentrate, as a real disorder.
In Europe, we refer to it loosely as ME (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis); in the States they use an umbrella term called CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome).
Yet there has been bitter debate and division between sufferers, the sometimes disbelieving 'healthy' public and doctors on the symptoms and causes of such a syndrome -- or if indeed it really exists as a purely physical condition.
As sufferer Marie Coffey explains, ME feels like one is constantly living with an excruciating hangover and it can be difficult for people to take it seriously as a physical ailment.
There was some excitement then last week when Science journal published a study that seemed to establish a link between ME/CFS sufferers and a recently discovered virus called XMRV.
"Since the original Science paper was submitted, we have continued to refine our test for XMRV and have surprisingly found that 95pc ME/CFS samples tested positive for XMRV antibodies in the plasma," said Dr Judy Mikovits, who led the research at the Whittemore Peterson Institute (WPI) in the University of Nevada, Reno.
"This finding clearly points to the retrovirus as a significant contributing factor in this illness," she added.
Tentative though the findings are, they seem a vindication of what sufferers have been saying all along: it's not all in our minds.
Because of the difficulty of diagnosing someone with ME, and the reluctance to see it as a definite syndrome anyway, there has been a tendency to dismiss sufferers as hypochondriacs.
In fact, when Dr Daniel Peterson of the WPI started a practice in Nevada in the 1980s and began diagnosing a large number of patients coming down with a new type of chronic fatigue illness, the media derogatively tagged it 'yuppie flu'.
The implication was that it was a type of psychological burnout particular to the social circumstances of Dr Peterson's affluent patients in the Lake Tahoe area.
This was incorrect, as the illness was being documented across lots of other areas, but it stuck for several reasons, some of which were to do with the health insurance industry in the US who didn't like the idea of categorising a new illness that they would have to pay out for.
Declan Carroll of the Irish ME Trust explains that the symptoms being diagnosed by Dr Peterson were not actually new to Europeans who had been loosely coining the term ME since a study in a London hospital in the 1950s.
A population study taken by a Prof Leonard Jason in the US of figures for CFS worldwide concluded that it affects a mean of 0.3pc of the population. In Ireland, that figure translates to around 12,000 people.
Questionnaires submitted to Irish GPs by the Irish ME Trust came up with a similar number, although the Trust admits that this is not conclusive.
"Basically what the uncovering of this new virus has done is to further demand a proper diagnostic approach," says Declan Carroll.
The best way forward for ME sufferers here -- at least to diagnose them -- is for doctors to apply Canadian guidelines which set out a number of fixed criteria for diagnosing the illness.
"What happens fairly regularly," says Declan Carroll, "is doctors are busy, they can't see anything untoward in regular blood tests, and they pass the patient onto a consultant that deals with the prevalent symptom, say a person with muscle pain gets sent to a rheumatologist.
"Otherwise they take the view: you have muscle pain, you're tired all the time, it may be burnout, stress, so go exercise and I'll give you an antidepressant. And that is not really satisfactory."
The Irish ME Trust is an information and support service for ME sufferers. See www.imet.ie for more details, or lo-call 1890 200 912.
'Let me get better, I thought, or let me go, because this is hell'
MARIE COFFEY (47) lives in Enniscorthy, Co Wexford. She began experiencing ME when she was just 31.
"I had been suffering from chest problems and some bad colds but I just collapsed one day in a friend's house in April 1993. I spent two full years in bed. I couldn't walk, I couldn't move, it was hell.
"My husband Tom had to carry me to the bathroom, and the doctors were telling me to exercise.
"I had been a very active person, I worked, I had two children. Dominic was six and Christina was eight. My son wouldn't remember me as a healthy mammy running around the place. I knew it wasn't psychological. I was pulling my hair out listening to doctors saying, 'Ah Marie, you just have to get up'. I did try but it got to the stage where I couldn't hold a cup.
"I never considered suicide but at one point I did ask God to take me if this was what it was going to be. Let me get better, I thought, or let me go because this is hell. My own mother dismissed me. I remember her looking at me one day and saying: 'Marie, you can't be that bad'.
"I'm still recovering -- it's baby steps. I like to say that ME doesn't manage Marie, Marie manages the ME! I speak to people on the phone, trying to help them go through it. I tell them to listen to their body, and I would beg doctors to listen to their patients.
"My son was a great man with the football -- I used to sit in my car watching him but other days I would be in bed crying because I couldn't go see him. I missed weddings. I missed my mother's funeral. We weren't close but I would have liked to have gone.
"I know now to give the body time to recharge. I meditate, I do stretches and yoga and I practise Emotional Freedom Therapy, which is like acupuncture without needles.
"When you first wake up you can be in burning pain. There is no doubt in my mind it's a virus -- your lymph nodes swell up, you're continuously dehydrated. You feel out of this world, they call it a 'brain fog', like your body has been invaded from outer space.
"I don't think ME should be fobbed off as a psychological problem. I have learned to be assertive and if a doctor doesn't listen to me today I just walk out.
"But I'm a firm believer that if the spirit is good, the body can recover. I have a grandson who is a wonderful boy of seven months. I can't hold him but I can still love him. It was a rough journey but I am thankful for where I am now."
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Reader, I hated him
You know you were a nerd as a kid when all your crushes were 19th century literary creations....
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/under-the-covers-with-my-first-love-1923465.html
Under the covers with my first love
Susan Daly trembles at the knees as she delves into the Mills and Boon poll of the ultimate romantic literary heroes
Saturday October 24 2009
My first love was well over 150 years old and had "a most forbidding, disagreeable countenance" when I fell for him. No Eamon Dunphy jokes please -- I was a tender-hearted 13-year-old and this was serious.
Never mind that Mr Darcy had seduced generations of young girls before me. He had me at hello. Or rather, at the first mention of his "fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien" in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.
If he had a bit of a puss on him, that was acceptable: at least he had some gravitas. When your real world is populated by teenage boys for whom seduction is twanging bra straps in class, a man with sophistication and the ability to grow impressive sideburns can turn a girl's head.
I take it quite personally that Mr Darcy (first name Fitzwilliam, but best not to dwell on that) has not topped a new list of the most romantic literary heroes as voted by Mills and Boon readers. That spot went to Mr Rochester, keeping wives in attics since 1847.
I understand that taking umbrage over which 19th century figment of the imagination fills his fictional breeches better is a bit like debating whether Spandau Ballet or Duran Duran was the finer band of the '80s. They were both a bit ridiculous, if we're honest.
Nonetheless, the first literary hero you take under the covers with you, reading by torch when your mother yells up the stairs to turn out the light, is special. Edward Rochester was not a man you would want to be alone with in a darkened room.
In Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, he was dismissive of his daughter, uncharitable towards his wife and menacing towards Jane. Reader, I despised him.
At one point, when Jane refuses to become his mistress (because that's what she would be, what with the first Mrs R still wearing a hole in the floor upstairs) he threatens that he may not be able to control his passion. "His voice was hoarse; his look that of a man who is just about to burst an insufferable bond and plunge headlong into wild licence," wrote the breathless Bronte. An implicit threat of rape -- hardly the stuff of fairytale romance, is it?
Mr Darcy was not without his faults but the whole attraction was that he repented and changed his ways through the love of a good woman. The words leopard and spots had yet to become linked in my very limited lexicon of love. Rochester, I seem to remember, needed to be blinded and crippled before he came to his senses.
Darcy is loyal and constant but misunderstood. As the book progresses, we are dropped little tidbits about his discreet kindnesses. We are made to fall in love with him much as Lizzie does. He ignores his family's protests that she is socially inferior, fulfilling our teenage fantasies that we are all Cinderellas just waiting for someone to see past the rags/acne/lack of status to the princess within.
In truth, I wonder how much of my crush on Mr Darcy would remain were the image of a wet-shirted Colin Firth not burned on my brain. Firth became the definitive Darcy in the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice in 1995, emerging damp and magnificent from a lake into which he had dived to quench his unvoiced passion for Lizzie Bennett. He was everything I had imagined he would be -- and more. Purely for research purposes, I looked up the scene on YouTube this week and can confirm that it remains what might politely be termed, a knee-trembler.
I will also admit to being influenced by Robert Redford and Mia Farrow at their most ethereally beautiful in the film version of The Great Gatsby, which I saw just before I read the book.
Blinded by Jay and Daisy's physical perfection, I wanted their champagne lifestyle, debauched and doomed though it was.
Rochester, by contrast, is merely terrifying as played by William Hurt in 1996 or, bizarrely, almost too handsome and suave in the hands of Timothy Dalton in the 1980s miniseries.
On the other hand, Wuthering Heights has somehow seen Heathcliff and Cathy's doomed passion recast as epic romance in screen versions. It helps with the bosom-heaving that he has been portrayed by the very beautiful Laurence Olivier and Ralph Fiennes. I have a suspicion that although we're all meant to be feminists now, the adolescent attraction to unsuitable bad boys lingers. Heathcliff -- so singularly demonic that he doesn't even have a last name -- is mad, bad and dangerous to know. Yet there is not one girl-child of the 1980s who has not looked wistfully out her bedroom window, practising her best Kate Bush wail: "Heathcliff, It's me, It's Cathy, I've come home ... "
As with most formative experiences, it's often a case of meeting the right romantic hero at the right time. Theodore 'Laurie' Laurence is a heart-throb as the wealthy, orphaned neighbour of the March sisters in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. But his appreciation of the qualities of bookish, headstrong tomboy Josephine was encouraging for those of us who spent teenhood hiding behind a book.
And sometimes there is just no accounting for taste. My biggest teenage crush, less literary than pulp fiction, was Kit Fielding, a jockey-slash-detective from the Dick Francis series of potboiler books. One scene in which he ravishes a lucky lady on some dustsheets in a renovated house and then heads off to ride seven winners at an evening race meet sticks in my mind, and I really wish it wouldn't.
I'm not alone. When I asked women of my acquaintance what literary heroes kept them turning the pages as teens, I got some interesting feedback. Heathcliff made it, of course, and Mr Darcy but also Adrian Mole, he of the secret diary and unrequited crushes, and Holden Caulfield of JD Salinger's Catcher in The Rye.
Another mentioned The Fat Controller, but I hope she was joking. A lust for Heathcliff might be so wrong it's right, but some passions are just, well, wrong.
FRANKLY, WE NOW GIVE A DAMN
Sometimes you only know you love a literary hero when you see them on screen. The following characters’ leap from book to script has only increased their attractiveness:
RHETT BUTLER – GONE WITH THE WIND: Margaret Mitchell’s novel was a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1937 before it was given the Hollywood treatment two years later with Clark Gable as Rhett and Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara. The novel’s Rhett was violent and brutal with women, based as he was on Mitchell’s first husband, a bootlegger and abuser whom she divorced. In the movie, Rhett is somewhat more dashing with Gable and his moustache ensconced locked in a classic flirt-flight epic with Scarlett.
ROMEO MONTAGUE – ROMEO AND JULIET: I never understood the attraction of Romeo – all mouth, no trousers and kills himself unnecessarily. What use is that? Then Leonardo diCaprio’s delinquent Romeo swaggered into the picture in Baz Luhrmann’s inspired Romeo + Juliet in 1996 and it all became clear. Especially in the scene where he rips his shirt off in the rain.
ROB GORDON – HIGH FIDELITY: As in most of Nick Hornby’s books, the male protagonist needs nothing more than a good shake. Director Stephen Frears made Rob Gordon (Fleming in the book) infinitely more attractive and less pathetic by casting the indie woman’s crumpet John Cusack in the role in the 2000 film. Record store owner and compulsive list-maker Rob learns to lose his fear of commitment and makes the perfect romantic mix tape.
ROBBIE TURNER – ATONEMENT: If Ian McEwan’s masterpiece had been around in my teenage years, I would have seized on the budding sexual tension between the aristocratic Cecilia Tallis and the poor-but-proud Robbie as the ultimate coming-of-age tale. Joe Wright’s 2007 film puts flesh on Robbie’s bones by casting the delicious James McAvoy. Thwarted love, heroic death and a full-blooded knee-trembler in the library: what more could a girl want?
EDWARD CULLEN – TWILIGHT: Stephanie Meyers did something clever with her Twilight series of teen books: she made her romantic hero the ultimate bad boy – a vampire. But her best trick was to allow the books to be optioned. By the time the first Twilight film came out last year, you could hear the anticipatory teen girl screams in space. And Meyers quite rightly gave Robert Pattison the stamp of approval as the Edward she had pictured in her head, managing to look both “dangerous and beautiful” at the same time.
CYRANO DE BERGERAC - CYRANO DE BERGERAC: We will ignore Steve Martin in the American film version Roxanne and concentrate on Gerard Depardieu in 1990 as the big-nosed lover who overcomes his facial shortcomings with beautiful words. Depardieu makes him an utterly believable, vulnerable character and let’s face it, the actor is not a man who has ever let his sizeable schnoz stand in his way with the ladies.
ARAGORN – LORD OF THE RINGS: In the Tolkien cycle of books Aragorn is a noble warrior for sure, but the description of him with shaggy dark hair “flecked with gray” and a stern, pale face hardly leaps off the page at you. Enter the ruggedly handsome Viggo Mortensen in 2001 in the first of Peter Jackson’s movie trilogy and suddenly it becomes a little easier to picture him being adored by the masses of Middle Earth.
JAMES BOND – THE 007 SERIES: Ian Fleming wrote that his fictional British secret agent James Bond had a noticeable scar on his cheek, “a bit cruel in the mouth, and the eyes were cold”. Doesn’t sound much like Sean Connery or Pierce Brosnan, does it? He also abhors killing people which is quite a remove from the devil-may-care physicality of the screen Bonds who seduce and assassinate with equal vigour.
The ladies’ man bit is consistent with Fleming’s books – although the written Bond also has a habit of slapping his Bond girls about which is something the screen Bond would never get away with (Sean Connery off-screen comments notwithstanding).
RICHARD SHARPE – SHARPE: A fictional British soldier in the Napoleonic Wars, Richard Sharpe is a man with a dark, possibly murderous past, in Bernard Cromwell’s series of books. He is also dark, long-haired and scarred. In the 1990s TV series, Sean Bean – blonde, beautiful, not at all scarred – romanticized the role. A fine, er, swordsman he was but his three marriages ended poetically badly: two wives die and the third betrays and steals from him. There, there Sharpe, let us comfort you on our heaving bosoms.
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/under-the-covers-with-my-first-love-1923465.html
Under the covers with my first love
Susan Daly trembles at the knees as she delves into the Mills and Boon poll of the ultimate romantic literary heroes
Saturday October 24 2009
My first love was well over 150 years old and had "a most forbidding, disagreeable countenance" when I fell for him. No Eamon Dunphy jokes please -- I was a tender-hearted 13-year-old and this was serious.
Never mind that Mr Darcy had seduced generations of young girls before me. He had me at hello. Or rather, at the first mention of his "fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien" in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.
If he had a bit of a puss on him, that was acceptable: at least he had some gravitas. When your real world is populated by teenage boys for whom seduction is twanging bra straps in class, a man with sophistication and the ability to grow impressive sideburns can turn a girl's head.
I take it quite personally that Mr Darcy (first name Fitzwilliam, but best not to dwell on that) has not topped a new list of the most romantic literary heroes as voted by Mills and Boon readers. That spot went to Mr Rochester, keeping wives in attics since 1847.
I understand that taking umbrage over which 19th century figment of the imagination fills his fictional breeches better is a bit like debating whether Spandau Ballet or Duran Duran was the finer band of the '80s. They were both a bit ridiculous, if we're honest.
Nonetheless, the first literary hero you take under the covers with you, reading by torch when your mother yells up the stairs to turn out the light, is special. Edward Rochester was not a man you would want to be alone with in a darkened room.
In Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, he was dismissive of his daughter, uncharitable towards his wife and menacing towards Jane. Reader, I despised him.
