Actors From Ireland

"On one occasion, I tried to cash in the pay check, and they wouldn't give me the money, 'cause the check was for one `Donald O'Brien'. So I had to go to the Embassy and have my passport corrected, with `Donald' in parentheses."

"Sollima was considered to be the intellectual among the Western filmmakers. I enjoyed working with him. He was a very intelligent and gifted man."

"Carné used to behave like a hysterical maniac. I had a small part in that film. Maurice Ronet and Annie Girardot were also in it. He was screaming like a maniac. But he was a masterful director. LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS is one of the greatest films ever made."

"[Unnamed actress on the set of Grand Prix] never had eyes for me. Hell, she wouldn't even talk to me, after she'd found out that I was just an unimportant actor. Good grief! Then, this is what happened: We were sitting in the foyer of the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo. She, myself and Antonio. Then an assistant director crossed our path. That actress was trying to get him to take us to the theatre where they were showing the rushes of the day before. After some discussion, she persuaded him. He said: `Be quiet, I'm gonna lose my job...' So we hid in the balcony, looking down, where that wonderful director Frankenheimer was sitting. After some minutes of racing cars, finally her scene came, and she was doing a phone call - she was playing a sophisticated magazine editor -, and suddenly you could hear the director, who had this loud, resonant voice, howling in rage, because he didn't like her at all. `Oh my God, she's awful! She can't walk, she can't talk, look at her hair!' So he turned to that faggot hairdresser, who was like Katherine the Great, and this guy said: `Well, usually she plays this peasant types. I don't know why you cast her for this role in the first place!' And remember, this actress was sitting there with us, and she nearly went crazy! She was squirming with embarrassment. This is an actor's nightmare, you know. The next day she was fired."

"(James Garner) was a very good-looking fellow, all the girls went crazy for him, and a good actor at that, but he, like others I used to work with, seemed to be self-conscious and nervous, for no discernible reason. I mean, these guys were famous and successful. But they often behaved like little girls when it came to things like, Why is he getting a longer close-up and I don't, stuff like that. I mean, this may be important when this one close-up is all the screen time you have, but they are the leading players, so why do they behave that way? I never understood that..."

"Now (Burt Lancaster) was a guy, terrific. I've worked with some Hollywood actors, but he was worth all of them. He used to be a circus acrobat. He had this marvellous physique, and while other actors would choose to act like primadonnas when it came to dangerous scenes, Lancaster would do most of the stuff himself. And he was a friendly guy, always helping us little-knowns when we had problems. This was one of my first more important parts and I was very unsure of myself. He was always telling us what we could do to improve our stuff. A great guy."

"[O'Brien joined the Dublin Gate Theatre) where Orson Welles had started. Very few people know that he started in Dublin, most people think it was the Mercury in New York. James Mason, Peggy Cummins, Edward Mulhare - they all used to work for the Gate Theatre. My father was extremely furious when he found out that I was wasting my time being an actor. He also got wind of the fact that the star of the production (Micheál Mac Liammóir) was one of the biggest queens alive. He also played the part of Jago in Orson Welles' OTHELLO. This really didn't help. He cut my money off.""

"Because I was stupid, I said, To hell with it, and I joined a drama school. [It was a ridiculously little school, which was first run by a very clever woman, but she soon was replaced by] "a nitwit, who had read a few books on the Actor's Studio and was very much into analysis, instead of teaching us how to walk and talk!""

"My father was a magnificent Irishman with a Barrymore profile and the physique of a boxer."

"When the law can stop the blades of grass From growing as they grow, And when the leaves in summer time Their verdure dare not show, Then I will change the colour I wear in my caubeen, But till that day I'll stick for aye To wearing of the green."

"Oh Paddy dear, and did you hear The news that's going round? The shamrock is forbid by law To grow on Irish ground."

"Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them."

"Like a heartbeat. Something inside me. Some dream. I think it's being a dreamer as a child. Dreamy kids become actors, don't they?"

"I hear that the no-smoking crowd are now operating at the National. Surely that sort of mentality doesn't belong in a theatre, it isn't a place where you impose rules on people, it's a dirty radical place where an actor can work with a fag in his hand."

"Every tub must stand upon its bottom."

"The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science, that smiles in yer face while it picks yer pocket; and the glorious uncertainty of it is of mair use to the professors than the justice of it."

"As she lay, on that day, In the bay of Biscay, O!"

"Loud roared the dreadful thunder, The rain a deluge showers."

