GABRIEL BYRNE...

was interviewed in Butterfield's, a tiny pub in Ballitore, a small village in county Kildare, where he tasted his first point of stout in the company of his father, Dan.

BEGINNINGS --
I was born in the Rotunda Hospital which is in Dublin, at about three o'clock in the morning. I don't remember very much about it, but the Rotunda Hospital is beside a theatre, and maybe that was fortuitous.

MEMORIES --
My very first memory is of being with my mother when she was collecting my younger brother from the hospital. It was a windy day, I remember, and the blanket that he was wrapped in kept flapping in his face, and I remember standing outside the hospital waiting for somebody to collect us.

The next memory that I have is of trying to poison my brother with a bottle of turpentine, which was used for removing wallpaper from the wall. He was in the pram in the front room, alone with me, and he asked for his liquid in a little whiskey bottle, and I gave it to him. He downed a fair bit of it before my father rushed into the room and became quite agitated, and my mother was called to the scene, and then a doctor arrived wit a little black bag. My brother and the room smelled of turpentine and vomit. And I remember being chastised and severely reprimanded. It was sitting in the window watching the doctor going out the gate with his little black bag, and my father told me to get out of the window, I wasn't a cat...My brother laughs about it now, but later I did try to choke him with a piece of turnip, which he thought was an apple, and again he turned blue, and there were more scenes of agitation. I had become known as a danger to young life, so I was never allowed to be in the same room as my brother again unattended.

We get on great now, really great. Mind you, he still insists on having the door open any time we're in the house together, just in case.

FAMILY --
There were six of us in my family, three boys and three girls, and we lived in a kind of uneasy toleration of each other, as I think most big families do. My sister died about four years ago, at a very young age, so that leaves five of us altogether.

I think the eldest in the family always gets the job of looking after the younger people, so I did that...I remember a TV thing called The Old Curiosity Shop, which used to run on BBC; there was an actor in that called Patrick Troughton, who later became Doctor Who and who made a huge impression on me as Quilp. He had long black hair, and was unshaven, and he had a hump. I used to run up and down the stairs at home terrifying my brothers and sisters, who'd scream and say, "Oh no, here comes Quilp!" That was my first performance, if you like. Pathetic but true.

I only knew my paternal grandmother and grandfather through what my father told me about them. We had pictures of them, but I never really had much to do with them. They were very simple farming people. There were tales told that once upon a time they owned vast tracts of land, and they were disinherited and disenfranchised, and sent to wander the roads; but I don't know whether that's true or not. They were simple farming people, farm laborers.

My father was one of five, six people in the family; he became a soldier, and then when he left the army he became a laborer in Guinness's brewery.

While he was working at Guinness's, my mother was at home looking after us. We lived in Drimnagh, on the Brandon Road-it was called after a mountain; all the roads around where we lived were called after mountains, for some reason I never quite understood. There was Brandon, Lissadell, Madigan, Comeragh....We moved from there in a rainstorm. I remember by mother pushing the pram with my brother inside, and I remember walking up the Walkinstown Road towards the mountains. Occasionally, these blue lights would flash out of a window, and I asked my mother what they were, and she said they were television sets. I'd never actually seen a television set light up a room before and turn the room blue.

We came to the house, which was at the end of a road leading to the mountain. On that road there were farms, and all these farms and fields eventually led to a little village called Tallaght, where there was an ancient monastic settlement.

There were people there who had all kinds of weird occupations-there was a swillman, I remember. People said he had been disappointed in love, and now he lived with his mother. He was a very sad-faced man who collected swill from the houses to feed the pigs. And there was a man who lived in a ruined castle, which stood on them top of a hill like a black tooth, with his dog. He was known as "the Sack man" because he dressed completely from head to toe in sacks-tailored sacks that said "Bagnelstown Flour Mills." He had a little hat made out of a sack, and hoses made out of a sack. And then there were a group of men who I think were gypsies-they were called the Bottom Boys and used to ride bicycles with no saddles on them. They'd terrify people by riding at great speed, shouting "hup ya boy ya," through the streets. And then there was a woman called Rosie who never stopped talking; she was the terror of the bus, because she'd get on and just say anything that came into her head, which was quite likely to be an obscenity of some sort. She was in total Stream of consciousness. The guy who looked after the cinema was a bald man-when the lights would go down he had the silhouette of Alfred Hitchcock, and every night when the lights went down, the entire audience would start to go "De, de de, di di, de de de," which was the theme song from Hitchcock, the TV show. It used to drive him crazy, and he would shine his torch around the cinema in a vain effort to get a hundred and fifty people to shut up.

It was a mixture of the urban and the suburban, and the country and the city. And it was really a glorious place to grow up. Now that area is totally covered with estate houses, and all those farms, all those people with strange occupations, all those characters are gone.

CHILDHOOD -
I don't really remember what kind of a young fella I was; but I know that there was a picture taken of me in school, with about 40 kids, and I was the only one who was smiling. I had my head to one side and I was smiling. So I don't remember childhood as being particularly miserable, and I don't remember it as being particularly happy. I remember miserable incidents, and happy incidents and I don't think anybody really has a continuously carefree, happy childhood.