At one point, when Jane refuses to become his mistress (because that's what she would be, what with the first Mrs R still wearing a hole in the floor upstairs) he threatens that he may not be able to control his passion. "His voice was hoarse; his look that of a man who is just about to burst an insufferable bond and plunge headlong into wild licence," wrote the breathless Bronte. An implicit threat of rape -- hardly the stuff of fairytale romance, is it?
Mr Darcy was not without his faults but the whole attraction was that he repented and changed his ways through the love of a good woman. The words leopard and spots had yet to become linked in my very limited lexicon of love. Rochester, I seem to remember, needed to be blinded and crippled before he came to his senses.
Darcy is loyal and constant but misunderstood. As the book progresses, we are dropped little tidbits about his discreet kindnesses. We are made to fall in love with him much as Lizzie does. He ignores his family's protests that she is socially inferior, fulfilling our teenage fantasies that we are all Cinderellas just waiting for someone to see past the rags/acne/lack of status to the princess within.
In truth, I wonder how much of my crush on Mr Darcy would remain were the image of a wet-shirted Colin Firth not burned on my brain. Firth became the definitive Darcy in the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice in 1995, emerging damp and magnificent from a lake into which he had dived to quench his unvoiced passion for Lizzie Bennett. He was everything I had imagined he would be -- and more. Purely for research purposes, I looked up the scene on YouTube this week and can confirm that it remains what might politely be termed, a knee-trembler.
I will also admit to being influenced by Robert Redford and Mia Farrow at their most ethereally beautiful in the film version of The Great Gatsby, which I saw just before I read the book.
Blinded by Jay and Daisy's physical perfection, I wanted their champagne lifestyle, debauched and doomed though it was.
Rochester, by contrast, is merely terrifying as played by William Hurt in 1996 or, bizarrely, almost too handsome and suave in the hands of Timothy Dalton in the 1980s miniseries.
On the other hand, Wuthering Heights has somehow seen Heathcliff and Cathy's doomed passion recast as epic romance in screen versions. It helps with the bosom-heaving that he has been portrayed by the very beautiful Laurence Olivier and Ralph Fiennes. I have a suspicion that although we're all meant to be feminists now, the adolescent attraction to unsuitable bad boys lingers. Heathcliff -- so singularly demonic that he doesn't even have a last name -- is mad, bad and dangerous to know. Yet there is not one girl-child of the 1980s who has not looked wistfully out her bedroom window, practising her best Kate Bush wail: "Heathcliff, It's me, It's Cathy, I've come home ... "
As with most formative experiences, it's often a case of meeting the right romantic hero at the right time. Theodore 'Laurie' Laurence is a heart-throb as the wealthy, orphaned neighbour of the March sisters in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. But his appreciation of the qualities of bookish, headstrong tomboy Josephine was encouraging for those of us who spent teenhood hiding behind a book.
And sometimes there is just no accounting for taste. My biggest teenage crush, less literary than pulp fiction, was Kit Fielding, a jockey-slash-detective from the Dick Francis series of potboiler books. One scene in which he ravishes a lucky lady on some dustsheets in a renovated house and then heads off to ride seven winners at an evening race meet sticks in my mind, and I really wish it wouldn't.
I'm not alone. When I asked women of my acquaintance what literary heroes kept them turning the pages as teens, I got some interesting feedback. Heathcliff made it, of course, and Mr Darcy but also Adrian Mole, he of the secret diary and unrequited crushes, and Holden Caulfield of JD Salinger's Catcher in The Rye.
Another mentioned The Fat Controller, but I hope she was joking. A lust for Heathcliff might be so wrong it's right, but some passions are just, well, wrong.
FRANKLY, WE NOW GIVE A DAMN
Sometimes you only know you love a literary hero when you see them on screen. The following characters’ leap from book to script has only increased their attractiveness:
RHETT BUTLER – GONE WITH THE WIND: Margaret Mitchell’s novel was a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1937 before it was given the Hollywood treatment two years later with Clark Gable as Rhett and Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara. The novel’s Rhett was violent and brutal with women, based as he was on Mitchell’s first husband, a bootlegger and abuser whom she divorced. In the movie, Rhett is somewhat more dashing with Gable and his moustache ensconced locked in a classic flirt-flight epic with Scarlett.
ROMEO MONTAGUE – ROMEO AND JULIET: I never understood the attraction of Romeo – all mouth, no trousers and kills himself unnecessarily. What use is that? Then Leonardo diCaprio’s delinquent Romeo swaggered into the picture in Baz Luhrmann’s inspired Romeo + Juliet in 1996 and it all became clear. Especially in the scene where he rips his shirt off in the rain.
ROB GORDON – HIGH FIDELITY: As in most of Nick Hornby’s books, the male protagonist needs nothing more than a good shake. Director Stephen Frears made Rob Gordon (Fleming in the book) infinitely more attractive and less pathetic by casting the indie woman’s crumpet John Cusack in the role in the 2000 film. Record store owner and compulsive list-maker Rob learns to lose his fear of commitment and makes the perfect romantic mix tape.
ROBBIE TURNER – ATONEMENT: If Ian McEwan’s masterpiece had been around in my teenage years, I would have seized on the budding sexual tension between the aristocratic Cecilia Tallis and the poor-but-proud Robbie as the ultimate coming-of-age tale. Joe Wright’s 2007 film puts flesh on Robbie’s bones by casting the delicious James McAvoy. Thwarted love, heroic death and a full-blooded knee-trembler in the library: what more could a girl want?
EDWARD CULLEN – TWILIGHT: Stephanie Meyers did something clever with her Twilight series of teen books: she made her romantic hero the ultimate bad boy – a vampire. But her best trick was to allow the books to be optioned. By the time the first Twilight film came out last year, you could hear the anticipatory teen girl screams in space. And Meyers quite rightly gave Robert Pattison the stamp of approval as the Edward she had pictured in her head, managing to look both “dangerous and beautiful” at the same time.
CYRANO DE BERGERAC - CYRANO DE BERGERAC: We will ignore Steve Martin in the American film version Roxanne and concentrate on Gerard Depardieu in 1990 as the big-nosed lover who overcomes his facial shortcomings with beautiful words. Depardieu makes him an utterly believable, vulnerable character and let’s face it, the actor is not a man who has ever let his sizeable schnoz stand in his way with the ladies.
ARAGORN – LORD OF THE RINGS: In the Tolkien cycle of books Aragorn is a noble warrior for sure, but the description of him with shaggy dark hair “flecked with gray” and a stern, pale face hardly leaps off the page at you. Enter the ruggedly handsome Viggo Mortensen in 2001 in the first of Peter Jackson’s movie trilogy and suddenly it becomes a little easier to picture him being adored by the masses of Middle Earth.
JAMES BOND – THE 007 SERIES: Ian Fleming wrote that his fictional British secret agent James Bond had a noticeable scar on his cheek, “a bit cruel in the mouth, and the eyes were cold”. Doesn’t sound much like Sean Connery or Pierce Brosnan, does it? He also abhors killing people which is quite a remove from the devil-may-care physicality of the screen Bonds who seduce and assassinate with equal vigour.
The ladies’ man bit is consistent with Fleming’s books – although the written Bond also has a habit of slapping his Bond girls about which is something the screen Bond would never get away with (Sean Connery off-screen comments notwithstanding).
RICHARD SHARPE – SHARPE: A fictional British soldier in the Napoleonic Wars, Richard Sharpe is a man with a dark, possibly murderous past, in Bernard Cromwell’s series of books. He is also dark, long-haired and scarred. In the 1990s TV series, Sean Bean – blonde, beautiful, not at all scarred – romanticized the role. A fine, er, swordsman he was but his three marriages ended poetically badly: two wives die and the third betrays and steals from him. There, there Sharpe, let us comfort you on our heaving bosoms.
Queen Vic
I rather like Victoria Smurfit, and I didn't really expect to. Read all about it, y'all...
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/celebrity-news-gossip/for-goodness-sake-im-36-ive-three-childrenjust-suck-it-up-and-get-on-with-it-1923455.html
By Susan Daly
Saturday October 24 2009
Victoria Smurfit has to try very hard not to look cross. Her angular face is built for stern close-ups. As displayed to full scary advantage in her role as TV detective Róisin Connor in Trial and Retribution, it is, she says, a face that lends itself to tough.
"Playing Róisin, more often than not, I'd get women coming up saying, 'I'd love to be you in that part, I'd love to be that cross'," she laughs. Men, on the other hand, would tell her husband Doug Baxter: "Good luck to you, married to that one."
Now that she is joining the cast of RTE's The Clinic, Smurfit is having to soften her edges. But there is another reason why it's been a leap for her to take the role of Dr Edel Swift, the latest arrival to the fictional Clarence Street Clinic.
"It's the closest part I've ever played to myself," she says.
Dr Edel is a mother of two, devoted to the job but trying to make time for a home life. It's the dilemma of modern motherhood that Smurfit, mum to three children under the age of five, can relate to. When we meet for morning coffee in Dublin city centre, she is pink-cheeked from pedalling her bicycle furiously from her Ranelagh home, all apologies for being a few minutes late.
She describes her morning so far in an entertaining stream of consciousness. "After I'd dropped Evie to school, Ridley to playschool, arranged a babysitter for Flynn, I realised when I got home I had yoghurt all down my trousers. Pull on another pair, pull on the boots, put on mascara -- will it come off on the bike? -- who cares, come on, let's go!"
She doesn't look like a harassed mummy; tight jeans, on-trend ankle boots, chartreuse-coloured sweater that brings out the green in her eyes. "I would say they are very pink," she demurs. "I had about four minutes' sleep."
Sleep deprivation must be a fact of life at this stage in the Smurfit-Baxter household. They officially moved back from London to Dublin in 2001, two years into their marriage, and Waterford native Baxter established three companies: Ocean PR, Ocean advertising and Birth Digital. Smurfit continued to be in demand in the UK, where she had largely forged her career.
So, the family would decamp to rented accommodation in England for the best part of the year while she filmed Trial and Retribution and other projects. Filming The Clinic this summer was like freewheeling downhill by comparison.
"In The Clinic, it's just down the road and the cast is so big you're one of eight or 10 characters, whereas in Trial I was in every day, all day, six days a week," she says. "It was pretty hardcore."
On-set in England, her two girls, Evie, now almost five, and Ridley, two, would come to her at lunch for some intense quality time, but then she would "brush the glitter off" and run back to set and arrest another fictional ne'er-do-well.
"You do what you do but, by the same token, sometimes you would go to bed at night with your heart beating out of your chest, thinking: 'I'm not sure I can handle the stress.' They were 20-hour days for nine months. When I started the gig it was five weeks, but then it became nine months."
Now that the family has been completed by 11-month-old Flynn, she is happy to be mostly on home ground. Working mums, she acknowledges, have to deal with "vast lumps" of guilt.
"You're constantly torn. You're at work, you should be with the kids. You're with the kids, you should be out earning money."
The assumption, of course, has been that Victoria Smurfit, as a member of one of Ireland's richest families, does not necessarily need to be out earning her own dough. Her father Dermot, along with his brothers Michael and Alan, are major shareholders in a billion-euro paper and packaging company.
She's heard the silver spoon stuff all before. "I don't tend to get it so much anymore because I've enough of a backlog of my own work that I'm seen separately. But it is something I have come across a lot: 'Why do you work?'
"I think, 'are you serious?' They assume I don't have to. I work for my soul and my wallet."
She has said before that her father did not supplement her fledgling acting career, nor did she ask for any, working consistently since graduating from acting school in Bristol in 1995. If anything, she says, she is entirely following in the family footsteps.
Her grandfather Jefferson was a working-class man from Wigan in northern England who came to Ireland after the Second World War and established the business from scratch. His sons began their careers working on the warehouse floor.
"They made all their own money and they did it the hard way," she says firmly. "They weren't trust fund babes. There are no sick days. They're extraordinarily talented men that I grew up admiring."
Although she spent childhood in a lofty pile in salubrious Dalkey, Victoria was packed off to boarding school in England at the age of 14, like her brother Desmond Jnr. The family name was not the calling card in England that it would have been here.
"They know the name more now because of the job I do and it would be brought up that way round. I'm very proud of that," she says. "As far as I'm concerned, I come from a hard-working family and I don't want to let the side down."
Far from playing the poor-little-rich-girl card, she pokes fun at it. She and husband Doug agreed to pose for a spread in VIP Magazine a few weeks after Flynn was born last November, but with the proviso that they could "take the mick".
She thinks back to the resulting photographs and laughs. "That's what we did: we had fun with the concept of this Victoria Smurfit." So you had Victoria stiff-backed on a horse on the steps of uncle Michael's exclusive K-Club, Victoria in a ball gown with a woolly jumper over the top.
"I'm bizarrely proud of it because we took a running publication that has a particular style and did something different," she says. "I mean, I'm standing on a table in a sparkly dress and playing with the chandelier. It was ridiculous!"
Not everybody got the joke -- one paper sniped cattily that she had done herself "few favours" with the shoot and likened Doug's appearance to that of a "lord of the manor". Victoria couldn't care less.
"I wouldn't have done that 10 years ago because I was trying to get away from that," she says. "But as far as I'm concerned now, if I haven't stood on my own reputation at this stage, I never will and if you don't get it by now, you never will."
If there is one advantage to having what a newspaper critic once called "the best name and crossest face in TV", a description Smurfit loves, it's that you can be imperious when the occasion calls for it. While she declares 90pc of actors a joy to work with -- she finds fellow Clinic newbie Alison Doody and old hand Amy Huberman to be "just delicious", naturally -- she is tickled when she comes across the occasional bitchy outburst.
Shortly after the birth of one of her daughters, she was presenting an award at the BAFTAs, trying not to get wobbly on a single glass of wine when she was caught off-guard by another actress's comment to her about "post-pregnancy nasal hair". She could only ask Doug: "I don't have, do I?" to which he replied in the negative. You have to laugh, she says.
And it's not always the women, she says, telling the story of a male actor who was guesting on Trial and Retribution. "Every now and then you come across somebody who takes themselves too seriously. He was going on and on and on about the scene. We all knew what the scene was about, but he just wanted to hear himself talking.
"I'm the regular so I'm just sitting there going 'Fine, great, brilliant, whatever ... ' And I just sort of did that [she wipes her eye] and he said: 'Oh, I'm sorry, is mummy tired?'"
Sharp intake of breath. "I'm in Róisin mode at this stage and I say, 'No, Victoria is'. And when I call myself Victoria, you know you are in trouble." She's not a luvvie, she's a fighter.
It's partly why she didn't feel that Hollywood was a fit for her. I venture that even though she and Doody are eternally wheeled out as Irish actresses done good on the international scene, the reality is that Smurfit's only well-known film roles are in About A Boy, a small part in The Beach and a lead in action flick Bulletproof Monk. Doody is best-known for her turn in a 1989 Indiana Jones film.
To Victoria's credit, she nods emphatically that it is her TV work that has made her career, from an early role in Ballykissangel to period drama Berkeley Square, huge hit Cold Feet and onto Trial.
She finds the experience of making a big-budget film to be "terribly lonely", preferring the energy and pace of frenetic small-screen productions. This is not surprising coming from a woman who copes with the experience of childbirth by thinking of it as an "extreme sport". She can't be doing with sitting in a trailer for a day and a half, only coming out for a scene that has two lines of dialogue, "a lot of pushing and shoving and someone flying out of the sky", she says wryly. "I find my brain rots slightly."
I take it she is referring to Bulletproof Monk, a film she describes as "pretty rubbishy". At an early table reading of the script with the director, she found that Tinseltown is not devoid of people taking themselves too seriously. She read the role with the comic intent that got her the part with the producer. The director admonished her for not taking his 'War and Peace' seriously enough.
"'War and Peace?' I was thinking. 'This is called Bulletproof Monk! Come on!'"