"I created an environment for myself and a way of living for myself that on the outside seemed incredibly gregarious and vivacious and it was just... I don't believe I have any chemical pre-disposition towards depression but let's just call it, I was suffering from a spiritual malady I suppose, for years, and I just indulged that and it was sweet. Because at times to be in pain, if it's self-perpetuated, at times, can be sweet. You can feel very alive when you're in pain. And I also know that from another perspective when somebody who I love in my life has passed away, there is something incredibly internally vivacious about feeling pain and mourning and even if it's as egocentric and self-indulgent as mourning for yourself or pitying for yourself and that sort of stuff. So I'm glad I'm out of that cycle of my life, and I'm very lucky that way."

"Desperation will allow you to do incredible things in the name of survival."

"Science is a joke. Look at the scientific explanation for the origin of life as we know it. No wonder we have creationists, you know, those people - God love them - who tell their children that, you know, originally we all went to school with dinosaurs, or whatever it is that they tell them. But no wonder they exist, because listen to the explanation for the origin of life itself - it doesn’t sound very scientific. "There was a big BANG! And then we all came from monkeys." "What? That’s it?" "Yeah, shop's closed, fuck off!" I need more than that! There must be more than - BANG! *monkey sounds* "Honey I’m home!" - come on! It’s such a boring theory, anyway! It’s much more interesting if you reverse the order."

"You know, people come in here with their fucking camera phones - everything’s a camera nowadays; you pick up a piece of fruit, it takes a picture of you. Or the computers which are everywhere which is proof that we like to be watched. That what we’ve replaced God with, technology! We’re fucking afraid to be alone, in a lift, in a taxi cab, we need cameras everywhere recording us unless we realise we’re alone, we might do something scary... like whimper, I don’t know!"

"Perfume is a good example of a product gone all wrong. When I was a child, it was a semi-exotic thing and it was called something stupid like "Fleur de Fleur" and you would give it to your mother or aunty at Christmas and it was advertised by some dopey looking woman in a field of sunflowers and she looked like she'd been hit by a tractor because she was going *flails with arms*. She couldn’t just get over how nice she smelled. Now, because we’re so jaded, we’ve consumed so much, our attention can only be grabbed in a violent way. So it’s always advertised by these constipated, exo-keletal bitches who are sneering at you and it’s called something horrible like "Homicide"! "Dysentery"! "Urban Dysentery" for boys and girls!"

"WHAT'S WRONG WITH US?! We're the only organism the planet is actively asking to fuck off! By burning things, and freezing things, and melting things on us! It's like going past the ocean and seeing it spit out whales, "Fuck off, I've had enough of you!" Passing the eucalyptus tree as the koalas hang on, the tree's going [Swaying violenty] "Get - the fuck - away - from me!""

"These fingers are from Florence. Yves Saint Laurent himself designed my arse. My nipples are reconstructed from an early unfinished blue print by Coco Chanel, hence their lopsided charm. One of them is on my shoulder. The other five I keep handily between my toes, which, in themselves are a bit embarrassing. But fuck it, it was the 80’s, you had to have suede."

"Young people, should be allowed to go up to one another and say “Hi” and that’s it – they go off and do something wonderfully stupid together...like have a gap year, there’s no other justification for that as far as I can see. What do young people have gap years for? They haven’t done anything yet! Why don’t they have a full year, where they do 9 times as much work as they’ve ever done in their life to prepare them for what the rest of adult hood feels like - which wandering around a desert, with a bag over your head, being bumped into by people who rob you as they bore you."

"You know, fucking mornings! What is that about? That time is a huge lie. "Get up, get up! We’re going to be late! Quickly! Late, imagine it! The disaster if we’re late! What’ll happen if we’re late? I can’t even bear to think about it!" Late is an idea. Late is bullshit. It doesn’t matter how fucking late you are, you can turn up in your pyjamas scratching your nuts with a fork, the same old shit’s gonna be there. It’s a lie! People running up to you saying, "what do you think?" in the morning! "What do you think?"! "Think? Think?! I’m not even fucking breathing, go away with your 'think'!" It takes you three quarters of an hour to find your face and apologise to it. And how do they lure you back into the world, into the human race, into consciousness itself? With the great traditional breakfast! As eaten here and in Britain and Ireland and lots of other places: Fried slices of dead pig, tubes of dead pig, some fungus and a chicken's period on a plate, "WELCOME BACK! WE MISSED YOU WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING! ENJOY!" Of course you can always have the healthy option, of course you can, of course you can!... Some yummy cereal, mmhmmmm dust with milk! Says it right there on the box in big primary coloured letters ‘contains fibre’. Goody gumdrops, I was up all night fantasizing about fucking fibre. You know that feeling when you get a belly full of fibre and you can skip round the room taunting everybody who didn’t get theirs? Remember all those times in your life when you stopped strangers in the street and screamed at them “I need some fibre!""

