Last year Eileen Walsh fulfilled a personal goal to star in The Second Woman, a marathon 24-hour play in Cork. Picture: Bríd O'Donovan.
The day after Brenda Fricker’s funeral, Eileen Walsh is speaking warmly and fondly of the Irish acting icon, who she crossed paths with over the years.
She particularly remembers working on a radio play with Fricker, where the cast were asked to create background noise and banter as part of the recording. “There were a couple of scenes in a pub and down on the docks, and so everybody was asked to do little chatty noises in the background. Brenda would forever go: ‘Woof!’ and then say: ‘Ah, there's always a fucking dog!’,” laughs Walsh at the memory.
More recently, the two women corresponded about potentially working together on stage, and the Cork actress is sorry that it didn’t come to pass. “I thought it would be so beautiful to be on stage with her. She'll be sorely missed because there are very few like her. She really stayed true to who she was — that performance in My Left Foot is so grounded in a world that she knows. She was fearless, and I think that really showed through in all her work.”
Walsh, too, has become one of our most-loved stage and screen icons. After making her debut in Enda Walsh’s remarkable Disco Pigs opposite Cillian Murphy in the late 1990s, she has built an impressive career, recently reuniting with Walsh and Murphy for Small Things Like These, the acclaimed adaptation of Claire Keegan’s novella.
This week, she featured in The Things We Do as part of The Boyne Valley International Film Festival, in partnership with LOVE Drogheda. Showcasing an array of local, national and international films, the festival creates an environment for filmmakers and audiences to connect and celebrate film in the historical medieval town of Drogheda, located in the heart of the Boyne Valley region.
Starring Moe Dunford and Toni O’Rourke, Shane O’Connor’s film centres on a father and husband struggling with a gambling addiction. Walsh got to know O’Connor through his work in stills photography on screen and in theatre.
“The candour with which he captured actors, I thought, actually, he'll probably have a lovely way with us on set. I felt the script was so delicately written. Often you can get quite a frazzled energy from a young director because they're eager and they're desperate — in a good way — to get hold of the reins. Shane doesn't have that energy about him. He's very competent, capable.”
In the short film, Walsh plays a nurse guiding the former gambling addict at a crucial juncture in his life. “There are lots of personal decisions that you make with any film, big or small. But it felt to me that she was somebody who knew addiction from her own family.
"Just to be able to sit with it and know the cost of it is much more than this person lying in the bed. I think Shane really brought that to her character, her allowing him to have moments to think about what his kids need as well as himself.”
Building on the recent success of Small Things Like These, Walsh has enjoyed a busy creative period. Last summer she fulfilled a personal goal to star in a marathon 24-hour play in the city where she grew up.
The Second Woman, as part of Cork Midsummer Festival, saw her star opposite 100 different men as she performed a scene between a man and a woman in a relationship that has lost its creativity and romance. It was inspired by John Cassavetes’ film Opening Night. Bringing the unique project to Cork Opera House was a special experience, she says.
“It is something that I had wanted to do from the moment I heard about the project in London with Ruth Wilson doing it. The idea, the concept, the original film behind it.”
“You could feel the anticipation and also the trepidation from the audience as to who would be next. People were staying for such a long time, there weren't that many doors flipping for people in and out.”
She says performing in her home city became even more special through the challenging later hours.