In any case, she had reached a point where she realised a superstar trailer and an entourage were not what she wanted. "It was either this is something you pursue 100pc or I want to have a family. And I wanted to have a family."
With her own parents, Caroline and Dermot, having divorced when she was still at school, it would be easy to play pop psychologist about the importance of a steady family unit to Victoria. In reality, I don't think there is much the woman who describes herself as a "headstrong bugger" does that she hasn't decided for herself.
She didn't marry a version of daddy. While Dermot Snr "loves being called a magnate", Doug -- who is also an exhibiting photographer -- "hates" being called an advertising executive. Far from banking on some fabulous inheritance, she wants to be working when she's 80. She recognises the propensity in herself as an actress to want to ask needily 'Was that alright?' then corrects herself.
"For goodness sake, I'm 36, I've three children, I've been working in this for 15 years. Just suck it up and get on with it!"
And I bet she calls herself Victoria as she says it.
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/celebrity-news-gossip/for-goodness-sake-im-36-ive-three-childrenjust-suck-it-up-and-get-on-with-it-1923455.html
By Susan Daly
Saturday October 24 2009
Victoria Smurfit has to try very hard not to look cross. Her angular face is built for stern close-ups. As displayed to full scary advantage in her role as TV detective Róisin Connor in Trial and Retribution, it is, she says, a face that lends itself to tough.
"Playing Róisin, more often than not, I'd get women coming up saying, 'I'd love to be you in that part, I'd love to be that cross'," she laughs. Men, on the other hand, would tell her husband Doug Baxter: "Good luck to you, married to that one."
Now that she is joining the cast of RTE's The Clinic, Smurfit is having to soften her edges. But there is another reason why it's been a leap for her to take the role of Dr Edel Swift, the latest arrival to the fictional Clarence Street Clinic.
"It's the closest part I've ever played to myself," she says.
Dr Edel is a mother of two, devoted to the job but trying to make time for a home life. It's the dilemma of modern motherhood that Smurfit, mum to three children under the age of five, can relate to. When we meet for morning coffee in Dublin city centre, she is pink-cheeked from pedalling her bicycle furiously from her Ranelagh home, all apologies for being a few minutes late.
She describes her morning so far in an entertaining stream of consciousness. "After I'd dropped Evie to school, Ridley to playschool, arranged a babysitter for Flynn, I realised when I got home I had yoghurt all down my trousers. Pull on another pair, pull on the boots, put on mascara -- will it come off on the bike? -- who cares, come on, let's go!"
She doesn't look like a harassed mummy; tight jeans, on-trend ankle boots, chartreuse-coloured sweater that brings out the green in her eyes. "I would say they are very pink," she demurs. "I had about four minutes' sleep."
Sleep deprivation must be a fact of life at this stage in the Smurfit-Baxter household. They officially moved back from London to Dublin in 2001, two years into their marriage, and Waterford native Baxter established three companies: Ocean PR, Ocean advertising and Birth Digital. Smurfit continued to be in demand in the UK, where she had largely forged her career.
So, the family would decamp to rented accommodation in England for the best part of the year while she filmed Trial and Retribution and other projects. Filming The Clinic this summer was like freewheeling downhill by comparison.
"In The Clinic, it's just down the road and the cast is so big you're one of eight or 10 characters, whereas in Trial I was in every day, all day, six days a week," she says. "It was pretty hardcore."
On-set in England, her two girls, Evie, now almost five, and Ridley, two, would come to her at lunch for some intense quality time, but then she would "brush the glitter off" and run back to set and arrest another fictional ne'er-do-well.
"You do what you do but, by the same token, sometimes you would go to bed at night with your heart beating out of your chest, thinking: 'I'm not sure I can handle the stress.' They were 20-hour days for nine months. When I started the gig it was five weeks, but then it became nine months."
Now that the family has been completed by 11-month-old Flynn, she is happy to be mostly on home ground. Working mums, she acknowledges, have to deal with "vast lumps" of guilt.
"You're constantly torn. You're at work, you should be with the kids. You're with the kids, you should be out earning money."
The assumption, of course, has been that Victoria Smurfit, as a member of one of Ireland's richest families, does not necessarily need to be out earning her own dough. Her father Dermot, along with his brothers Michael and Alan, are major shareholders in a billion-euro paper and packaging company.
She's heard the silver spoon stuff all before. "I don't tend to get it so much anymore because I've enough of a backlog of my own work that I'm seen separately. But it is something I have come across a lot: 'Why do you work?'
"I think, 'are you serious?' They assume I don't have to. I work for my soul and my wallet."
She has said before that her father did not supplement her fledgling acting career, nor did she ask for any, working consistently since graduating from acting school in Bristol in 1995. If anything, she says, she is entirely following in the family footsteps.
Her grandfather Jefferson was a working-class man from Wigan in northern England who came to Ireland after the Second World War and established the business from scratch. His sons began their careers working on the warehouse floor.
"They made all their own money and they did it the hard way," she says firmly. "They weren't trust fund babes. There are no sick days. They're extraordinarily talented men that I grew up admiring."
Although she spent childhood in a lofty pile in salubrious Dalkey, Victoria was packed off to boarding school in England at the age of 14, like her brother Desmond Jnr. The family name was not the calling card in England that it would have been here.
"They know the name more now because of the job I do and it would be brought up that way round. I'm very proud of that," she says. "As far as I'm concerned, I come from a hard-working family and I don't want to let the side down."
Far from playing the poor-little-rich-girl card, she pokes fun at it. She and husband Doug agreed to pose for a spread in VIP Magazine a few weeks after Flynn was born last November, but with the proviso that they could "take the mick".
She thinks back to the resulting photographs and laughs. "That's what we did: we had fun with the concept of this Victoria Smurfit." So you had Victoria stiff-backed on a horse on the steps of uncle Michael's exclusive K-Club, Victoria in a ball gown with a woolly jumper over the top.
"I'm bizarrely proud of it because we took a running publication that has a particular style and did something different," she says. "I mean, I'm standing on a table in a sparkly dress and playing with the chandelier. It was ridiculous!"
Not everybody got the joke -- one paper sniped cattily that she had done herself "few favours" with the shoot and likened Doug's appearance to that of a "lord of the manor". Victoria couldn't care less.
"I wouldn't have done that 10 years ago because I was trying to get away from that," she says. "But as far as I'm concerned now, if I haven't stood on my own reputation at this stage, I never will and if you don't get it by now, you never will."
If there is one advantage to having what a newspaper critic once called "the best name and crossest face in TV", a description Smurfit loves, it's that you can be imperious when the occasion calls for it. While she declares 90pc of actors a joy to work with -- she finds fellow Clinic newbie Alison Doody and old hand Amy Huberman to be "just delicious", naturally -- she is tickled when she comes across the occasional bitchy outburst.
Shortly after the birth of one of her daughters, she was presenting an award at the BAFTAs, trying not to get wobbly on a single glass of wine when she was caught off-guard by another actress's comment to her about "post-pregnancy nasal hair". She could only ask Doug: "I don't have, do I?" to which he replied in the negative. You have to laugh, she says.
And it's not always the women, she says, telling the story of a male actor who was guesting on Trial and Retribution. "Every now and then you come across somebody who takes themselves too seriously. He was going on and on and on about the scene. We all knew what the scene was about, but he just wanted to hear himself talking.
"I'm the regular so I'm just sitting there going 'Fine, great, brilliant, whatever ... ' And I just sort of did that [she wipes her eye] and he said: 'Oh, I'm sorry, is mummy tired?'"
Sharp intake of breath. "I'm in Róisin mode at this stage and I say, 'No, Victoria is'. And when I call myself Victoria, you know you are in trouble." She's not a luvvie, she's a fighter.
It's partly why she didn't feel that Hollywood was a fit for her. I venture that even though she and Doody are eternally wheeled out as Irish actresses done good on the international scene, the reality is that Smurfit's only well-known film roles are in About A Boy, a small part in The Beach and a lead in action flick Bulletproof Monk. Doody is best-known for her turn in a 1989 Indiana Jones film.
To Victoria's credit, she nods emphatically that it is her TV work that has made her career, from an early role in Ballykissangel to period drama Berkeley Square, huge hit Cold Feet and onto Trial.
She finds the experience of making a big-budget film to be "terribly lonely", preferring the energy and pace of frenetic small-screen productions. This is not surprising coming from a woman who copes with the experience of childbirth by thinking of it as an "extreme sport". She can't be doing with sitting in a trailer for a day and a half, only coming out for a scene that has two lines of dialogue, "a lot of pushing and shoving and someone flying out of the sky", she says wryly. "I find my brain rots slightly."
I take it she is referring to Bulletproof Monk, a film she describes as "pretty rubbishy". At an early table reading of the script with the director, she found that Tinseltown is not devoid of people taking themselves too seriously. She read the role with the comic intent that got her the part with the producer. The director admonished her for not taking his 'War and Peace' seriously enough.
"'War and Peace?' I was thinking. 'This is called Bulletproof Monk! Come on!'"
In any case, she had reached a point where she realised a superstar trailer and an entourage were not what she wanted. "It was either this is something you pursue 100pc or I want to have a family. And I wanted to have a family."
With her own parents, Caroline and Dermot, having divorced when she was still at school, it would be easy to play pop psychologist about the importance of a steady family unit to Victoria. In reality, I don't think there is much the woman who describes herself as a "headstrong bugger" does that she hasn't decided for herself.
She didn't marry a version of daddy. While Dermot Snr "loves being called a magnate", Doug -- who is also an exhibiting photographer -- "hates" being called an advertising executive. Far from banking on some fabulous inheritance, she wants to be working when she's 80. She recognises the propensity in herself as an actress to want to ask needily 'Was that alright?' then corrects herself.
"For goodness sake, I'm 36, I've three children, I've been working in this for 15 years. Just suck it up and get on with it!"
And I bet she calls herself Victoria as she says it.
Friday, October 30, 2009
"If I live I can be proud of that, and if I die I did something good."
The very lovely thing about this job is the fact that you meet lots of interesting folk. Even better, you get paid to meet them. Occasionally, 'interesting' doesn't go hand-in-hand with 'nice'. That's not the case with gardener Dermot O'Neill. I had as much fun as you can have in a warehouse in Finglas last year when I interviewed him about his upcoming shows for RTE and his ambitions to renovate a 19th-century walled garden in Co Laois.
But when I went to see him earlier this month, the conversation was altogether more sombre. We're thinking of you Dermot.
FROM IRISH INDEPENDENT'S Weekend magazine, October 17, 2009
By SUSAN DALY
THERE is something not right about seeing Dermot O’Neill in a hospital bed. He should be standing in a flower border, energetically pruning back roses, or showing off the glut of winter chard from his garden in Co Laois.
Instead he is easing himself back onto a pillow, an angry crescent-shaped wound visible on the front left of his shaved head, pinced together with staples. It is through this hole in his skull that chemotherapy is being administered once a week to track down rogue cancer cells in his spinal and brain fluid. Last night, he joked with a friend that the opening was like having the lid of a wheelie bin on his head.
His trademark gelled quiff is gone. He decided to have his hair shaved off rather than wait for the fallout of severe chemotherapy to kick in. A woman walked into his hospital room last week and said she was the hospital hairdresser. “I said, ‘You’re exactly the woman I’m looking for. Will you shave my head?’”
It was Dermot’s way of taking back some control in his life, something he hasn’t had much of since he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in early September.
Everything had just been coming together for him this summer. His gardening expertise had never been more in demand; he was giving lectures and tours, rushing to festivals all around Ireland. His revitalisation of a 19th century walled garden at Clondeglass, Laois was coming along beautifully – RTE have commissioned a 12-part series about the ambitious project for the new year called Dermot’s Garden.
When Weekend magazine called for a tour of Clondeglass a little over a month ago, Dermot was buzzing with plans. As well as the regeneration of the garden, he was renovating the one-bedroom cottage beside it and looking at setting up a gardening school.
The picturesque cottage, with roses trailing around the doorway, was particularly important to him. Eight or nine years ago, Dermot lost his job and then his beloved home in Dublin’s Portobello, just off the South Circular Road. He has never forgotten the “horror” and the indignity of that time in his life and so earlier this summer he agreed to become a patron of homeless charity Threshold. Their corporate funding has dried up and they have had to shut their Limerick office even though demand for their services has doubled because of the number of people losing their homes in the recession.
“I asked them: ‘Are there people who get cancer being thrown out of accommodation?’ And they said yes. I thought that, well, when I’m back on my feet, I want to look closely at this.”
Dermot has plans, no doubt about it. He is throwing himself behind the fight being waged against his disease by his consultant oncologist Professor John Crown, a man well known to the Irish public for his formidable critiques of the government’s handling of cancer services.
“He’s very direct and it suits me,” says Dermot. “There’s no mollycoddling. He’s there fighting on your behalf, he’s like a soldier and he has an amazing team of nurses here.”
When Prof Crown told Dermot he would need to drill a hole in his skull, Dermot asked if neurosurgery wasn’t a bit risky. “And he said: ‘It’s simple. You do it or you die’. And I went, Right, say no more, I understand, I’m in your hands, do what you have to do.”
He sounds very stoic and, wrapped up in a dapper silk polka-dot dressing gown, looks well despite the harrowing trial his body is undergoing. (“It’s the steroids,” he whispers.) But he is the first to admit that when first told he had cancer, and the fast-growing version of it at that, he was plunged into fear.
“There’s a hopeless moment where you feel you are alone in the world, like someone suddenly switches out a light,” says Dermot.
He first felt unwell at the end of June, and was admitted to the Beacon in Sandymount when he developed chickenpox. The blisters were everywhere – “In my ears, my nose, my head, I looked like the creature from the black lagoon” – but he also had a bleeding ulcer. After ten days or so, he was about to be discharged when he developed painful gout in his foot, a result of being so run down.
It was when he returned for an endoscopy to check on his ulcer a few weeks later, that he got the first hint something could be seriously wrong. His consultant Dr Donal Maguire said they weren’t happy, the ulcer hadn’t healed and that there appeared to be something else.
The results of a biopsy confirmed that Dermot had a tumour in his stomach. The good news, said Mr Maguire, was that although it was very serious, it was very treatable. It was a fast-growing cancer, but the upside to that was that it would respond quickly to chemotherapy.
He was immediately referred to Prof Crown, a world-recognised expert in lymphoma. Dermot’s mental state, however, took a little time to catch up with the fast pace of events.
“You immediately start wondering: How long have I? How many months? You hear of people going in three weeks. We’ve all heard these stories. It was very emotional and I thought, Hold on a minute, you have the strength and the maturity to pull you through this. You’ve got to put on a brave face.”
Telling his parents, now in their 70s, was an awful moment. “Very very difficult to do that,” he says, “because I hadn’t come to terms with it and I knew how desperately shocked and upset they were.” Dermot’s aunt Ann Hall died last year of cancer at a relatively young age. “It brings it all back for the family. It resurrects the memory of what another loved one went through,” he adds.
Yet he has found strength in his lost aunt. He remembers saying goodbye to her and how she told him that she would always be with him.
He tries to think of it all as part of the cycle of life. The night before he was admitted to St Vincent’s Private Hospital to start treatment, he opened the harvest festival to mark 150 years of Killiney’s Anglican church. “I went early so I could be alone there. And I walked into that church and it was full of flowers… The love the care the effort that went into every arrangement.
“It was very appropriate, here I was coming to terms with something that might take my life and I’m in the middle of a space where people had been married, christened, buried. It was very grounding.”
Those positive thoughts have been reinforced by his “amazing” friends and parents, his sisters Carol and Louise. He’s had so many letters and cards that the overflow has gone to his parents’ house. Carol – who narrowly escaped death herself in 2001 when she fled her workplace, the burning Twin Towers, on 9/11 – came home from America to visit him last weekend. Dermot was allowed out wearing a mask to ward off infection because his immune system is at an all-time low.