In the same way, I was a combination of the extrovert and the introvert. I didn't like being the center of attention. I was sent at a very young age to learn how to play the accordion-an eccentric with a pipe and cravat taught me the rudiments of the accordion, and I then got a job in my uncle's pub playing the four songs that I knew for twelve and sixpence a night. And I hated it; I hated being singled out for any kind of public attention at all. Learning to play "Kelly the Boy from Killane" or "The Bridges of Paris" and having to lug an accordion case around the streets of Dublin while all my friends were playing football or Cowboys and Indians was always a source of tremendous humiliation to me.

SCHOOL -
I went to the nuns first of all, in a place called the "Coombe, which is a very old part of Dublin. It was taught there by a very elderly nun in a starched white costume with a white headdress which had the effect of framing her face into a kind of ghostly visage. She terrified me.

On the first day I went in with my mother. We arrived at the schoolyard and I saw all these kids running around in new uniforms...I remember seeing a nun go over to a boy and take him by the ear and put him standing in line; and I didn't know that I had to join that line, that I had to go into that school. And suddenly my mother wasn't standing there; I was in this room with this woman dressed in black, with a rosary and a big, long belt hanging from her waist, who was speaking in what I thought was an unkind and unsympathetic voice. And that was the beginning of the fear. I couldn't understand what I was doing there; nobody had explained the concept of school. You must woke up one day and found you were going to school, in a uniform that itched you and in a class that was full of strangers.

At school I kept my eyes down, and I was extremely deferential to teachers and to Brothers, because I realized that on any whim they could really hurt you. I learnt silence and cunning in relation to authority figures at a very early age. We're very enlightened now about corporal punishment in schools, but when I think back on how it was meted out indiscriminately for sometimes imagined offenses...It was a tremendously cruel system of discipline. I remember being terrified of these people, with their enormous hands and bullet heads, knowing that if you displeased them in any way you could end up in great pain. And I hated them. To this day I don't have any great love for the Christian Brothers. I couldn't contemplate doing to a child what some of them did.

I'm not saying this out of self-pity-I look back on those days and sometimes I hear people say, "Yes, I experienced the same thing," and they say, "Well, it didn't do us any harm." But I always say that I don't believe it did me any good either. I believe you can get children to learn and to be curious about the world by encouragement, rather than by hitting them with a stick and teaching them through fear. I'm glad that world has gone, I really am. I don't see any benefits to it at all. I lived my schooldays in abject fear. Monday mornings were...I still wake up with a part of my brain saying, "I don't have to got to school day, I don't have to go to the Brothers." I've met some of these guys since, and they're basically just men who are forced to live an unnatural celibate lifestyle teaching young boys.

BALLITORE -
Ballitore is the place where I grew up in the summers in Ireland. It's a village, about an hour from Dublin, and it's bypassed by all the main roads, so it's preserved a lot of the characteristics that other villages have lost over the years. It's full of history -it was originally a Quaker town, and there's an old mill here that has existed for several centuries. An during the Famine times, there was a great deal of death in Ireland-in 1842 the population was, I think, eight and a half million, and by the end of the Famine, which began in 1845 and ended in 1947, the population had been reduced to four and a half million people; people died or emigrated because of starvation. But Ballitore was lucky because of its Quaker influence and because of the mill. If the mill hadn't been here, perhaps I wouldn't be here, because all my people depended on this mill, and on the generosity of the Quaker settlement here. People were fed, and so they don't have that terrible scar that many towns have-the memory of starvation and death.

The bus used to come from Dublin, and it would come down the hill and stop here. And of course the arrival of the bus every evening was the major event of the day; people would come out of shops to stand and look at who was getting on and who was getting off. There would always be a collection of men in peaked caps smoking cigarettes over by the clock, which was permanently stopped at ten to two. And myself and my brother would always be the object of curiosity, being from the city-they looked upon us as city slickers and Jackeens, which was the country name for people who came from Dublin. But to me this was a magic, fairytale place, because it was the exact opposite in every sense to the city; and I loved the people here because they were extremely friendly, and they had a great sense of humor-a very dry sense of humor, which I've always appreciated. I always felt at home and welcome here.

I stayed with my father's brother and sister. They had a little farmhouse about three miles from this pub. I suppose my parents wanted to get rid of me for the summer, which I can perfectly understand; but I think they also felt it was important that I experience life in the country-my father's people were from down here. And I'm really glad that they did that, because it's something that's remained with me always. It's a funny thing: when I read certain novels, I place them in my head here, and when I remember Ireland, this village is what I remember. It influenced me very much in the writing that I've done; I've tended to set a lot of stuff here. I tend to write about a lot of the incidents that I heard about, growing up, and perhaps I have tended to romanticize the area.