"- I know what you're thinking!"

"Women are not allowed to be seen to enjoy themselves on lots of ways. They have a test for that in Ireland now, they’ve scientifically perfected that. The Madonna-Whore-Quotient of a woman. You know, if when a woman puts her hand together to pray, and when she’s crying the blood and she levitates and you don’t get a sustained hum in A Flat, she’s a fucking whore!"

"Where is the cake? Cake is the language of love. I don't see any cakes in the building. You know, people say that to you: "I love you, I love you!" Yeah? Gimme a fuckin' eclair."

"The ultimate human shopping list: I’d like some illegal, some forbidden, some frowned upon and some downright disgusting, please. I’ll have that to go, thank you!"

"You have to have a good relationship with pleasure, Australians seem to, on the whole your approach seems to be to go, "What's that? Ahh, yeah, it's one of those" which is a lot healthier than the Irish one, which is to go, "What's that? That looks nice. I'll wait till everyone's asleep, then I'll steal it, so nobody will see me enjoy myself and then I won't have to feel ashamed. I can just let the guilt fester for the rest of my life and spend all my remaining years drunk.""

"- Where are you?"

"And I’ve been on the road for too long, I know I have, because I was in the supermarket the other day, and I saw this tiny, heartbreaking can of beans. And it really made me want to cry. I just thought how old or sick or small do you need to be to need those beans? And it was on a high shelf, you know, you’d be climbing the ladder for days just to get at those four beans."

"And what is the point of putting a picture of the perfectly ordinary Irish smile on the box of cigarettes? what's that all about? what you supposed to achieve?"

"The truth is that women are like chick peas under a psychopath's hat. They can be cherishable and zingy and suprising. But you ask too many questions and you get killed."

"Don’t get feminist on me! Look, I’m not a feminist, 'cause I'm a man. I'm not qualified. I can't be a feminist. Just like most women.. If women were serious about feminism they would have everything that feminists talk about getting. Equal pay, you could have that tomorrow! IF... women would give up bitching about one another for FIVE MINUTES. Which doesn’t seem to be possible."

"If you're a young man, you know, you live in a sexual tyranny anyway and your penis is Kim Jong. Sex decides everything. You can have a car crash. You lie in the ditch thinking: "What is the erotic twist in the situation? I can't quite seem to see it yet"."

"Who sleeps, really? If you’re a proper adult person in the 21st century, how can you relax, at all? Your mind keeps churning. You think, "What if this thing happens?! What if that thing happens?! What if they happen together?! What if I lose my job?! I hate my fucking job! But what if I lose it?" Your mind is a hive of worms. And worms don't live in a hive, so it already feels unnatural. You lie in bed, beside your partner... "What if I died?!" If you don't have a partner, you just think, "What if I died? ...Okay, I would be dead." But if you do have a partner and family, you'd think, "What if I died? How would they cope?" They wouldn't! They would be out in the street in half an hour, stealing food from seagulls mouths! Or worse! They WOULD cope! They'd have a much nicer, cleaner house! And an improved sense of self-worth. Probably more money! And inevitably your partner would find somebody within the first 3-4 days, and begin a tumultuous sexual relationship. They would be having sex a lot in your bed when you were dead! The morning, the afternoon, the evening, and the night time would be the main times they would be having sex, in your bed, when you were dead. Feeding each other lobster with their bare hands, to give each other more energy to try it in new and more demanding ways. When your realise you are lying besides somebody who is waiting for you to die! And what's more, they're sleeping to make the time go faster."

"Days are stupid length. They are just long enough to get regret and then you have to go to bed."

"Scotland, the country where they fry the food five times to make sure it’s dead; the country where they invented bacon flavour mouthwash."

"You laugh at the North, you think they’re all funny little short people who live in a big pie. Trying to sort out their relationship with the definite article. Throwing darts at their dinner."

"Some people don’t like Mr Cameron. Mr Cameron and his cube of air. He doesn’t seem to know where to put that thing down. He can’t find a place for it. I think the reason he can’t get rid of it is because it contains the essence of the Big Society, and nobody wants that shit."

"The belief system that if you smiled hard enough into the face of God, you would eventually shit money."