Even though he feels he has what he needs to fight the good fight – support, love, great medical care – there are anxieties that can’t be brushed under the carpet. “I hadn’t cried at all until I was admitted into hospital two weeks ago,” he says. “But then it happened.”
He had an appointment to meet Prof Crown at St Vincent’s Private Hospital on the Friday. When he arrived, he was immediately admitted. As they weren’t starting any treatment on him that day, he was allowed to go out – “as long as I came back!” So he went with a group of close friends for a meal. On the surface, he was trying to enjoy the evening but underneath he was deeply upset.
When one of his friends brought him back to St Vincent’s in a taxi, Dermot just “exploded into tears”. He says: “I looked at the building and I thought: I might never come out of here.
“That was the little breaking point. I had left my friends and I was now starting this new journey… It just overwhelmed me.”
It still does. As we have been talking, dusk has fallen outside the hospital window and we are sitting in shadow. In the half-light, he covers his face briefly and sheds a few tears. It’s only a few short weeks since his diagnosis. He has six months of three types of chemo ahead of him. Crying is a healthy response I think.
“They said it’s good to cry,” he says, “men don’t cry enough. So every now and then I have a little cry. I’ve had a cry now and I look at it as: It’s good for me, it’s another little release.”
Dermot believes that not recognising what your body needs is a major root of any illness. “I’m convinced that stress had a big role to play in mine,” he says. “I was working very hard all summer long, enjoying it, but I was working around the clock. I was worried if I didn’t do that extra bit would I lose that contract, would I lose that opportunity, would that not be renewed. It’s like that saying: You’re running faster to stay still.”
He thinks this stress, the insecurity of being self-employed, is compounded by his desire to never again be in the vulnerable financial position he was eight years ago.
It is for this reason he has invited us to visit him in his hospital bed, for this reason that he spoke to Pat Kenny during the week about his cancer.
“I want to ask people: How many of us stop and think, Hold on, what about me? What about my health? What about that day off? I think if I had done more of that, I might not be in the position I am now.”
That, and the hope that even one person who hears his story might get themselves a health check, is what drives him on.
“If I live I can be proud of that, and if I die I did something good.”
Nobody’s going anywhere yet though. Dermot went through some pretty gruelling diagnostic tests, a bone marrow biopsy, lumber punctures, a PET/CT scan that left him with bad migraine. But all of these helped his medical team to tailor his treatment regime to the specifics of his cancer.
“It was giving Prof Crown that extra ammunition that he needed as a soldier to deal with this,” he says. There is much hope, he says, although the key is to take each day at a time and see how the tumour responds to the chemo assault.
Meanwhile, Dermot’s thinking ahead to what he has to look forward to. There is Dermot’s Garden, which will now have the journey of his cancer fight wound into its narrative. RTE has also commissioned a second series of Supergardens and asked Dermot to host it in next summer. He wants to get out there on the campaign trail for Threshold.
He has other ambitions too. “You know you’re responsible for the end of the Late Late Show appearance I made?” he laughs. The last time I interviewed him, over a year ago when he started work on Clondeglass, Dermot told me that he had a secret dream to be an opera singer. The Mooney Show on RTE Radio One read the article and sent him for lessons. He stunned a Late Late Show audience on March 6 this year by singing, unaccompanied, a sweet version of O Sole Mio.
I ask him, what I can fix for you this time round? “A trip to the moon. Will you send me to the moon?” he says, laughing again.
Then he thinks about it, and adds quietly, “Although I should be careful, because what you wish for… I could end up on the moon. The man on the moon.”
But when I went to see him earlier this month, the conversation was altogether more sombre. We're thinking of you Dermot.
FROM IRISH INDEPENDENT'S Weekend magazine, October 17, 2009
By SUSAN DALY
THERE is something not right about seeing Dermot O’Neill in a hospital bed. He should be standing in a flower border, energetically pruning back roses, or showing off the glut of winter chard from his garden in Co Laois.
Instead he is easing himself back onto a pillow, an angry crescent-shaped wound visible on the front left of his shaved head, pinced together with staples. It is through this hole in his skull that chemotherapy is being administered once a week to track down rogue cancer cells in his spinal and brain fluid. Last night, he joked with a friend that the opening was like having the lid of a wheelie bin on his head.
His trademark gelled quiff is gone. He decided to have his hair shaved off rather than wait for the fallout of severe chemotherapy to kick in. A woman walked into his hospital room last week and said she was the hospital hairdresser. “I said, ‘You’re exactly the woman I’m looking for. Will you shave my head?’”
It was Dermot’s way of taking back some control in his life, something he hasn’t had much of since he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in early September.
Everything had just been coming together for him this summer. His gardening expertise had never been more in demand; he was giving lectures and tours, rushing to festivals all around Ireland. His revitalisation of a 19th century walled garden at Clondeglass, Laois was coming along beautifully – RTE have commissioned a 12-part series about the ambitious project for the new year called Dermot’s Garden.
When Weekend magazine called for a tour of Clondeglass a little over a month ago, Dermot was buzzing with plans. As well as the regeneration of the garden, he was renovating the one-bedroom cottage beside it and looking at setting up a gardening school.
The picturesque cottage, with roses trailing around the doorway, was particularly important to him. Eight or nine years ago, Dermot lost his job and then his beloved home in Dublin’s Portobello, just off the South Circular Road. He has never forgotten the “horror” and the indignity of that time in his life and so earlier this summer he agreed to become a patron of homeless charity Threshold. Their corporate funding has dried up and they have had to shut their Limerick office even though demand for their services has doubled because of the number of people losing their homes in the recession.
“I asked them: ‘Are there people who get cancer being thrown out of accommodation?’ And they said yes. I thought that, well, when I’m back on my feet, I want to look closely at this.”
Dermot has plans, no doubt about it. He is throwing himself behind the fight being waged against his disease by his consultant oncologist Professor John Crown, a man well known to the Irish public for his formidable critiques of the government’s handling of cancer services.
“He’s very direct and it suits me,” says Dermot. “There’s no mollycoddling. He’s there fighting on your behalf, he’s like a soldier and he has an amazing team of nurses here.”
When Prof Crown told Dermot he would need to drill a hole in his skull, Dermot asked if neurosurgery wasn’t a bit risky. “And he said: ‘It’s simple. You do it or you die’. And I went, Right, say no more, I understand, I’m in your hands, do what you have to do.”
He sounds very stoic and, wrapped up in a dapper silk polka-dot dressing gown, looks well despite the harrowing trial his body is undergoing. (“It’s the steroids,” he whispers.) But he is the first to admit that when first told he had cancer, and the fast-growing version of it at that, he was plunged into fear.
“There’s a hopeless moment where you feel you are alone in the world, like someone suddenly switches out a light,” says Dermot.
He first felt unwell at the end of June, and was admitted to the Beacon in Sandymount when he developed chickenpox. The blisters were everywhere – “In my ears, my nose, my head, I looked like the creature from the black lagoon” – but he also had a bleeding ulcer. After ten days or so, he was about to be discharged when he developed painful gout in his foot, a result of being so run down.
It was when he returned for an endoscopy to check on his ulcer a few weeks later, that he got the first hint something could be seriously wrong. His consultant Dr Donal Maguire said they weren’t happy, the ulcer hadn’t healed and that there appeared to be something else.
The results of a biopsy confirmed that Dermot had a tumour in his stomach. The good news, said Mr Maguire, was that although it was very serious, it was very treatable. It was a fast-growing cancer, but the upside to that was that it would respond quickly to chemotherapy.
He was immediately referred to Prof Crown, a world-recognised expert in lymphoma. Dermot’s mental state, however, took a little time to catch up with the fast pace of events.
“You immediately start wondering: How long have I? How many months? You hear of people going in three weeks. We’ve all heard these stories. It was very emotional and I thought, Hold on a minute, you have the strength and the maturity to pull you through this. You’ve got to put on a brave face.”
Telling his parents, now in their 70s, was an awful moment. “Very very difficult to do that,” he says, “because I hadn’t come to terms with it and I knew how desperately shocked and upset they were.” Dermot’s aunt Ann Hall died last year of cancer at a relatively young age. “It brings it all back for the family. It resurrects the memory of what another loved one went through,” he adds.
Yet he has found strength in his lost aunt. He remembers saying goodbye to her and how she told him that she would always be with him.
He tries to think of it all as part of the cycle of life. The night before he was admitted to St Vincent’s Private Hospital to start treatment, he opened the harvest festival to mark 150 years of Killiney’s Anglican church. “I went early so I could be alone there. And I walked into that church and it was full of flowers… The love the care the effort that went into every arrangement.
“It was very appropriate, here I was coming to terms with something that might take my life and I’m in the middle of a space where people had been married, christened, buried. It was very grounding.”
Those positive thoughts have been reinforced by his “amazing” friends and parents, his sisters Carol and Louise. He’s had so many letters and cards that the overflow has gone to his parents’ house. Carol – who narrowly escaped death herself in 2001 when she fled her workplace, the burning Twin Towers, on 9/11 – came home from America to visit him last weekend. Dermot was allowed out wearing a mask to ward off infection because his immune system is at an all-time low.
Even though he feels he has what he needs to fight the good fight – support, love, great medical care – there are anxieties that can’t be brushed under the carpet. “I hadn’t cried at all until I was admitted into hospital two weeks ago,” he says. “But then it happened.”
He had an appointment to meet Prof Crown at St Vincent’s Private Hospital on the Friday. When he arrived, he was immediately admitted. As they weren’t starting any treatment on him that day, he was allowed to go out – “as long as I came back!” So he went with a group of close friends for a meal. On the surface, he was trying to enjoy the evening but underneath he was deeply upset.
When one of his friends brought him back to St Vincent’s in a taxi, Dermot just “exploded into tears”. He says: “I looked at the building and I thought: I might never come out of here.
“That was the little breaking point. I had left my friends and I was now starting this new journey… It just overwhelmed me.”
It still does. As we have been talking, dusk has fallen outside the hospital window and we are sitting in shadow. In the half-light, he covers his face briefly and sheds a few tears. It’s only a few short weeks since his diagnosis. He has six months of three types of chemo ahead of him. Crying is a healthy response I think.
“They said it’s good to cry,” he says, “men don’t cry enough. So every now and then I have a little cry. I’ve had a cry now and I look at it as: It’s good for me, it’s another little release.”
Dermot believes that not recognising what your body needs is a major root of any illness. “I’m convinced that stress had a big role to play in mine,” he says. “I was working very hard all summer long, enjoying it, but I was working around the clock. I was worried if I didn’t do that extra bit would I lose that contract, would I lose that opportunity, would that not be renewed. It’s like that saying: You’re running faster to stay still.”
He thinks this stress, the insecurity of being self-employed, is compounded by his desire to never again be in the vulnerable financial position he was eight years ago.
It is for this reason he has invited us to visit him in his hospital bed, for this reason that he spoke to Pat Kenny during the week about his cancer.
“I want to ask people: How many of us stop and think, Hold on, what about me? What about my health? What about that day off? I think if I had done more of that, I might not be in the position I am now.”
That, and the hope that even one person who hears his story might get themselves a health check, is what drives him on.
“If I live I can be proud of that, and if I die I did something good.”
Nobody’s going anywhere yet though. Dermot went through some pretty gruelling diagnostic tests, a bone marrow biopsy, lumber punctures, a PET/CT scan that left him with bad migraine. But all of these helped his medical team to tailor his treatment regime to the specifics of his cancer.
“It was giving Prof Crown that extra ammunition that he needed as a soldier to deal with this,” he says. There is much hope, he says, although the key is to take each day at a time and see how the tumour responds to the chemo assault.
Meanwhile, Dermot’s thinking ahead to what he has to look forward to. There is Dermot’s Garden, which will now have the journey of his cancer fight wound into its narrative. RTE has also commissioned a second series of Supergardens and asked Dermot to host it in next summer. He wants to get out there on the campaign trail for Threshold.
He has other ambitions too. “You know you’re responsible for the end of the Late Late Show appearance I made?” he laughs. The last time I interviewed him, over a year ago when he started work on Clondeglass, Dermot told me that he had a secret dream to be an opera singer. The Mooney Show on RTE Radio One read the article and sent him for lessons. He stunned a Late Late Show audience on March 6 this year by singing, unaccompanied, a sweet version of O Sole Mio.
I ask him, what I can fix for you this time round? “A trip to the moon. Will you send me to the moon?” he says, laughing again.
Then he thinks about it, and adds quietly, “Although I should be careful, because what you wish for… I could end up on the moon. The man on the moon.”
Not obsessed at all....
... George Clooney is such a great source of, er, inspiration to us all that it's never a hardship to be rung by your editor and asked: Can you give me 1,800 words on Clooney and eligble bachelors? Can I ever.
From The Irish Independent, October 17
TO ALL THE GIRLS HE’S LOVED BEFORE… Could George Clooney really have fallen off the shelf?
By SUSAN DALY
IN a great piece of ironic timing, George Clooney is promoting a film that casts him as a rootless wanderer who finally meets a woman he wants to be with. And while he has been trying not to let journalists read too much into his love ’em and leave ’em role in Up In The Air, the internet is abuzz with suggestions that George has finally hitched his wagon to a woman in real life.
Italian TV presenter and sometime actress Elisabetta Canalis launched a thousand gossip blogs when she began sporting a Cartier diamond ring this past week.
Elisabetta – or ‘La Canalis’ as she is known to her Italian fans – has been dating Clooney since July. They met through a mutual friend in Rome, were seen dining out in Milan at the end of July, snapped larking about on a boat in August, and posed together at the Venice Film Festival in September.
La Canalis is now reported to have moved into Castello Clooney on Lake Como. He is staying in Italy to start filming The American, directed by former U2 photographer Anton Corbijn. Cindy Crawford and her husband and Matt Damon and his wife have holidayed with the couple. Damon says his pal’s new squeeze is a “really, really wonderful woman”. So far, so swimmingly.
However, a “friend” insists that smitten George has been showering his new Italian girlfriend with presents and the Cartier ring is just one of them. “It is a sign they are getting serious”, but it’s not an engagement ring, the “friend” told In Touch magazine.
A celebrity’s love life is always a magnet for tittle-tattle, but when there is a hint that The World’s Most Eligible Bachelor might be about to abandon ship, it’s front page news. To this point, George Clooney’s longest-lasting relationship has been with a pot-bellied pig called Max. His 18-year devotion to the animal certainly outlived his 18-month relationship to Kelly Preston who left him Max when she and Clooney split in 1988.
He had the obligatory starter marriage to Mad Men actress Talia Balsam the following year but they divorced in 1993. “I was 28, and in Kentucky when you get to be that age, you're supposed to get married,” he explained several years later. Clooney has vowed he will never marry again which of course has the paradoxical effect of making every woman fantasise about being the one to ‘turn him’.
Kimberly Russell, an ex of Eddie Murphy, was quite open about the reason she and Clooney split around 1996. “We’d been together for over three years and I wanted a family,” she said. Clooney didn’t – at least not then.
There is, of course, something sexist in the implication that every woman who Clooney has dated wanted nothing more to be married to him. Who is to say some of the ladies weren’t the ones dragging their heels at the sight of the aisle? The idea of being married to a talented, handsome, witty, intelligent, wealthy, politically-aware man may not appeal to everyone, you know.
Looked at closely, Clooney’s romantic track record is indicative more of a serial monogamist than of a serial womaniser. He’s not afraid to make room for an extra toothbrush: it just never seems to get as far as adding ‘Mrs Clooney’ to the mailbox.
His next relationship was another three-year stint, with French law student Celine Balitran moving to the States to live with him until 1999. They met when Clooney was 35 and shooting The Peacemaker in Paris with Nicole Kidman.
(Incidentally, Kidman had a $10,000 bet with Michelle Pfeiffer that her co-star would be married by the age of 40. We hope Pfeiffer spent her winnings wisely.)