I fell very easily into the country way of life-it's genetic, I think, my appreciate of that way of life. I loved the different seasons here-I wasn't here just in the summer. I loved the country routine-going to Mass on Sundays, walking down with hundreds of people to Mass in the morningtimes. The visit to the pictures once, twice a week, on Saturdays and Wednesday nights-I saw a lot of famous movies here. The first Hitchcock movie I ever saw, North by Northwest, I saw in this town on a bedsheet. The man used to come on a bicycle with the cans of film from Athy, and we would all wait for him there under the clock. And the seats were bus seats, three and sixpence, and the seats at the back were dining-room chairs. But there was a tremendous atmosphere-the movie was always breaking down, and sometimes it would go upside down, and bedlam would break out and people would demand money back, and so forth...But it was a great place to see films. And then we would walk home at nighttime along the roads, discussing the movie...And I used to come to this pub here with my father, and I partook of my first drink-it was a glass of Guinness-when I was about five or six, sitting over there in that corner by the fire. And in the summertime we would take part in all the things that happened on the farm, like the cutting of the hay...

I've always loved the landscape around here; it's my favorite type of landscape, which is pastoral-the fields are green and yellow, and it really is like a quilted patchwork. There are no high mountains, the sea is far away, but there are rivers and trees and meadows, and sleepy villages like this one. I find that kind of landscape very relaxing. I was stolen by gypsies once. Yeats has a poem called "The Stolen Child" - "Come away...to the waters and the wild, with a fairy, hand in hand, for the world's more full of weeping than you can understand," something like that...I remember I was warned by several people not to have anything to do with the gypsies, and of course I didn't pay any attention to them. Then one day this man and his wife, gypsies, pulled up in a horse and cart and asked me if I wanted a lift home, and they seemed to be very nice people and I said yes, and all I can remember is galloping past my house with my father and mother and aunts standing aghast as I was galloped away to captivity. They found me at then turn of the road, anyway, walking back from where these people had let me out. But I was known thereafter as "they boy who was nearly stolen by the tinkers."

One of the things that I was very conscious of, growing up here, was that everybody had some kind of a story. We would come into the pub at night and listen to people sit by the fire and tell stories, and then we would walk home-which was about four miles away-through the dark, terrified by hearing stories about other-worldly creatures and supernatural beings that of course really did exist. And I believed at nighttime I could hear the Headless Horseman who was supposed to ride from Monasterevin to Mullaghmast, an ancient rath, or burial lace, near where we lived, every seven years. I would ask foolish questions like, "How can he see where he's going, if he has no head?" and people would say "That's not the point, he's a headless horseman."

Then when somebody died you would hear the footsteps walking around the house...And then there was the banshee, who was a ghostly fairy woman who followed certain families whose names began with O, or Mac. Originally our name was O'Byrne, so the banshee followed our family. And my mother swears that she heard the banshee several times during her life. She would stand outside the house, with her long red hair and a comb, and would comb her hair-the banshee, that is, not my mother!

You grew up there with a very thin line between the natural world and the supernatural world, and the crossover between them happened very frequently, so often you didn't quite know what was the real world and what was the supernatural world. You grew up with a great fear of ghosts and goblins, witches and spirits, and especially of the dead, who would come back to haunt the living or to generally disturb them in someway.

There was a story told that various Irish warriors were lured into Mullaghmast Rath and massacred thereby the English, many centuries ago, and of course their ghosts populate the area. Under the rath in Mullaghmast sleep the Red Branch Knights, who are supposed to rise up as one, on the day that Ireland gains its freedom. What they're supposed to do when they rise up I don't know, but they've been asleep for two thousand years so I imagine the first thing they'd do is have a good stretch...My father said to me once that these roads were so full of ghosts that there was hardly room for humans to walk. It was a very naove, primitive, pagan view of the world, and it coexisted with Catholicism. It made for a very unusual world-view.

SPORT
I was very interested in football, Gaelic football. I used to write away to various footballers for their photographs, and I still have pictures at home of fellas in Kerry jerseys and long shorts with their arms folded, "Best wishes" written on them. All my heroes at the time were footballers. I still listen to football matches every Sunday. To me the Sunday-afternoon football match, with Michael O hEithir commentating, is so resonant. Even when you weren't at home, when you were at the beach maybe, the cars would have their doors open and you could hear the match coming out.

I remember that in football I always followed the underdog-teams like Leitrim and Wicklow that never had a chance of getting to the All-Ireland final. And it's really gratifying to me that recently Leitrim actually got into the All-Ireland semi-final, because I've always supported it-a county I have no connection with whatsoever, except I liked the fact that it has the smallest coastline in Ireland, and that it has no hope whatsoever of ever getting anywhere. My philosophy was that any eejit can support a winning team, but it was great to follow a side that had no hope, and watch them come up. I used to do that in the English divisions as well-I used to support Hartlepool and York City, at the bottom of the forth division.

I never really was good at hurling; I always found that I was too much of a sissy for hurling, really. But soccer I came to really love, because I had been to school in England, and I followed it. For a while I played football for a Dublin club called Lourdes Celtic. I was a goalkeeper, and I loved playing in goal. I moved out of playing in goal when I got my nose broken for the second time. I had broken it when I was nine; I ran around the corner and straight into some girl, who probably has the scars of it today. She smashed my nose, and I think I smashed something of hers-we were both brought to the hospital anyway. And then I broke it as a footballer, and then I broke it again.