"You know what you think, you know where you are on the spectrum... You’re Left or you’re Right really, that’s it. And if you’re left-wing, you’re boring. That’s the truth. Nobody wants to hang around with you, you’re very dull. You’re the voice of conscience, y’know the one saying: “Now look. Put it down, we should all be nice to one another. Let’s try and not eat everything today.” Very dull voice... The right-wing... Cruel? Yes. Vicious? Certainly. But honest. Not a sophisticated philosophy, it just says: “What is this? Do we fuck it or eat it? Let’s try half and half.”... Now you might be liberal! You could be, I forgot. You could be one of those thoughtful, troublesome people. People who say: “Well things are actually a little bit like this AND a little bit like that. Soooo, let’s do whatever you say.” If you’re liberal, you have no purpose. You are the thing in your kitchen you never use. Something you bought once, while you were out at a market feeling frisky."

"They tell you, you can get everything you need from pulses and lentils and things like that. Yeah. Everything you need, except company, which is not to be had, because you are dying, bent double in a miasma of your own toxic farts."

"What does anyone think or believe any more? Belief itself is treated with disgust. Belief is now regarded as a kind of fat marbling the brain. Who here believes in organized religion? (NO!) Who doesn't? (AUDIENCE CHEERING LOUDLY) You see? People in the West don't believe in anything! And we're proud of it! "What you believe in?" "Nothing! Nothing!" "What did you have for lunch? I don't fucking believe you!" We don't believe in anything. We treat religion with contempt. Faith. All that rubbish. What are you, a child? Believing in this, you do good and then you know, you die and then you get a biscuit! What are you, a fucking idiot? What's wrong with you? We don't believe in anything! Because we know about science! Believe in science! That's the only thing we know about! The atoms and quarks and things. We don't understand it! Any of it! But... But that's the case. So, that's totally different to having a faith! Isn't it?"

"The dark creates all kinds of things. The dark creates music, particular kinds of music. Horrible folk music you don't want to listen to. And heavy metal which they love in dark places. They love it in Scandinavia. They have all these metal bands, you know? And they're not like the English ones or American ones that have names like Metallica and Megadeth and so on. The names are... 'Cause English isn't their first language in Scandinavia even though they all speak it. So they call their bands things like Anus Hammer, Egg Smuggler, all that stuff. lt's a very interesting look, heavy metal, you know... You have everything down here. You've got jazz and ska and everything, you know. Whatever, folk music, too, probably. Folk music has its own look. lt has a... You know, people wear dungarees 'cause they say, "l'm a man or a woman of the people. This isn't my main thing, you know. l'm just like you really. My main job is harvesting turnips. Anyway, this next number is called Cross-eyed Mary of the Lowlands. l'd like to dedicate it to my wife." And then there's jazz, you know, where you get people in suits but they're non-conformist suits 'cause they're wearing a pink shirt with a green jacket and a blue tie and trousers too complex to describe. 'Cause they're saying, "Yes, l'm wearing a suit but l work for me. And my job is to play the electrified tractor horn till 5:00 in the morning, so fuck you." Heavy metal is a very interesting look. The look is a kind of an argument. lt's an argument against Darwinism. Because what the people who are involved are saying, is that attraction is not necessary for reproduction. That's why they shave all the hair off where it would naturally be and cultivate it in places it shouldn't be. And that's why the music is so angry. You know, if you shave all the hair off your arse and get into a pair of leather trousers, you're gonna sing an angry song. lt's not gonna be some wistful ballad about that crazy summer in Paris with Justine. lt's going to be much more, "Death in the morning, death for breakfast. Little pots of toasted death." Heavy metal is what happens when a group of people with competitively disgusting appearances come together to try to kill air. No, partly... Partly, that is probably age speaking. l just can’t tolerate certain things, you know."

"Why would anybody want to go skiing? You could sit in the comfort of your own kitchen and break your knees with a hammer. What is the human impulse? What’s wrong with these people? I think it’s because they’re so closeted, their lives are so comfortable, they actually seek out danger as a pastime. If you’re poor, you don’t go and look for danger ‘cause you’re surrounded by it. Your accommodation is dangerous, your neighbours are dangerous. Your own family are pretty handy. You probably have a couple of moves yourself. Your dinner can fucking kill you anyway so you don’t have to go and look for danger."

"Now, The Archers is not a programme I’m hugely familiar with, because every time the theme music comes on, I leap across the kitchen with an athleticism I don’t actually possess, in search of the “fuck off” button on the radio. I gather it’s about some people who are very, very worried about getting the crisps to the fete on time. No wonder everybody's hooked."