There was a moment when it almost seemed possible that Clooney might renege on his non-wedding vow. His reasonably long on-off relationship with British model Lisa Snowdon ended in the early Noughties with not a bad word ever uttered between them since. This is fairly typical of Clooney’s endings, whether happy or not – it is hard to find an ex who will gripe about him. He had a little fling with Renee Zellwegger around this time, but she evidently had no problem acting opposite him in
Leatherheads last year.
The Snowdon affair may well have been the relationship that cemented Clooney’s eligible bachelor status. Snowdon was beautiful, but not overpoweringly so. She was a bit girl-next-door. Good Lord, we could be in with a chance after all! Not only was he eligible, but we might be too.
After that, Clooney’s tastes appeared to veer a little onto the wild side. His next affair was with Krista Allen, star of the soft-core Emmanuelle series. He grew close to Allen and her young son Jacob, but again, she disappeared as a ring failed to materialise.
Vegas cocktail waitress Sarah Larson was next in line and he brought her to the Oscars when he was nominated for Michael Clayton in 2007 – a red-carpet moment heralded by the phantom ringing of wedding bells that, again, never tolled for she.
In the year since their break-up, Clooney has been linked with as diverse a range of women as waitress Lucy Wolvert and Indian journalist Fatima Bhutto, niece of assassinated Pakistan president Benazir Bhutto.
To wonder if this will be the year that Elisabetta boldly goes where only one woman has gone before is a matter of speculation. George Clooney’s publicist never – repeat, NEVER – comments on his personal life.
His own remarks on his new relationship have been typically oblique. Publicising previews of Up In The Air at a film festival at the start of last month, Clooney was cheeky when asked who was the current o-pilot in his life. “Well, I’ve been flying Alitalia,” he said. “She’s… I have a nice co-pilot.”
The fact that the role as Ryan Bingham, an emotionally-detached man who is addicted to collecting frequent-flyer miles, was written specifically for him by the film-maker Jason Reitman (Juno) may have given Clooney pause for thought.
Who wants to have these words – spoken by Ryan in the film – put in his mouth? “Some animals were made to carry each other to live symbiotically over a lifetime… star-crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We are not swans. We’re sharks.”
Clooney commented: “The minute I read the script, I understood why I was probably the right person for this job. Part of it requires talking about things that are tricky to talk about for almost everybody but sometimes for me, in particular.
“Things that are cute when you’re 26 aren’t always cute when you’re 48. I’m well aware of that.” It would be interesting to see if the date on that Cartier receipt came before or after that press conference.
POST-CLOONEY: WHO IS IN LINE FOR CROWN ON HOLLYWOOD’S MOST ELIGIBLE BACHELOR?
With George Clooney teetering on the edge of the single shelf, Hollywood must be casting desperately around for its next most eligible bachelor. But what makes one? This 1937 article from Movie Mirror celebrity magazine seemed sure of the criteria: “Hollywood bachelors, collectively, don't think in terms of matrimony. Not if they are twenty-three, tall, dark, handsome, with Irish wit, and are building up annuities.”
The article referred to a fledgling star called Tyrone Power who went on to marry three times and, post-death, attracted rumours that he may have been more of a ‘confirmed bachelor’ than an eligible one in his youth.
So don’t blame us if this lot of would-be Clooneys are off the market by next year, ladies. A Hollywood bachelor is a fickle creature…
BENICIO DEL TORO: Film nerds had been in love with Del Toro, 42, for years until his mysterious gangster in The Usual Suspects turned the world onto him. He’s an Oscar winner, a manly dude who doesn’t mind gaining weight (Traffic) or burning himself with cigarettes (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) for a role. He’s got his sensitive side (he’s an artist), the requisite string of gorgeous exes (Chiara Mastrioanni, Claire Forlani and other assorted actresses). He’s good pals with Johnny Depp and his name means ‘Of the Bull’ for goodness sake. George who?
LEONARDO DiCAPRIO: He’s lost some of those boyish good looks of Titanic days but 34-year-old di Caprio always manages to hook the hotties (his last two long-term girlfriends were models Gisele and Bar Rafaeli). Like Mr Clooney, DiCaprio has shown himself a man of substance by consistently campaigning on environmental issues. Now a bona fide star and multi-millionaire and currently single, fans would do well to heed the title of one of his more recent films, Catch Me If You Can.
CHACE CRAWFORD: Yes, yes, he’s only 24, but as our lady from Movie Mirror said in 1937: “Bachelorhood, we know, is a fledgling state in which the male flaunts his brightest feathers”. Mr Crawford has certainly been shaking his plumage of late, breaking out from his TV empire of Gossip Girl (he’s the teen’s Dr Doug Ross) into film and winning People magazine’s Summer’s Hottest Bachelor award. He plays the Kevin Bacon role in the remake of Footloose next year. Scream!!
ROBERT PATTISON: Another young un’ at 23 but one who is shaping up to have a wider appeal than squeaky clean Zac Efron. Pattison’s vampire lead in the Twilight movies
have invested his sex appeal with an edge and his dark brooding looks have attracted comparisons with Marlon Brando. He said this year that he “almost doesn't want to have a girlfriend in this environment”. Nothing makes a bachelor more eligible than his reluctance to settle down.
GERARD BUTLER: The Europeans get a look in with Scotsman Butler, 39, who filled out his armour rather well in the Spartan epic 300 and is soon to be seen opposite Jennifer Aniston in The Bounty. He has the looks, the charm and the increasing star power. We will, however, have to caution against the chauvinist he played in recent movie The Ugly Truth and his woeful Irish accent in PS I Love You. Three strikes and you’re out, Gerry.
RYAN GOSLING: Gosling at 28 is already a more interesting character than many of the prettier boys of Hollywood, with his homemade tattoos and offbeat charm in The Notebook and Lars and The Real Girl. He has dated actress Rachel MacAdams on and off but as of last year, they appear to be just good friends. Good bachelors stay friends with their exes.
JACK NICHOLSON: Not that we would recommend the 72-year-old as the ideal marriage prospect, but it must be acknowledged that he is as close to a veteran eligible bachelor as Hollywood has these days. He married, once, in the 1960s and has several children but has never settled down. He prefers to say coyly that he has “never minded being a fool for love”, all the while lounging on a speedboat in the south of France amid a bevy of bikinied lovelies.
From The Irish Independent, October 17
TO ALL THE GIRLS HE’S LOVED BEFORE… Could George Clooney really have fallen off the shelf?
By SUSAN DALY
IN a great piece of ironic timing, George Clooney is promoting a film that casts him as a rootless wanderer who finally meets a woman he wants to be with. And while he has been trying not to let journalists read too much into his love ’em and leave ’em role in Up In The Air, the internet is abuzz with suggestions that George has finally hitched his wagon to a woman in real life.
Italian TV presenter and sometime actress Elisabetta Canalis launched a thousand gossip blogs when she began sporting a Cartier diamond ring this past week.
Elisabetta – or ‘La Canalis’ as she is known to her Italian fans – has been dating Clooney since July. They met through a mutual friend in Rome, were seen dining out in Milan at the end of July, snapped larking about on a boat in August, and posed together at the Venice Film Festival in September.
La Canalis is now reported to have moved into Castello Clooney on Lake Como. He is staying in Italy to start filming The American, directed by former U2 photographer Anton Corbijn. Cindy Crawford and her husband and Matt Damon and his wife have holidayed with the couple. Damon says his pal’s new squeeze is a “really, really wonderful woman”. So far, so swimmingly.
However, a “friend” insists that smitten George has been showering his new Italian girlfriend with presents and the Cartier ring is just one of them. “It is a sign they are getting serious”, but it’s not an engagement ring, the “friend” told In Touch magazine.
A celebrity’s love life is always a magnet for tittle-tattle, but when there is a hint that The World’s Most Eligible Bachelor might be about to abandon ship, it’s front page news. To this point, George Clooney’s longest-lasting relationship has been with a pot-bellied pig called Max. His 18-year devotion to the animal certainly outlived his 18-month relationship to Kelly Preston who left him Max when she and Clooney split in 1988.
He had the obligatory starter marriage to Mad Men actress Talia Balsam the following year but they divorced in 1993. “I was 28, and in Kentucky when you get to be that age, you're supposed to get married,” he explained several years later. Clooney has vowed he will never marry again which of course has the paradoxical effect of making every woman fantasise about being the one to ‘turn him’.
Kimberly Russell, an ex of Eddie Murphy, was quite open about the reason she and Clooney split around 1996. “We’d been together for over three years and I wanted a family,” she said. Clooney didn’t – at least not then.
There is, of course, something sexist in the implication that every woman who Clooney has dated wanted nothing more to be married to him. Who is to say some of the ladies weren’t the ones dragging their heels at the sight of the aisle? The idea of being married to a talented, handsome, witty, intelligent, wealthy, politically-aware man may not appeal to everyone, you know.
Looked at closely, Clooney’s romantic track record is indicative more of a serial monogamist than of a serial womaniser. He’s not afraid to make room for an extra toothbrush: it just never seems to get as far as adding ‘Mrs Clooney’ to the mailbox.
His next relationship was another three-year stint, with French law student Celine Balitran moving to the States to live with him until 1999. They met when Clooney was 35 and shooting The Peacemaker in Paris with Nicole Kidman.
(Incidentally, Kidman had a $10,000 bet with Michelle Pfeiffer that her co-star would be married by the age of 40. We hope Pfeiffer spent her winnings wisely.)
There was a moment when it almost seemed possible that Clooney might renege on his non-wedding vow. His reasonably long on-off relationship with British model Lisa Snowdon ended in the early Noughties with not a bad word ever uttered between them since. This is fairly typical of Clooney’s endings, whether happy or not – it is hard to find an ex who will gripe about him. He had a little fling with Renee Zellwegger around this time, but she evidently had no problem acting opposite him in
Leatherheads last year.
The Snowdon affair may well have been the relationship that cemented Clooney’s eligible bachelor status. Snowdon was beautiful, but not overpoweringly so. She was a bit girl-next-door. Good Lord, we could be in with a chance after all! Not only was he eligible, but we might be too.
After that, Clooney’s tastes appeared to veer a little onto the wild side. His next affair was with Krista Allen, star of the soft-core Emmanuelle series. He grew close to Allen and her young son Jacob, but again, she disappeared as a ring failed to materialise.
Vegas cocktail waitress Sarah Larson was next in line and he brought her to the Oscars when he was nominated for Michael Clayton in 2007 – a red-carpet moment heralded by the phantom ringing of wedding bells that, again, never tolled for she.
In the year since their break-up, Clooney has been linked with as diverse a range of women as waitress Lucy Wolvert and Indian journalist Fatima Bhutto, niece of assassinated Pakistan president Benazir Bhutto.
To wonder if this will be the year that Elisabetta boldly goes where only one woman has gone before is a matter of speculation. George Clooney’s publicist never – repeat, NEVER – comments on his personal life.
His own remarks on his new relationship have been typically oblique. Publicising previews of Up In The Air at a film festival at the start of last month, Clooney was cheeky when asked who was the current o-pilot in his life. “Well, I’ve been flying Alitalia,” he said. “She’s… I have a nice co-pilot.”
The fact that the role as Ryan Bingham, an emotionally-detached man who is addicted to collecting frequent-flyer miles, was written specifically for him by the film-maker Jason Reitman (Juno) may have given Clooney pause for thought.
Who wants to have these words – spoken by Ryan in the film – put in his mouth? “Some animals were made to carry each other to live symbiotically over a lifetime… star-crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We are not swans. We’re sharks.”
Clooney commented: “The minute I read the script, I understood why I was probably the right person for this job. Part of it requires talking about things that are tricky to talk about for almost everybody but sometimes for me, in particular.
“Things that are cute when you’re 26 aren’t always cute when you’re 48. I’m well aware of that.” It would be interesting to see if the date on that Cartier receipt came before or after that press conference.
POST-CLOONEY: WHO IS IN LINE FOR CROWN ON HOLLYWOOD’S MOST ELIGIBLE BACHELOR?
With George Clooney teetering on the edge of the single shelf, Hollywood must be casting desperately around for its next most eligible bachelor. But what makes one? This 1937 article from Movie Mirror celebrity magazine seemed sure of the criteria: “Hollywood bachelors, collectively, don't think in terms of matrimony. Not if they are twenty-three, tall, dark, handsome, with Irish wit, and are building up annuities.”
The article referred to a fledgling star called Tyrone Power who went on to marry three times and, post-death, attracted rumours that he may have been more of a ‘confirmed bachelor’ than an eligible one in his youth.
So don’t blame us if this lot of would-be Clooneys are off the market by next year, ladies. A Hollywood bachelor is a fickle creature…
BENICIO DEL TORO: Film nerds had been in love with Del Toro, 42, for years until his mysterious gangster in The Usual Suspects turned the world onto him. He’s an Oscar winner, a manly dude who doesn’t mind gaining weight (Traffic) or burning himself with cigarettes (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) for a role. He’s got his sensitive side (he’s an artist), the requisite string of gorgeous exes (Chiara Mastrioanni, Claire Forlani and other assorted actresses). He’s good pals with Johnny Depp and his name means ‘Of the Bull’ for goodness sake. George who?
LEONARDO DiCAPRIO: He’s lost some of those boyish good looks of Titanic days but 34-year-old di Caprio always manages to hook the hotties (his last two long-term girlfriends were models Gisele and Bar Rafaeli). Like Mr Clooney, DiCaprio has shown himself a man of substance by consistently campaigning on environmental issues. Now a bona fide star and multi-millionaire and currently single, fans would do well to heed the title of one of his more recent films, Catch Me If You Can.
CHACE CRAWFORD: Yes, yes, he’s only 24, but as our lady from Movie Mirror said in 1937: “Bachelorhood, we know, is a fledgling state in which the male flaunts his brightest feathers”. Mr Crawford has certainly been shaking his plumage of late, breaking out from his TV empire of Gossip Girl (he’s the teen’s Dr Doug Ross) into film and winning People magazine’s Summer’s Hottest Bachelor award. He plays the Kevin Bacon role in the remake of Footloose next year. Scream!!
ROBERT PATTISON: Another young un’ at 23 but one who is shaping up to have a wider appeal than squeaky clean Zac Efron. Pattison’s vampire lead in the Twilight movies
have invested his sex appeal with an edge and his dark brooding looks have attracted comparisons with Marlon Brando. He said this year that he “almost doesn't want to have a girlfriend in this environment”. Nothing makes a bachelor more eligible than his reluctance to settle down.
GERARD BUTLER: The Europeans get a look in with Scotsman Butler, 39, who filled out his armour rather well in the Spartan epic 300 and is soon to be seen opposite Jennifer Aniston in The Bounty. He has the looks, the charm and the increasing star power. We will, however, have to caution against the chauvinist he played in recent movie The Ugly Truth and his woeful Irish accent in PS I Love You. Three strikes and you’re out, Gerry.
RYAN GOSLING: Gosling at 28 is already a more interesting character than many of the prettier boys of Hollywood, with his homemade tattoos and offbeat charm in The Notebook and Lars and The Real Girl. He has dated actress Rachel MacAdams on and off but as of last year, they appear to be just good friends. Good bachelors stay friends with their exes.
JACK NICHOLSON: Not that we would recommend the 72-year-old as the ideal marriage prospect, but it must be acknowledged that he is as close to a veteran eligible bachelor as Hollywood has these days. He married, once, in the 1960s and has several children but has never settled down. He prefers to say coyly that he has “never minded being a fool for love”, all the while lounging on a speedboat in the south of France amid a bevy of bikinied lovelies.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Where it's always Arthur's Day
All Back To The Local - as printed in Day and Night magazine last Friday...
SOMETIMES you know something has happened before you see it. There’s a thump, a stifled giggle and a frisson of energy from a corner of the pub.