I hoped to join the League of Ireland, and I went away to England for trials, which I found totally miserable...Basically my career ended when I discovered girls and cigarettes. That was it for me. Football's loss was the bar-room's gain.

THE MOVIES - I think that the movies were incredibly important to me at the time. I used to go as often as I possibly could-three, four, five, six times a week sometimes. To be in a darkened room, to be by yourself yet to be a part of a crowd, to have these worlds beyond imagination opened up to you, and then t o come out of those movies fired with imagination and excitement, and to ride nonexistent horses up the road, slapping yourself on the backside, pretending it was a horse...

I remember seeing a move called Terror in a Texas Town-I think Sterling Hayden was in it. For months afterwards we re-enacted the entire movie in a field-we knew every line in the film. Then we would do the cowboys things, and then we did the German concentration camp. I remember one guy who always played the girl-for some reason he was captured with us. He used to wear his sister's pink pullover, and this other guy, playing the camp commandant, would say: "You villt stay heere unt ze girl villt come vit me." The games were full of kind of ambiguous moments like that, but basically we re-enacted what we saw in the movies.

The kind of artistic arguments that used to go on were: who's better, Cliff Richard or Elvis Presley? Cliff Richard was for wimps, and Elvis was for people who knew what the score was. I liked Billy Furey myself-I don't know why, but I did. And somehow I thought that not liking either Elvis or Cliff, and liking Billy Furey, might endear me to some black-haired girl. That was the kind of mad thing going on in my head at the time.

We used to swap these little chewing-gum packets with movie-star faces on them. This guy once said to me, "Do you want to swap Sal Mineo for Audrey Murphy?"

I said, "Who's Audrey Murphy?"

The guy said, "Audrey Murphy," and I said,

"No, you mean Audie Murphy." And there was a big fight as to whether Audrey Murphy was a girl or Audie Murphy was the war hero from the movie To Hell and Back. We knew an awful lot about movies, but we didn't know an awful lot about movie stars.

I never lost that love of the movies. I used to stand and watch people-the social event of the week at that time was going to the pictures, and so you would watch the guys and the girls walking down at nighttime, click-clacking down the street. And they would all be upon the balcony, what we used to call "the wearers"-couples who would be kissing and doing things like that. And the thing was to get up to the balcony, to get behind these people and see what in fact they were doing. It reached the stage when the movie became less important than what was going on in the balcony. We would sit behind these couples and be amazed at how the ritual was the same every time. The girl would sit down, the guy would put his arm around her, suddenly the girl would be bent backward, and they would lose total interest in the movie. And the thing was to tap the guy on the shoulder in the middle of this and say, "Scuse me, have you got a light please?"-just to see what his reaction was.

CAREER CHOICES

FROM ALTAR BOY TO SEMINARIAN
I was spending all my time at the movies, but I was also an altar boy, so I went between the two worlds of sanctity and sin. I used to serve Mass; I learned all the Latin, which I really loved the sound of, and which I loved saying. I was addicted at the time to congealed grease-I used to eat the candle grease off the side of the candles-and I used to slug down some altar wine and some hosts. We'd always been told that there were certain things which you should never do: if you went to hit your mother, your hand would wither, and God knows that would happen to you if you ate the host. I never did find out if my hand would wither, but I ate the host and am here to say that nothing happened to me.

I divided the priests into those who said the Mass quick and those who said it slow. There was one priest we used to call Bullet. There was another guy-every time he would come out on the altar you could hear a collective sigh from the audience going "ohhh, not this fella..." This priest-who was very nervous, I remember-had a stammer, and stammered his way through the Mass, so it took forever to get through.

The church was actually a very theatrical place, because what they had to offer, when you think about it, was probably the best theatre show in town. The plainchant was very seductive, and if you inhale incense it has a soporific effect, and there was all the candlelight and flowers...They used the old Latin Mass, where you didn't know what they were saying, and so the mystery of it was also very attractive.

Then I was in school one day, and this man came and showed us slides of where his order had missions-Ecuador, and Bolivia, and Peru. You could see him standing there in a straw hat, tanned, and there were two little black children smiling at the camera, and I thought "I'd like to be there, that looks like a nice ace to be." And six months later I found myself on a boat for England, to become a priest. I think I was attracted by the romantic idea of the priesthood, and the idea of travel, and the vestments and so forth.

I was eleven and a half. Now, when I think of how young I was, it seems incredible, but I never regretted the experience.

Girls weren't important at that time. If, at the time, someone had told me all about it and said, "Look, this isn't very important now but in about three or four years time you're going to notice that girls are on the planet, too," I might have thought twice about it. I'd already fallen in love with a very shy girl in a purple coat, who I never spoke to but saw in the choir in church. I used to gaze at her longingly and lovingly and throw sweet papers at her in the cinema, and ignore her. I had a bike, and once I went down past her house and did some very acrobatic turns on one wheel, in the hope that she might be looking out the bedroom window. If she was, it didn't impress her very much. But I think there's a peculiar thing that happens when you're that age: you think that the object of your affections will come to the window full of concern and say, "OH God, isn't he unbelievably exciting---the way he's able to do things with that bike...I want to get off with him." I think I still think like that today. I never took the girl out, but she was the fuel for a great deal of fantasy.

In the dormitory of the school in England I was next to a guy from Dublin who had the same name as me-a great guy who was a friend of mine, a great footballer. We used to lie awake at night and discuss all kinds of things. I remember he said to me: "Are you going to be married?" Remember, we were supposed to be studying to be priests. I said yes, and he said, "What kind of a girl are you going to marry?" I said, "I'm going to marry a girl with dark hair." I was so sure of this because Id' read Little Women, and Beth was the one I really liked. It was kind of the literary equivalent of "Which Beatle do you like?" I liked Beth, and I always imagined that I would marry someone like her, but I never did. The seminary was a wonderful experience.

In a way it was kind of like boarding school, except that the emphasis was obviously on the long-term hope that these young boys would be turned into priests. It was a great place to be; but it was also a lonely place. When you think of two hundred 12-year old boys without mothers or fathers, being looked after by priests...

They did have drama there, and I too part. The first time I was ever on stage was in a production of Oliver!. Of course I had wanted to play the Artful dodger. I couldn't sing, but I auditioned as Quilp, playing my old role again. And they said, "no, we don't want that characterization, but you could play a hunchback in a crowd scene." So very early on in the musical, when Oliver is being sold by Mr. Bumble, who sings that song, "Boy for Sale," I came across the stage with a walking stick and my hump, and my Quilp characterization, going "ahahh." I wasn't able to say anything.

I was also the Victor Laudorum 1964-it was an athletic competition where you had to take part in maybe ten different athletic events: the high jump, the long jump, the 40 and 88, the mile, et cetera.....The person who won the most events became the Victor Laudorum, which is Latin for "Champion of the Games." I was very physically fit at the time. I think it was just unused sexual energy that propelled me into record-breaking runs; I didn't quite know what else to do with myself. In the end I was drummed out of the seminary. I was called to the rector's office one day, because myself and this chap from Newcastle used to go to the graveyard every morning and smoke three or four Park Drives-they were kind of like Woodbines, except they were just maybe a grade below. We used to smoke these cigarettes in the graveyard, and one day the prefect came into the room and said, "I smell cigarette smoke in the room-if the culprits don't stand u now, the entire class will be..." So we were pointed out as being the culprits, and we were forced to the rector's office. And he said, "Well, I'm really glad you've come to see me, Byrne"-they called you by your second name-"because I've been watching you for quite some time, and it's become extremely apparent to me that you don't have a vocation to the priesthood, and my advice to you is to pack your bags and leave."

So myself and my smoking colleague were brought to Birmingham in a snowstorm and put on a train for London. There was no heat in the carriage, I remember, and at Crewe Station we had to get out and do press-ups on the platform because it was so cold.

I arrived back in Dublin at 15 and a half or 16, exhilarated at being free-and, of course, having discovered that there were girls in the world.

COSTING CLERK
When I first went back to Dublin I became a messenger boy for the firm of Robert J. Jolly & Co., 14-16 Dame Street. I stamped letters, and brought insurance forms from one insurance company to the other, and made the tea, and got things for people for their tea breaks, and stuff like that. And I was really progressing up the ladder there-in fact there was talk of me definitely going into claims, or maybe life assurance if things went well-but I left to become a costing clerk. And if you knew how bad I was at arithmetic, you'd know that the idea of me becoming a costing clerk was totally ludicrous. I used to hate things in school where they would say, "If it takes three men two weeks to dig a hole five foot long, how long will it take four men to dig the same hole if one of this is X?" I used to look at these things and say, "I don't care how big the hole is, how many of the guys did it. I have no interest whatsoever in the outcome."

But I got a job in the Cosmo Printing House in Capel House, in Dublin, and the theory of ten per cent was explained to me. Ten per cent had to be added on to teach bill, and I could never get the concept. I used to just add on ten pounds, or maybe ten shillings sometimes, or maybe four pounds-I'd just take a number and add it on. And I was getting on great, till they started getting these irate phone calls from people saying, "Hey, my bill came to 425 pounds!" And finally it was traced back to me, and Paddy Collins, who was the man who trained me in, said one day, "Look, you're wanted in Mr. Montaine's office at 11 o'clock, for a major talking-to about all this stuff." In the meantime, he said, "Go out and get me ten Craven A." And I never went back. I got out into Capel Street, and I thought, There's no way I can get out of this, so I took Paddy's ten Craven A and I beat it. And I was never seen in Chapel Street for years afterwards. In fact every time I go down to Capel Street, I still think Paddy's going to be waiting on the doorstep: "Jaysus , boy, about time."

Now at least I know what the concept of 10 per cent is, because my agent at International Creative Manager takes 10 per cent every time I go to work.

MORGUE ATTENDANT
My mother worked as a nurse in St. Kevin's Hospital in Dublin where she had trained. All of us got jobs there-I worked for a while on the telephones and on the ambulances, and for a very short stint in the morgue. I lasted there maybe a day and a night. It was not what I had set my career hopes on. I'm not great around dead bodies, for a start.