This forewarning never fully prepares you for the sight of a fully-grown man upside down with his head trapped between the wood panelling of the bar and the copper foot rail running around the bottom.
The soles of his shoes pedalling furiously in mid-air. His face turning purple with impotent fury and the rush of blood to the head. His friends alternating between collapsing in hysterics and trying to extricate him.
The barman intervenes with a weary ‘Fer Chrissakes, lads, take him home’. The rest of us turn back to our drinks. Just another Saturday afternoon in the local.
Only a certain class of pub can breed those little moments of weirdness. It needs staff who are intimate with the eccentricities of their regulars, and regulars who appreciate that sometimes a man will end up on his head because he’s too tired and emotional to stand on his feet. We’ve all been there. (Haven’t we?)
The upside-down man was one of a group of early-shift workers whose day finished at noon. They were always to be found at one end of my old local on a Saturday, easing their transition from work to the weekend with a few pints. He was the new guy and had yet to perfect the art of daytime drinking.
He was back the following week, pacing himself a little more carefully and looking sheepish. The barman never said a word, just laid his pint on the counter.
That’s the kind of unspoken tolerance that cultivates loyalty. At the risk of sounding like Dara O’Briain in those Vintners’ Federation ads, there’s nowhere like your local.
I wonder if many of us will start rediscovering ours now that the era of the superpub appears to be over. The financial death grip of the past year has closed several of them. Others remain on life support, looking for help from the courts to stay open.
It has been difficult for small pubs too – I guess more people are staying at home with cheap slabs of beer from Lidl. But if it came to the crunch and we were all required to go to the pub at least once a week (come on Guinness, surely a better marketing wheeze than Martha’s Day) I know which till I would rather put my money in.
If it doesn’t sound too pathetic to say out loud, I felt bereft when I moved to a different part of the city some years back and had to leave behind my old home-from-home, Slatterys of Rathmines. It was the place to call into on the way in or out of town on a weekend afternoon.
There would always be one or two of a bunch of Cork lads at the table by the side door ready to pass on a racing tip or the bits of the newspapers they didn’t want (everything but the sports section). Table service came later, but in my time the three laconic barmen could interpret an order from a raised eyebrow.
Maybe it’s an expat culchie thing but the sense of community is seductive. To know that when the elderly blind man comes in to the front bar for his nightly tipple, whoever is sitting in his habitual seat will stand up without being asked.
To know that conversation is king and the telly only comes on for big matches. To know that only a privileged few on the high stools get control of the remote.
Locals have snugs and diamond-patterned banquettes. The floor will have a bit of an ancient slope on it and a quartered beermat will be needed to steady the legs of the table.
Toasted sandwiches may well be served, but they must be inserted in magic plastic wrappers and rotated through the kind of giant open toasters that Buck Rogers thought would be the future of cooking.
I know I’m not the only ‘old man pub’ enthusiast. My Donegal friend spent so much of his spare time in The Stag’s Head that he ended up working there for a while. Another one is practically bolted to a chair outside Grogan’s every Thursday night.
Babies and spouses who insist that King crisps are not a fully-rounded diet eventually play havoc with the devotion required to make your pub a local. But until then, may I recommend a little place on Haddington Road…
- By SUSAN DALY
SOMETIMES you know something has happened before you see it. There’s a thump, a stifled giggle and a frisson of energy from a corner of the pub.
This forewarning never fully prepares you for the sight of a fully-grown man upside down with his head trapped between the wood panelling of the bar and the copper foot rail running around the bottom.
The soles of his shoes pedalling furiously in mid-air. His face turning purple with impotent fury and the rush of blood to the head. His friends alternating between collapsing in hysterics and trying to extricate him.
The barman intervenes with a weary ‘Fer Chrissakes, lads, take him home’. The rest of us turn back to our drinks. Just another Saturday afternoon in the local.
Only a certain class of pub can breed those little moments of weirdness. It needs staff who are intimate with the eccentricities of their regulars, and regulars who appreciate that sometimes a man will end up on his head because he’s too tired and emotional to stand on his feet. We’ve all been there. (Haven’t we?)
The upside-down man was one of a group of early-shift workers whose day finished at noon. They were always to be found at one end of my old local on a Saturday, easing their transition from work to the weekend with a few pints. He was the new guy and had yet to perfect the art of daytime drinking.
He was back the following week, pacing himself a little more carefully and looking sheepish. The barman never said a word, just laid his pint on the counter.
That’s the kind of unspoken tolerance that cultivates loyalty. At the risk of sounding like Dara O’Briain in those Vintners’ Federation ads, there’s nowhere like your local.
I wonder if many of us will start rediscovering ours now that the era of the superpub appears to be over. The financial death grip of the past year has closed several of them. Others remain on life support, looking for help from the courts to stay open.
It has been difficult for small pubs too – I guess more people are staying at home with cheap slabs of beer from Lidl. But if it came to the crunch and we were all required to go to the pub at least once a week (come on Guinness, surely a better marketing wheeze than Martha’s Day) I know which till I would rather put my money in.
If it doesn’t sound too pathetic to say out loud, I felt bereft when I moved to a different part of the city some years back and had to leave behind my old home-from-home, Slatterys of Rathmines. It was the place to call into on the way in or out of town on a weekend afternoon.
There would always be one or two of a bunch of Cork lads at the table by the side door ready to pass on a racing tip or the bits of the newspapers they didn’t want (everything but the sports section). Table service came later, but in my time the three laconic barmen could interpret an order from a raised eyebrow.
Maybe it’s an expat culchie thing but the sense of community is seductive. To know that when the elderly blind man comes in to the front bar for his nightly tipple, whoever is sitting in his habitual seat will stand up without being asked.
To know that conversation is king and the telly only comes on for big matches. To know that only a privileged few on the high stools get control of the remote.
Locals have snugs and diamond-patterned banquettes. The floor will have a bit of an ancient slope on it and a quartered beermat will be needed to steady the legs of the table.
Toasted sandwiches may well be served, but they must be inserted in magic plastic wrappers and rotated through the kind of giant open toasters that Buck Rogers thought would be the future of cooking.
I know I’m not the only ‘old man pub’ enthusiast. My Donegal friend spent so much of his spare time in The Stag’s Head that he ended up working there for a while. Another one is practically bolted to a chair outside Grogan’s every Thursday night.
Babies and spouses who insist that King crisps are not a fully-rounded diet eventually play havoc with the devotion required to make your pub a local. But until then, may I recommend a little place on Haddington Road…
- By SUSAN DALY
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
I Forgot My 'Eckker... sorry, Eckhart
My interview with a slightly odd but loveable Aaron Eckhart from last Friday's Day and Night magazine...
http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/day-and-night/features/whos-that-guy-1909047.html
Who's that guy?
Friday October 09 2009
Aaron Eckhart is a pretty tough actor to pigeonhole. He's been a charming romantic foil for Julia Roberts, Gwyneth Paltrow and Catherine Zeta Jones, but he has also saved the earth from apocalypse, played a paedophile, a detective, a state attorney, a football coach and a Marine, an academic and a car dealer.
When I ask him how he pronounces his first name, he says amiably: "I don't mind. Call me anything you like. You're Irish. You'd say Aran, right?" So, Aran, like the jumper, it is for the rest of the interview, but it doesn't answer my question.
Eckhart, 41, prefers to keep it that way. He has based his career on being the director's flexible friend and cannot figure out why people keep proclaiming him as the next big romantic star when his roles have been so diverse to this point. "After every movie, from the Company of Men to Erin Brockovich, I've heard that I'm one of those leading men, that I have the physical aspect of it, but everything is a role. Leading man is also something to be acted," he says.
The movie he is promoting right now, the horribly named Love Happens, will do nothing to dispel the persistent rumour that he is leading-man material. His lantern-jawed good looks, piercing blue eyes and a masculine chin cleft to rival the Douglas clan, beg for a close-up. His co-star is Jennifer Aniston in full cutesy mode; Eckhart is the grieving widower who wins her heart.
Eckhart politely points out that he has moved on already from that shoot. "I have already made three movies since this one. I have a part in a movie based on a Hunter S Thompson book with Johnny Depp, I've done Rabbit Hole and I'm the leader of a platoon of Marines in an alien movie. I run the gamut from small independent movies to the big ones. I wouldn't be able to do one persona over and over."
When you're as chameleon a performer as Eckhart is, you don't have to act yourself into a box. For all that Heath Ledger's Joker stole the headlines in Dark Knight last year, it was Eckhart's performance that really touched me. His metamorphosis from crusading attorney Harvey Dent into the villainous Two Face was just stunning. Even at Two Face's most grotesque moments, Eckhart managed to dredge up some whisper of humanity.
"People are too quick to say that Two Face is a bad guy," he says cheerfully. "You see what happens to him. He's dealing with an incredible amount of loss and anger and bitterness. To me, the most interesting part of acting can be to humanise the bad guy."
Perhaps there is a common thread running through Eckhart's roles after all. His tobacco lobbyist Nick Naylor in Thank You for Smoking three years ago delighted in conflicting the audience. The guy was the last word in amorality, but with Eckhart's handsome smile stretching across his face he seemed almost likeable. You could almost trust him.
"It's my job to put the audience in that position," says Eckhart. "No one wants to see a one-dimensional bad guy. I mean, is Hamlet a bad guy? And what about Macbeth? The guy who you feel sympathy for at the start of the play turns out to be the worst guy in the world."
There may be more to Eckhart's fluid career than his ability to empathise with any character. He's not very interested in inflicting his personality on the roles. In that sense, he's more of an actor's actor than a star, although he does note that he doesn't "shun success".
Take his thoughts on how he got into the mindspace of his character Burke Ryan in Love Happens. Ryan has written a self-help manual for the bereaved, although he is slow to take his own advice.
Eckhart comes across as a no-nonsense guy. Did he have to read a lot of advice books to be able to spout the inane catchphrases that are Ryan's stock-in-trade? "It's lucky that I'm a complete loser and a train wreck as a person," he says unexpectedly. "I have a lot of self-help books on my shelves."
I can't tell over the phone -- Eckhart is on the line from his publicist's office in LA -- if he's smirking or not. But he is sincere about his unease with the growing spotlight on him.
"You are on your way to a premiere, hyperventilating in the car. Most of the time you're terrified -- you have no idea what you are going to say. Then you get there, that door opens and you're hit with fans and flashbulbs and you feed off that energy."
He brought that experience to a potent scene in Love Happens. Burke, self-medicating with vodka and denial, is gripped by panic as he waits outside a conference room to address fans of his self-help book. But when his name is called, he bursts through the double doors, high-fiving the aisle seats as he strides purposefully to the stage.
"A great thing that director did was he stacked that room with lots of actors and extras that I could riff off. But to want that all the time, it's disingenuous or self-servicing or vanity and I'm not into that."
Californian-born Eckhart was brought up in the Mormon faith, although he has said that he doesn't necessarily adhere to the conservative tenets of the religion. Still there is a modesty about him that feels deep-seated. The American premiere for Love Happens was the night before we speak. I'm impressed that he's so sparky at eight o'clock in the morning. "I went home early," he says.
But there is only so much attention that Eckhart can resist as his profile builds and builds. It has been a growing sport in the gossip sheets to link him with his female co-stars, most recently with Jennifer Aniston.
"I've come to accept that it happens," he says. "But I'm in a good place with my family and friends because I sat them down a long time ago and they know what's going on. So it's not confusing to them when I am linked to Jennifer Aniston or Nicole Kidman, because they don't take any notice. Neither does the girl I go out with."
There is a chance that Aaron Eckhart could be the next Brad Pitt. But whether or not he wants to be is highly debatable.
PANEL: From Batman villain to Julia Roberts’s love interest, the sheer diversity of Aaron Eckhart’s roles so far means he is not always recognised on the street. “I’m a photographer and when I was in London I walked the city. I just walked and walked and no-one noticed,” he says. Here are some of those chameleon roles…
In The Company of Men (1997): Playing vile misogynist Chad allows Eckhart to try out the bad bastard role for size.
Erin Brockovich (2000): A thoroughly likeable Eckhart comes up for air as Julia Roberts’s long-haired biker lover George.
Possession (2002): His raffish academic manages to melt Gwyneth Paltrow’s epic reserve.
The Core (2003): Science fiction yarn in which Eckhart saves the Earth. Every actor should have one on their CV.
Suspect Zero (2004): Although the movie was panned, Eckhart manages to deliver a rare portrayal of an FBI agent with complexity.
Thank You For Smoking (2006): The bad guy never looked so good as Nick Naylor, the amoral tobacco industry lobbyist with the vulpine grin.
No Reservations (2007): Catherine Zeta Jones gets a taste of his charming chef, and a career as a romantic lead is Eckhart’s for the taking.
The Dark Knight (2008): Forget Christian Bale’s Batman, the film’s conflicted anti-hero award goes to Eckhart for the humanity he invests in Harvey Dent/Two Face.
http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/day-and-night/features/whos-that-guy-1909047.html
Who's that guy?
Friday October 09 2009
Aaron Eckhart is a pretty tough actor to pigeonhole. He's been a charming romantic foil for Julia Roberts, Gwyneth Paltrow and Catherine Zeta Jones, but he has also saved the earth from apocalypse, played a paedophile, a detective, a state attorney, a football coach and a Marine, an academic and a car dealer.
When I ask him how he pronounces his first name, he says amiably: "I don't mind. Call me anything you like. You're Irish. You'd say Aran, right?" So, Aran, like the jumper, it is for the rest of the interview, but it doesn't answer my question.
Eckhart, 41, prefers to keep it that way. He has based his career on being the director's flexible friend and cannot figure out why people keep proclaiming him as the next big romantic star when his roles have been so diverse to this point. "After every movie, from the Company of Men to Erin Brockovich, I've heard that I'm one of those leading men, that I have the physical aspect of it, but everything is a role. Leading man is also something to be acted," he says.
The movie he is promoting right now, the horribly named Love Happens, will do nothing to dispel the persistent rumour that he is leading-man material. His lantern-jawed good looks, piercing blue eyes and a masculine chin cleft to rival the Douglas clan, beg for a close-up. His co-star is Jennifer Aniston in full cutesy mode; Eckhart is the grieving widower who wins her heart.
Eckhart politely points out that he has moved on already from that shoot. "I have already made three movies since this one. I have a part in a movie based on a Hunter S Thompson book with Johnny Depp, I've done Rabbit Hole and I'm the leader of a platoon of Marines in an alien movie. I run the gamut from small independent movies to the big ones. I wouldn't be able to do one persona over and over."
When you're as chameleon a performer as Eckhart is, you don't have to act yourself into a box. For all that Heath Ledger's Joker stole the headlines in Dark Knight last year, it was Eckhart's performance that really touched me. His metamorphosis from crusading attorney Harvey Dent into the villainous Two Face was just stunning. Even at Two Face's most grotesque moments, Eckhart managed to dredge up some whisper of humanity.
"People are too quick to say that Two Face is a bad guy," he says cheerfully. "You see what happens to him. He's dealing with an incredible amount of loss and anger and bitterness. To me, the most interesting part of acting can be to humanise the bad guy."
Perhaps there is a common thread running through Eckhart's roles after all. His tobacco lobbyist Nick Naylor in Thank You for Smoking three years ago delighted in conflicting the audience. The guy was the last word in amorality, but with Eckhart's handsome smile stretching across his face he seemed almost likeable. You could almost trust him.
"It's my job to put the audience in that position," says Eckhart. "No one wants to see a one-dimensional bad guy. I mean, is Hamlet a bad guy? And what about Macbeth? The guy who you feel sympathy for at the start of the play turns out to be the worst guy in the world."
There may be more to Eckhart's fluid career than his ability to empathise with any character. He's not very interested in inflicting his personality on the roles. In that sense, he's more of an actor's actor than a star, although he does note that he doesn't "shun success".