In every job I did there was some kind of an initiation ceremony, which I believe dates back to medieval times and the trade unions and guilds-when you became a plumber, they used to take down your trousers and do unmentionable things with pain and stuff. My brother and other people had warned me to stay calm, but the people in the morgue were going to do something. You'd be there, with the bodies laid out, and of course inevitably one of the bodies would move and you'd hear something go "Oooohh" under the sheets. I defy anybody to stay clam in a situation like that. You edge gingerly back to the door, thinking, I'm totally calm, this will not get to me-I'll just get out this door now...and the door's locked. Great when you'd doing it, not so great when you're the victim.

PLUMBER
then became a plumber, and I was a bit of a disaster at that as well. I was propositioned by an elderly plumber of about 70, with emphysema, who offered me 2 and sixpence for a look at my privates.

We used to go on these jobs putting in central heating, and toilets, and so forth, in the cold. It was a miserable existence-rammed into a small toilet with three other plumbers bumping into each other in boiler suits. Eventually someone would say to me, "Would you just get outside, just get out of the toilet, just wait out there." And I was called in again and told that my future did not lie in the plumbing trade and that I should seek employment elsewhere.

UNIVERSITY
I decided that I should go back to school and study for my Leaving Cert. I was quite old at this stage. I fell in love with the idea of being an academic, because I had a brilliant teacher there, a man who had actually retired and come back to teach. This man spoke fluent Latin and Greek, and loved English literature, and used to speak with a kind of halt in his voice: he would sp-eak li-ke th-at, and would talk a-bout Pl-ato. But he gave us a fantastic love of literature, and Latin, and knowledge, and taught us that the acquisition of knowledge in itself was a very desirable thing, that knowledge could be hip and cool.

I took to wearing long coats, and growing my hair; at that time I think I was kind of like Hamlet, with none of the good speeches. I was just morose, wandering around the place alone and paley loitering, being academic and abstracted, because I hoped that-and this is true-there would be a girl somewhere who would say, "See that guy over there in the long coat and the long hair? I know I could go for him." All those things I did were just ruses to get women, really.

Then I got a scholarship to University College Dublin. I was really thrilled, because I had been brought up with the idea that to get to university was a great thing. And I was really proud of the fact that I had gotten to university, still never having passed a maths exam in my life. I'm still useless at arithmetic and maths; I've n ever in my life passed a maths exam. But I compensated by doing Spanish and Irish and English, and I got the honors and everything, and I got the grant, and I went and did Irish and Archaeology and Spanish at university.

I spent three years there, basically isolated, dislocated. I didn't have any of those great university times that people talk about; I was very much a loner at the time. I always felt at university that I was in some way not as good as other people. Looking back, it wasn't because of anything other people did; it was me. But it felt like a middle-class environment-it felt elitist, and to me it felt very much like an insiders' club. It made me feel alienated-though again, I think that was all in my own imagination.

I came out with a degree at the end of it. I remember going up the stairs with my father, to accept the scroll, and being met at the top of the stairs by the Registrar and the President-they were just pumping hands with everyone who came up those stairs, and the President congratulated my father on getting his degree. My father turned to him and said, "Jaysus, I barely know how to read and write."

WRITING
I've always been interested in literature, and I've always been interested in writing. While I was at UCD I wanted to do a magazine that blended established writers with young writers. I got J.B. Keane and Ulick O'Connor and Mary Lavin and Christy Brown to write for the magazine, as well as getting younger writers who were at UCD to write poetry and short stories. You had to be an ex-student of UCD; that was the criterion. I edited it and sold it in the pubs around Dublin. It was a bizarre aberration in my life, but I guess everything has a purpose.

I wrote a lot of the stories and some of the poetry in the magazine, under pseudonyms, because we didn't have enough people to fill a couple of issues. I would make up biographies for these pseudonyms: "Seamus MacChommaraigh was born in the Donegal Gaeltacht in 1953, he's at present serving in a ministerial capacity in Ghana," or something.

Liam Nolan was the first person to publish anything that I wrote-he had a radio program called Here and Now on RTE radio, and he had a short-story slot. The first short story I wrote, called "In Memory of Daffodils," was accepted by him. His producer, a guy called Paddy O'Neill who used to comment on the greyhounds, was in charge of commissioning short stories. I remember getting a letter afterwards from a Professor or English in Cork, called Harry Atkins, who said that I should be a writer. I was 20 at the time. As soon as I got that letter, I thought, Oh my God, and abandoned writing.

The big thing about getting stories on the radio was that it was a major, major event. We'd have a group of friends, I would choose a pub, we'd go there and get the man to put on the radio, and we would listen to the story on the radio, and then get drunk for the rest of the day. But I had a story broadcast on Radio 4, and I can't describe the excitement of the guy saying, "This is the BBC; this morning's story..." And he'd read out the thing and we'd all be sitting in some pub in Ballybrack or wherever, already completely gone with drink-"Oh, ye boy ye..." It would go on for days. It was incredibly exciting.

I've come back to writing recently. It's always been something that I've done-I've kept diaries, and I've always scribbled. But I could certainly get back into it seriously now, with the encouragement of certain people who told me that I could and should do it.

I find writing incredibly difficult-not the actual writing itself, but the getting down to writing. I'll do anything to put it off, and I put it off for years. I'm always afraid that if it comes out of my head onto the paper it will be totally different. It requires tremendous discipline to be a writer, and I'm actually a very lazy person. It requires self-motivation, and self-generation, and I find it very, very difficult to motivate myself, to do something that's only for myself. And also, I'm so in awe of great writers that I find there's a part of me which says I've some cheek to be writing at all.

I've never seriously thought of myself as a writer until the last, I think, year or so. I never accepted that I had any kind of a talent for writing. I'm very doubtful of myself, I never take myself for granted as an actor or producer or writer. I have never felt that I'm in a position where I can be totally at ease with being any of these things. I love doing all these things, but I doubt myself every step of the way.

I write poetry occasionally, but mostly for myself. I find it a very good way of remembering how I felt at a particular time. To me it's like taking a photography, like sculpting something with words, so that when you look at it in five or ten years' time, you can say, "Yes, I know exactly what that incident was about, I know exactly the significance of it, and I know exactly how it felt at the time." It's my way of taking photographs of myself.

I'm always really pleased with the public reaction to my writing. Dirk Bogarde is an actor I admire greatly who went on to become a writer, and I look at his work and I say, "Well, it's not impossible for me to follow in that way."

TEACHING
After graduating from university I went to Spain to teach. I taught English to bored Spanish housewives, and soldiers in the Spanish army, and young children who were brought by the ear and thrown into rooms with me, and the door locked. I had to teach things like "Rex has the ball. Woof, woof, says Rex," for long afternoons with the sun baking outside, to these women with incredibly long aristocratic fingers and sumptuous rings, all saying to me: "Rex has the ball, woof, woof." I remember saying to 50 soldiers, "So what does Rex say?" and 50 big, macho soldiers, in crew cuts, all saying, "Woof, woof."

I met a girl who always used to say "Sshhh" to me in bars. I'd ask why, and she'd say "Because everybody in Spain is in the secret service." But three years later, after I'd left Spain, I saw her picture in the newspaper as a woman arrested for the transport of arms. I had a pretty interesting time there.

I went back to Dublin and ended up possibly doing to young kinds what had been done to me: I went back to teach Irish and Spanish, in the school where I had graduated. My life became a full circle.

ON STAGE
I was 27 or 28 before I decided to become a full-time actor. I had no idea of becoming an actor when I was living in Spain; it happened when I came back to Dublin. I thought it would be an interesting way of filling up my evenings instead of being in the pub.

I went to the Dublin Shakespeare Society, and I auditioned with all these people who had been in UCD and who all, it seemed to me, spoke in Dublin 4 accents and talked about Shakespeare - "I think the Merchant is his best play, actually..." I took part in a production of Coriolanus, dressed completely in black; I had a black jumper with black bell-bottoms-nobody ever explained how Marcus Aufidius happened to be wearing bell-bottoms in ancient Rome-and I had a wooden sword, and I still have a scar on my little finger to prove that I fought with it. I basically stood there itching in a black polo-neck sweater while other actors went on with huge speeches. Nobody knew what anybody else was saying, except you knew that when the guy stopped talking it was your turn to start.

THE FOCUS
I worked at the Focus Theatre under Deirdre O'Connell-most young actors worked under Deirdre for various lengths of time. She gave me my start, and she was a fabulous teacher.

She used to say, "Gabriel, there's one thing that you have to learn about working on the stage: it's that the audience shouldn't know when you're going to come on, because if it says in the play that you've gone away to Moscow and you may not return, you want to keep that sense of tension among the audience."

I said, "What do you mean?"

She said, "Before every entrance that you make, I can hear you in the wings, clearing your throat." I became known in the Focus Theatre as "the Croup." Other actors-and the audience-would know that it was time for me to come on, because they'd hear me in the wings.

THE PROJECT
One day I got a call from somebody who said, "If you're looking to become an actor, you can come to this place called the Project." So I went to the Project. Everybody was there: Neil Jordan, Liam Neeson, the Sheridans...It was a great time to be a young actor in Dublin.

I left teaching that year, so I was no longer a teacher, I was an actor; and so instead of a tweed sports coat from Clery's, I was now to be seen walking around the streets of Dublin sporting waistcoats and collarless shirts and jeans with high boots, telling people I was an actor.

I never really had any doubts about changing like that. I've always been into change; I've never believed in staying in the same thing for very long, as you can gather. I didn't want to be there at 70, still doing the same thing-to be an old white-haired teacher in a stained waistcoat and the kids saying, "Oh n, not this eejit again."