Take his thoughts on how he got into the mindspace of his character Burke Ryan in Love Happens. Ryan has written a self-help manual for the bereaved, although he is slow to take his own advice.
Eckhart comes across as a no-nonsense guy. Did he have to read a lot of advice books to be able to spout the inane catchphrases that are Ryan's stock-in-trade? "It's lucky that I'm a complete loser and a train wreck as a person," he says unexpectedly. "I have a lot of self-help books on my shelves."
I can't tell over the phone -- Eckhart is on the line from his publicist's office in LA -- if he's smirking or not. But he is sincere about his unease with the growing spotlight on him.
"You are on your way to a premiere, hyperventilating in the car. Most of the time you're terrified -- you have no idea what you are going to say. Then you get there, that door opens and you're hit with fans and flashbulbs and you feed off that energy."
He brought that experience to a potent scene in Love Happens. Burke, self-medicating with vodka and denial, is gripped by panic as he waits outside a conference room to address fans of his self-help book. But when his name is called, he bursts through the double doors, high-fiving the aisle seats as he strides purposefully to the stage.
"A great thing that director did was he stacked that room with lots of actors and extras that I could riff off. But to want that all the time, it's disingenuous or self-servicing or vanity and I'm not into that."
Californian-born Eckhart was brought up in the Mormon faith, although he has said that he doesn't necessarily adhere to the conservative tenets of the religion. Still there is a modesty about him that feels deep-seated. The American premiere for Love Happens was the night before we speak. I'm impressed that he's so sparky at eight o'clock in the morning. "I went home early," he says.
But there is only so much attention that Eckhart can resist as his profile builds and builds. It has been a growing sport in the gossip sheets to link him with his female co-stars, most recently with Jennifer Aniston.
"I've come to accept that it happens," he says. "But I'm in a good place with my family and friends because I sat them down a long time ago and they know what's going on. So it's not confusing to them when I am linked to Jennifer Aniston or Nicole Kidman, because they don't take any notice. Neither does the girl I go out with."
There is a chance that Aaron Eckhart could be the next Brad Pitt. But whether or not he wants to be is highly debatable.
PANEL: From Batman villain to Julia Roberts’s love interest, the sheer diversity of Aaron Eckhart’s roles so far means he is not always recognised on the street. “I’m a photographer and when I was in London I walked the city. I just walked and walked and no-one noticed,” he says. Here are some of those chameleon roles…
In The Company of Men (1997): Playing vile misogynist Chad allows Eckhart to try out the bad bastard role for size.
Erin Brockovich (2000): A thoroughly likeable Eckhart comes up for air as Julia Roberts’s long-haired biker lover George.
Possession (2002): His raffish academic manages to melt Gwyneth Paltrow’s epic reserve.
The Core (2003): Science fiction yarn in which Eckhart saves the Earth. Every actor should have one on their CV.
Suspect Zero (2004): Although the movie was panned, Eckhart manages to deliver a rare portrayal of an FBI agent with complexity.
Thank You For Smoking (2006): The bad guy never looked so good as Nick Naylor, the amoral tobacco industry lobbyist with the vulpine grin.
No Reservations (2007): Catherine Zeta Jones gets a taste of his charming chef, and a career as a romantic lead is Eckhart’s for the taking.
The Dark Knight (2008): Forget Christian Bale’s Batman, the film’s conflicted anti-hero award goes to Eckhart for the humanity he invests in Harvey Dent/Two Face.
Make fudge, not war
Now when I say cooking is better than sex, I mean in an EVOLUTIONARY sense. Allegedly.
From today's Indo...
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/why-cooking-is-better-than-sex-1912427.html
Why cooking is better than sex. . .
A new book claims it's what happens in the kitchen -- not the bedroom -- that has made humanity evolve. Susan Daly reports
By Susan Daly
Wednesday October 14 2009
A survey of women last year declared that chocolate was better than sex. A victorious sports captain might describe winning as better than sex. For sleep-deprived new parents, eight hours of kip can be better than ... You get the idea.
Indeed, sex might not be the force that binds men and women together. According to a Harvard anthropologist, the main shaping force of human social behaviour is: cooking.
Richard Wrangham, in his new book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, says that the turning point in our evolution into modern men and women came when we first thought of throwing a bit of meat on the fire.
Archaeology normally dates the birth of cooking back to 200,000 BC when the first evidence of charred bones and hearths appeared. Wrangham, however, goes back 1.9 million years to find what he says is the point at which humans started to perform rudimentary cooking.
It is that moment at which our ancestors' bodies evolved into Homo erectus, with smaller digestive systems, jaws and teeth and bigger brains. The reason for these changes, says Wrangham, is that we had learned to break food down by cooking it, freeing up all that energy previously used chewing and digesting to increase our brain power.
There might be something in this. Nutritionist Aveen Bannon says that a raw-food diet -- although somewhat in vogue these days -- can be a very difficult one in which to balance all your energy and nutritional needs.
"It can be phenomenally high in fibre, and so takes a lot of digestive work," she says. Indeed, chimps spend around six hours a day chewing their raw foodstuffs into submission.
"It takes lots of planning and dedication to make sure that you are getting all the calcium, iron, vitamins and minerals that you need from such a diet."
A famous research project called the Giessen Raw Food Study found that a raw-food diet can't "guarantee an adequate energy supply".
The release of energy from raw food takes a lot longer to permeate the human body than cooked food, says Bannon.
There is no doubting that cooking food freed up time and energy for our ancestors to evolve. More controversial is Wrangham's contention that the first human 'marriages' were about food, not sex. The discovery of cooking, he says, led to relationships between the sexes that were "primitive protection rackets".
Men protected women from animals and other creatures attracted by the light and smell of the cooking fire. Women in return slaved for them over a hot cooking pit.
Is this the real truth behind the old chestnut, 'The way to a man's heart is through his stomach'?
"Over the past decades we have understood that our social system comes through the competition for reproductive partners," Wrangham says. "I'm saying, pair bonds are firstly about food, and that gave a platform to develop those relationships further."
Dr Abdullahai El Tom of the Department of Anthropology in NUI Maynooth, is an expert in the anthropology of food. He agrees that cooking food helped advance society by widening the choice of what was edible.
"But it was not the foundation of society," he insists. "It makes a wonderful story but it should be seen more as an addition, among many other things, to human society as it evolved over time."
As for the assumption that women were immediately chained to the primitive stove, Dr El Tom is not convinced.
"The original cook would not have used tools at all, it would have been very simply cooking by roasting and I don't know how he could prove that women had to do it." In fact, he points out mischievously, "look at the barbecue in summer, you will find men dominating them still."
However, food is still a major part of how we construct our social selves. Dr El Tom believes how we eat is as important to our sense of identity as how we dress. Food is very indicative today of where we are headed.
'Society is becoming more individualistic and our use of food asserts that," says Dr El Tom. "The communal stage, where families mostly sat down to dinner together, is coming to an end. There is a transformation in the way we approach food, even down to the family that sits together but serves three or four different meals at the one table."
Where food used to augment the family relationship, it is now more likely to be a cohesive force among friends (the new family?) or to impress your status by meeting at a particular restaurant.
Yet the romantic dinner survives as a cultural motif. Cooking for someone for the first time can be a very intimate gesture. This might hold an echo back to a time when it really mattered to a husband that he could come home to a meal cooked by his wife.
But be warned, gentlemen, women have evolved to the point where they no longer desire to be the only ape in the kitchen.
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/fifty-ways-to-feed-your-lover-1912426.html
Wednesday October 14 2009
Richard Wrangham contests that cooking, not sex, was the initial binding force between humans. Whatever the truth of why our ancestors paired off, the twin imperatives of food and sex have become culturally intertwined.
Oysters, chocolate and asparagus are a byword for sensual pleasure. This menu, drawn from the chefs at www.eatsomethingsexy.com, suggests a few new ways to your partner's heart ...
STARTER: Spicy garlic shrimp
Why? The ancient Greeks used to feed garlic to Olympians because it was purported to improve stamina. Scientists have recently found that the chemical substance behind the distinctive whiff of garlic, far from being a turn-off, is also present in female sexual secretions.
Ingredients: 400g peeled shrimp; 5 tbsp olive oil; 1/4 tsp red pepper flakes; 3 cloves garlic, crushed; sea salt.
Method: 1. Add the pepper flakes and garlic to the olive oil and leave to infuse for an hour.
2. Heat oil in large skillet on medium-high heat, adding shrimp and cooking 2 mins each side.
3. Season and serve on crusty French bread.
MAIN: Wild mushroom risotto with seared scallops
Why? Often overlooked by romantics in favour of the oyster, scallops are high in phosphorus and iodine. Iodine deficiency has been documented as reducing sex drive. Mushrooms are lauded by several South Pacific cultures for their aphrodisiacal qualities on women.
Ingredients: Two tbsp olive oil; 400g scallops, crescent-shaped muscles discarded; salt and pepper; 1 shallot, minced; 1 garlic clove, minced; 200g assorted mushrooms; 1 tbsp thyme leaves; 1 tbsp chopped parsley; 2 bay leaves; 1 cup arborio rice; half-cup dry white wine; 4 cups chicken stock, heated; 1 tbsp butter; handful grated parmesan cheese.
Method: 1. On medium heat, cook the shallot and garlic in 1tbsp oil in large, deep skillet, stirring for 5 minutes. Add mushrooms and herbs and cook for about 10 minutes. Season.
2. Add the rice and stir 2 minutes to coat with the oil; the grains will turn opaque. Season again. Stir in wine and cook 1 minute.
3. Pour in 1 cup of the warm stock and stir until the rice has absorbed the liquid. Stir constantly and add stock, 1 cup at a time, until rice has absorbed all liquid.
4. Sprinkle scallops with salt and pepper and brown on another pan over medium-high with 1tbsp oil. Remove after 2 minutes.
5. When risotto is cooked, fold in the butter and cheese, top with the scallops and drizzle with olive oil. Serve hot.
DESSERT: Bananas in hot fudge
Why? It's all about the banana. Potassium and B vitamins are bananas' gift to healthy sex hormone production. The banana is an important aphrodisiac in Central America and India (where it is offered as a gift to the fertility gods) and in Islam, the banana, not the apple, was the forbidden fruit in Eden.
Ingredients: 2 bananas; 375g condensed milk; 450g castor sugar; 100g softened butter; 1tsp vanilla extract
Method: 1. Freeze the peeled bananas overnight.
2. Put butter in saucepan over medium heat. As it melts, add condensed milk, sugar and vanilla extract.
3. Gently stir the mixture around until the sugar dissolves. Still stirring, bring the mixture to a rolling boil and then turn down the heat.
4. Keep cooking the fudge mixture while stirring at low heat (8-10 mins). Do not stop stirring or it will caramelise too quickly.
5. Serve lengthway slices of the frozen banana to dip into the still-liquid hot fudge.
From today's Indo...
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/why-cooking-is-better-than-sex-1912427.html
Why cooking is better than sex. . .
A new book claims it's what happens in the kitchen -- not the bedroom -- that has made humanity evolve. Susan Daly reports
By Susan Daly
Wednesday October 14 2009
A survey of women last year declared that chocolate was better than sex. A victorious sports captain might describe winning as better than sex. For sleep-deprived new parents, eight hours of kip can be better than ... You get the idea.
Indeed, sex might not be the force that binds men and women together. According to a Harvard anthropologist, the main shaping force of human social behaviour is: cooking.
Richard Wrangham, in his new book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, says that the turning point in our evolution into modern men and women came when we first thought of throwing a bit of meat on the fire.
Archaeology normally dates the birth of cooking back to 200,000 BC when the first evidence of charred bones and hearths appeared. Wrangham, however, goes back 1.9 million years to find what he says is the point at which humans started to perform rudimentary cooking.
It is that moment at which our ancestors' bodies evolved into Homo erectus, with smaller digestive systems, jaws and teeth and bigger brains. The reason for these changes, says Wrangham, is that we had learned to break food down by cooking it, freeing up all that energy previously used chewing and digesting to increase our brain power.
There might be something in this. Nutritionist Aveen Bannon says that a raw-food diet -- although somewhat in vogue these days -- can be a very difficult one in which to balance all your energy and nutritional needs.
"It can be phenomenally high in fibre, and so takes a lot of digestive work," she says. Indeed, chimps spend around six hours a day chewing their raw foodstuffs into submission.
"It takes lots of planning and dedication to make sure that you are getting all the calcium, iron, vitamins and minerals that you need from such a diet."
A famous research project called the Giessen Raw Food Study found that a raw-food diet can't "guarantee an adequate energy supply".
The release of energy from raw food takes a lot longer to permeate the human body than cooked food, says Bannon.
There is no doubting that cooking food freed up time and energy for our ancestors to evolve. More controversial is Wrangham's contention that the first human 'marriages' were about food, not sex. The discovery of cooking, he says, led to relationships between the sexes that were "primitive protection rackets".
Men protected women from animals and other creatures attracted by the light and smell of the cooking fire. Women in return slaved for them over a hot cooking pit.
Is this the real truth behind the old chestnut, 'The way to a man's heart is through his stomach'?
"Over the past decades we have understood that our social system comes through the competition for reproductive partners," Wrangham says. "I'm saying, pair bonds are firstly about food, and that gave a platform to develop those relationships further."
Dr Abdullahai El Tom of the Department of Anthropology in NUI Maynooth, is an expert in the anthropology of food. He agrees that cooking food helped advance society by widening the choice of what was edible.
"But it was not the foundation of society," he insists. "It makes a wonderful story but it should be seen more as an addition, among many other things, to human society as it evolved over time."
As for the assumption that women were immediately chained to the primitive stove, Dr El Tom is not convinced.
"The original cook would not have used tools at all, it would have been very simply cooking by roasting and I don't know how he could prove that women had to do it." In fact, he points out mischievously, "look at the barbecue in summer, you will find men dominating them still."
However, food is still a major part of how we construct our social selves. Dr El Tom believes how we eat is as important to our sense of identity as how we dress. Food is very indicative today of where we are headed.
'Society is becoming more individualistic and our use of food asserts that," says Dr El Tom. "The communal stage, where families mostly sat down to dinner together, is coming to an end. There is a transformation in the way we approach food, even down to the family that sits together but serves three or four different meals at the one table."
Where food used to augment the family relationship, it is now more likely to be a cohesive force among friends (the new family?) or to impress your status by meeting at a particular restaurant.
Yet the romantic dinner survives as a cultural motif. Cooking for someone for the first time can be a very intimate gesture. This might hold an echo back to a time when it really mattered to a husband that he could come home to a meal cooked by his wife.
But be warned, gentlemen, women have evolved to the point where they no longer desire to be the only ape in the kitchen.
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/fifty-ways-to-feed-your-lover-1912426.html
Wednesday October 14 2009
Richard Wrangham contests that cooking, not sex, was the initial binding force between humans. Whatever the truth of why our ancestors paired off, the twin imperatives of food and sex have become culturally intertwined.
Oysters, chocolate and asparagus are a byword for sensual pleasure. This menu, drawn from the chefs at www.eatsomethingsexy.com, suggests a few new ways to your partner's heart ...
STARTER: Spicy garlic shrimp
Why? The ancient Greeks used to feed garlic to Olympians because it was purported to improve stamina. Scientists have recently found that the chemical substance behind the distinctive whiff of garlic, far from being a turn-off, is also present in female sexual secretions.
Ingredients: 400g peeled shrimp; 5 tbsp olive oil; 1/4 tsp red pepper flakes; 3 cloves garlic, crushed; sea salt.
Method: 1. Add the pepper flakes and garlic to the olive oil and leave to infuse for an hour.
2. Heat oil in large skillet on medium-high heat, adding shrimp and cooking 2 mins each side.
3. Season and serve on crusty French bread.
MAIN: Wild mushroom risotto with seared scallops
Why? Often overlooked by romantics in favour of the oyster, scallops are high in phosphorus and iodine. Iodine deficiency has been documented as reducing sex drive. Mushrooms are lauded by several South Pacific cultures for their aphrodisiacal qualities on women.
Ingredients: Two tbsp olive oil; 400g scallops, crescent-shaped muscles discarded; salt and pepper; 1 shallot, minced; 1 garlic clove, minced; 200g assorted mushrooms; 1 tbsp thyme leaves; 1 tbsp chopped parsley; 2 bay leaves; 1 cup arborio rice; half-cup dry white wine; 4 cups chicken stock, heated; 1 tbsp butter; handful grated parmesan cheese.
Method: 1. On medium heat, cook the shallot and garlic in 1tbsp oil in large, deep skillet, stirring for 5 minutes. Add mushrooms and herbs and cook for about 10 minutes. Season.
2. Add the rice and stir 2 minutes to coat with the oil; the grains will turn opaque. Season again. Stir in wine and cook 1 minute.
3. Pour in 1 cup of the warm stock and stir until the rice has absorbed the liquid. Stir constantly and add stock, 1 cup at a time, until rice has absorbed all liquid.
4. Sprinkle scallops with salt and pepper and brown on another pan over medium-high with 1tbsp oil. Remove after 2 minutes.
5. When risotto is cooked, fold in the butter and cheese, top with the scallops and drizzle with olive oil. Serve hot.
DESSERT: Bananas in hot fudge
Why? It's all about the banana. Potassium and B vitamins are bananas' gift to healthy sex hormone production. The banana is an important aphrodisiac in Central America and India (where it is offered as a gift to the fertility gods) and in Islam, the banana, not the apple, was the forbidden fruit in Eden.
Ingredients: 2 bananas; 375g condensed milk; 450g castor sugar; 100g softened butter; 1tsp vanilla extract
Method: 1. Freeze the peeled bananas overnight.
2. Put butter in saucepan over medium heat. As it melts, add condensed milk, sugar and vanilla extract.
3. Gently stir the mixture around until the sugar dissolves. Still stirring, bring the mixture to a rolling boil and then turn down the heat.
4. Keep cooking the fudge mixture while stirring at low heat (8-10 mins). Do not stop stirring or it will caramelise too quickly.
5. Serve lengthway slices of the frozen banana to dip into the still-liquid hot fudge.
Drink. Girls. F***.
Drinking is fun, sex is fun - is it really that hard to imagine that the two are frequently intertwined?
From Monday's Irish Independent
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/love-sex/why-women-need-a-drink-before-they-have-sex-1910737.html
Half of us prefer to be a bit tipsy before diving under the sheets -- a very sobering statistic, writes Susan Daly
Monday October 12 2009
An ex-boyfriend and I were 'seeing' each other for about a month before we had our first date. How's that, you ask? Well, I used to jokingly tell people, we had to go on an official date in broad daylight to make sure that we liked each other sober.
I don't consider myself to be a drunkard, but the reality of Irish relationships is that many of them are kickstarted by the social lubrication of a few drinks. In the case I mention above, we were work colleagues and the more Americanised culture of going on dates had yet to take firm grip in Ireland.
If anything, it felt more normal at the time to confirm an attraction over post-work drinks than to organise a stiff meeting under the clock at Clerys.
With that model of Irish romance in mind, it's difficult to be shocked by the new survey that found that half of its female respondents preferred to have sex with alcohol on board. The survey was conducted among 3,000 women in the UK, on behalf of a female hygiene company called FemFresh.
As such, it's neither an academic nor an exhaustive study but it does throw up plenty of food for thought, especially as the Irish social scene is aligned with the British style of pub culture.
"In other European cultures, meeting in coffee shops might be more popular, or wine bars where you might eat a tapas or two with a glass of wine," says HotPress sex columnist Anne Sexton, "but in English and Irish social life the pub is our first port of call. Pub culture doesn't encourage sober interaction."
There may be more to the results, however, than the fact that our socialising normally coincides with alcohol. Some 6pc of the women surveyed admitted they had never had sex sober. That's a pretty grim statistic, one you might normally associate with people who had severe drinking problems.
Recovered alcoholic Eric Clapton, for example, once revealed that he did not have sober sex until he was in his 30s. Last year on the Celebrity Rehab programme in the US, model and actress Amber Smith admitted she had reached the age of 27 without ever having sex while sober.
Research from Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis revealed that there was a direct link with high rates of alcohol dependence and an increased number of sexual partners -- 41pc of frequent bingers indulged regularly in unplanned sex, while this happened to only 8pc of occasional drinkers.
Heavy drinking leads to reckless and unsafe sex: that's a given. Alcohol lowers inhibitions and disables a neurotransmitter in the brain which normally causes us to conduct ourselves with reason and rationality.
It's the finding that at least half of us prefer to be a bit tipsy before diving under the sheets that is more complicated.
The folks at FemFresh made a bit of a leap from their findings to state: "These results are a clear indication that British women today are severely lacking in confidence. The fact that alcohol plays an integral role in their love lives shows that women are looking for a boost in self-esteem when it comes to their bedroom antics."
Substitute 'Irish' for 'British' and is that a fair portrayal of our sex habits? Are Irish women too shy and body conscious to let loose without booze? Anne Sexton agrees that negative body image is a huge element of it. "It is recognised that in the western world, most women have body-image issues. We start to be critical about our bodies from about the age of eight and that definitely has an impact on our comfort levels about being naked with our partners."
Susie Orbach, who wrote Fat Is A Feminist Issue 30 years ago, has published a new book called Bodies which argues that women are racked with "body anxiety". We are bombarded on all sides by images of perfect models and celebrities, diet products and weight loss reality shows. It isn't a stretch to suggest that many women need some Dutch courage to reveal their un-airbrushed, wobbly reality.
Aside from the body-image issue, Sexton believes that our social confidence is also shaky. That goes for men too. Sexton lived in Ireland until she was eight years old, before her family moved to South Africa.
When she returned to live in Ireland eight years ago, she says she was surprised by the amount of casual sex that was happening among people "really off their heads with drink".
It's not that we're all alcoholics -- it's just that adults in their 30s still suffer from a certain amount of discomfort around the opposite sex and alcohol has become a normalised tool to overcome that.
"You see with the newer generation that boys and girls mix easily but with people in their 30s there is not a huge amount of genuine friendship going on across the gender barrier. If there is a mixed group it's normally couples. There is a nervousness around sex and alcohol lubricates a lot of sexual action. That's why the one-night stand has become popular. You go out, get drunk, have sex and leave before you have to confront the fact that you have had sex with this person."
A personal ad which was posted on the free website gumtree.ie last week shows that some people are actually turned off by the prevalence of drink on the dating scene. The ad was titled: Genuine male looking for lady who enjoys sex without alcohol. The 29-year-old poster explained that he had just moved to Cork and was "looking to meet sexy lady who can enjoy all of lifes (sic) sexy wonders without alcohol".
But most of us don't get blotto to have sex, all of the time. Scientists say there are perfectly sound biological reasons why women like a glass or two to make everything look rosé in the bedroom. Research in the respected Journal of Sexual Medicine last August showed that a glass or two of red wine is good for a women's libido.
Dr Nicola Mondaini, who led the Italian study, said that while drink could have a negative effect on male sexual performance, a moderate amount significantly intensified the sexual pleasure of women.
Women are not necessarily self-medicating themselves with plonk in order to get it on with their partners. As Anne Sexton points out, our busy lives often mean we have just a small window of relaxation time.
You are not likely to mix yourself a G&T while cooking the dinner and bathing the baby. The glorious moment when you get to sit down with a glass of Rioja at the end of the day is going to coincide with possibly the only alone time you and your partner might get.
But if you're having a drink because you find you no longer desire your partner at all, says Sexton, that's another matter. "There are not many relationships that will survive that, drink or no drink."
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/love-sex/a-tipple-before-bedtime-1910738.html
Drunken sex is a comedic staple for film and TV makers -- although the female characters who have it frequently end up paying a high price ...
KNOCKED UP: A beautiful TV presenter, played by Katherine Heigl, puts on her beer goggles for some clumsy fumbling with layabout pothead Seth Rogen.
While Rogen's character is thrilled at playing outside his league, Heigl's wakes up hungover, horrified and -- in the best tradition of unsafe drunken sex -- pregnant.
SEX AND THE CITY: Lawyer Miranda feels so intimidated by her handsome new date that she tries to bolster her confidence about her own looks with a series of double vodka martinis.
She drags him back to her apartment, waking in the morning to a splitting headache and a note on her hall table from her date advising her to seek help for her drinking problem.
21: Even beautiful actors have turned to the bottle to get the courage to strip off. Kate Bosworth and Jim Sturgess revealed that they both got drunk before filming steamy sex scenes for casino movie 21 last year.
"We decided to have a couple of drinks, loosen up and go for it," Kate told People magazine. "It was brilliant for about half an hour," added co-star Jim. "As we continued to drink... it just became messy and sloppy."
VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA: Javier Bardem plied both Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall with fine Italian wines and cognac in the last Woody Allen movie.
Hall's character Cristina resists temptation but Johansson's Vicky sways drunkenly to his hotel room -- only to get sick on his bed.
From Monday's Irish Independent
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/love-sex/why-women-need-a-drink-before-they-have-sex-1910737.html
Half of us prefer to be a bit tipsy before diving under the sheets -- a very sobering statistic, writes Susan Daly
Monday October 12 2009
An ex-boyfriend and I were 'seeing' each other for about a month before we had our first date. How's that, you ask? Well, I used to jokingly tell people, we had to go on an official date in broad daylight to make sure that we liked each other sober.
I don't consider myself to be a drunkard, but the reality of Irish relationships is that many of them are kickstarted by the social lubrication of a few drinks. In the case I mention above, we were work colleagues and the more Americanised culture of going on dates had yet to take firm grip in Ireland.
If anything, it felt more normal at the time to confirm an attraction over post-work drinks than to organise a stiff meeting under the clock at Clerys.
With that model of Irish romance in mind, it's difficult to be shocked by the new survey that found that half of its female respondents preferred to have sex with alcohol on board. The survey was conducted among 3,000 women in the UK, on behalf of a female hygiene company called FemFresh.
As such, it's neither an academic nor an exhaustive study but it does throw up plenty of food for thought, especially as the Irish social scene is aligned with the British style of pub culture.
"In other European cultures, meeting in coffee shops might be more popular, or wine bars where you might eat a tapas or two with a glass of wine," says HotPress sex columnist Anne Sexton, "but in English and Irish social life the pub is our first port of call. Pub culture doesn't encourage sober interaction."
There may be more to the results, however, than the fact that our socialising normally coincides with alcohol. Some 6pc of the women surveyed admitted they had never had sex sober. That's a pretty grim statistic, one you might normally associate with people who had severe drinking problems.
Recovered alcoholic Eric Clapton, for example, once revealed that he did not have sober sex until he was in his 30s. Last year on the Celebrity Rehab programme in the US, model and actress Amber Smith admitted she had reached the age of 27 without ever having sex while sober.
Research from Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis revealed that there was a direct link with high rates of alcohol dependence and an increased number of sexual partners -- 41pc of frequent bingers indulged regularly in unplanned sex, while this happened to only 8pc of occasional drinkers.
Heavy drinking leads to reckless and unsafe sex: that's a given. Alcohol lowers inhibitions and disables a neurotransmitter in the brain which normally causes us to conduct ourselves with reason and rationality.
It's the finding that at least half of us prefer to be a bit tipsy before diving under the sheets that is more complicated.
The folks at FemFresh made a bit of a leap from their findings to state: "These results are a clear indication that British women today are severely lacking in confidence. The fact that alcohol plays an integral role in their love lives shows that women are looking for a boost in self-esteem when it comes to their bedroom antics."
Substitute 'Irish' for 'British' and is that a fair portrayal of our sex habits? Are Irish women too shy and body conscious to let loose without booze? Anne Sexton agrees that negative body image is a huge element of it. "It is recognised that in the western world, most women have body-image issues. We start to be critical about our bodies from about the age of eight and that definitely has an impact on our comfort levels about being naked with our partners."
Susie Orbach, who wrote Fat Is A Feminist Issue 30 years ago, has published a new book called Bodies which argues that women are racked with "body anxiety". We are bombarded on all sides by images of perfect models and celebrities, diet products and weight loss reality shows. It isn't a stretch to suggest that many women need some Dutch courage to reveal their un-airbrushed, wobbly reality.
Aside from the body-image issue, Sexton believes that our social confidence is also shaky. That goes for men too. Sexton lived in Ireland until she was eight years old, before her family moved to South Africa.
When she returned to live in Ireland eight years ago, she says she was surprised by the amount of casual sex that was happening among people "really off their heads with drink".
It's not that we're all alcoholics -- it's just that adults in their 30s still suffer from a certain amount of discomfort around the opposite sex and alcohol has become a normalised tool to overcome that.
"You see with the newer generation that boys and girls mix easily but with people in their 30s there is not a huge amount of genuine friendship going on across the gender barrier. If there is a mixed group it's normally couples. There is a nervousness around sex and alcohol lubricates a lot of sexual action. That's why the one-night stand has become popular. You go out, get drunk, have sex and leave before you have to confront the fact that you have had sex with this person."
A personal ad which was posted on the free website gumtree.ie last week shows that some people are actually turned off by the prevalence of drink on the dating scene. The ad was titled: Genuine male looking for lady who enjoys sex without alcohol. The 29-year-old poster explained that he had just moved to Cork and was "looking to meet sexy lady who can enjoy all of lifes (sic) sexy wonders without alcohol".
But most of us don't get blotto to have sex, all of the time. Scientists say there are perfectly sound biological reasons why women like a glass or two to make everything look rosé in the bedroom. Research in the respected Journal of Sexual Medicine last August showed that a glass or two of red wine is good for a women's libido.
Dr Nicola Mondaini, who led the Italian study, said that while drink could have a negative effect on male sexual performance, a moderate amount significantly intensified the sexual pleasure of women.
Women are not necessarily self-medicating themselves with plonk in order to get it on with their partners. As Anne Sexton points out, our busy lives often mean we have just a small window of relaxation time.
You are not likely to mix yourself a G&T while cooking the dinner and bathing the baby. The glorious moment when you get to sit down with a glass of Rioja at the end of the day is going to coincide with possibly the only alone time you and your partner might get.
But if you're having a drink because you find you no longer desire your partner at all, says Sexton, that's another matter. "There are not many relationships that will survive that, drink or no drink."
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/love-sex/a-tipple-before-bedtime-1910738.html
Drunken sex is a comedic staple for film and TV makers -- although the female characters who have it frequently end up paying a high price ...
KNOCKED UP: A beautiful TV presenter, played by Katherine Heigl, puts on her beer goggles for some clumsy fumbling with layabout pothead Seth Rogen.
While Rogen's character is thrilled at playing outside his league, Heigl's wakes up hungover, horrified and -- in the best tradition of unsafe drunken sex -- pregnant.
SEX AND THE CITY: Lawyer Miranda feels so intimidated by her handsome new date that she tries to bolster her confidence about her own looks with a series of double vodka martinis.
She drags him back to her apartment, waking in the morning to a splitting headache and a note on her hall table from her date advising her to seek help for her drinking problem.
21: Even beautiful actors have turned to the bottle to get the courage to strip off. Kate Bosworth and Jim Sturgess revealed that they both got drunk before filming steamy sex scenes for casino movie 21 last year.
"We decided to have a couple of drinks, loosen up and go for it," Kate told People magazine. "It was brilliant for about half an hour," added co-star Jim. "As we continued to drink... it just became messy and sloppy."
VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA: Javier Bardem plied both Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall with fine Italian wines and cognac in the last Woody Allen movie.
Hall's character Cristina resists temptation but Johansson's Vicky sways drunkenly to his hotel room -- only to get sick on his bed.
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