1977 Dublin hadn't had the great artistic explosion we know now. We were the first of it. All the actors at the Project couldn't get into the Abbey or the Gate, because they couldn't speak properly, or they hadn't gone to drama school. The Project sprang up to accommodate actors like that. I remember it being one long marijuana-smoking, drinking, Rabelaisian party till seven o'clock in the morning. "What's the next play?" "We're off to Edinburgh!" "We've just won the Fringe Award!" "Where are we going next?" It was an incredible roller-coaster of excitement, of bohemianism, or so it seemed to me-going from the excitement of television studios to rehearsal halls.

I lived in a little apartment on Stamer Street, just off the south Circular Road, which I paid 2.50 pounds a week for. Johnny Murphy, a friend of mine, said it was the only apartment in Dublin where you had to wipe your feet on the way out, it was so dirty inside. And there were seven Nigerian apprentice doctors downstairs, me in the middle with no lock on the door, and upstairs a couple of people who I never saw, though I suspect they were up to nefarious doings in the underworld of Dublin. I ate fish fingers and apples and was never in.

I got my Equity card in a play called The Liberty Suite, at the Olympia Theatre, in 1977. I had just been to Tenerife on my holidays and was completely suntanned, and there was no line inserted in the script to explain how my character, a car thief who'd been in jail for four years, had managed to acquire a Mediterranean tan...And then I got my first television job, which was as a curate in a play called The Last Summer. I had to show Susan Fitzgerald into a room in which Barry Casson was playing the bishop, and I knocked over a statue of the Blessed Virgin, smashed it into a thousand pieces. I had no lines, but I caused hundreds of pounds worth of damage, and endless letters between the Convent of Mercy and RTE.

Funnily enough, I think I did some of my best work as an actor in those times. I did comedy, which I love, though people don't really cast me in it now because they think I'm such a dour, brooding kind of guy-which I am and I'm not. I really felt I was an actor, and I was fresh and young and excitable, and ready and open and unspoiled by the sight of anything. I feel I did my best theatre work there.

I don't really miss theatre. I admire great theatre, but to be honest I haven't seen it with any regularity. Also, I feel that the stage as a method of expression is now an actors' medium. It doesn't really speak to a lot of people any more, and it's become elitist, both in terms of the kind of people who go to the theatre and the kind of things that it addresses. And it doesn't really speak to me any more. I rarely find my concerns dealt with in a theatre.

I'd like to do a play now and again, because it is an actor's medium and there are roles there that you just cant' do on film. But I have no great desire at the moment to do it.

CINEMA
EXCALIBUR
John Boorman came to see The Liberty Suit, and he asked me to be in Excalibur, which was my first break. (I had a naked scene in The Liberty Suit, and when I met John Boorman's daughter Daisy in England a few years ago, she came over to me and said, "You were the first naked man I ever saw." I was very flattered.) I hoped that I was going to have long, flowing hair and look incredibly romantic, and John Boorman says, "Well, I think we should cut the hair." And my heart sank, and I thought, Oh God.

But I had a great time doing that movie. I was working with Nicol Williamson-he told me later on that he could never understand anything I was saying. I was on top of a horse, and the armor stuck into the top of my neck, so when I said, "The land from here to the seal shall be your," Nicol Williamson turned to John Boorman and said, "He's saying something about his granny!"

I had my first on-screen love scene in that. I didn't know anything about the technicalities of making love on screen; I thought that they came along with a camera and put it down and you did the thing, just like on the stage, and the camera captured all the angles. I didn't understand that you had to do it this way, that way, put the camera here, put the camera there, et cetera, et cetera.

So I was going the scene with John Boorman's daughter Katrine, who was playing my wife, and I was supposed to make love to her in quite a violent fashion. They did the wide shot, which was me on top of her in my suit of armor, and a fire burning behind me. I was covered in sweat. Anyway, I had love to Katrine in the wide shot, doing my grunting and groaning and all those medieval sexual shenanigans. Then they came in for the close shot and I was there saying, "Are we going to do it again?"

"Yes, we've got to get the close shot."

So then I see them putting a pillow onto the bed, and I hear John Boorman saying, "Okay, Gabriel, you can..?"

I'm saying, "Where's Katrine?"

"Oh no, she's not going to be in this shot."

"So I have to hump the cushion?"

"Yes, yes, yes."

That was the beginning of my disillusionment with it. I don't care how into the part you are, there's always a part of your brain that tells you, "You are making a complete eejit of yourself. Everybody knows that that's a cushion, and besides, you're wearing a suit of armor, and who ever heard of anybody raping anybody in a suit of armor?"

Anyway, I did the scene, and I believe I got a round of applause at the premiere in Dublin for doing the job with armor on. People used to say to me, "Come 'ere, you were in that movie-how did you do it with the gear on ye?" It was a question I was often asked by learned critics.

BRITISH FILMS
In about 1981 I went to the National Theatre in London, and I began to work in British films. I'm very fond of that period in my career, because I made what I think are some pretty good films. I did a movie called Defence of the Realm, which I think was a very forward-looking movie for its time. I'm very proud of that film. And then I did a couple of risky movies-like I worked with Ken Russell. People ask me why. Well, I played Lord Byron for Ken Russell, and I don't know many actors who would've turned down that role. I played a kind of Lord Lucan character in a movie called Diamond Skulls, which wasn't entirely successful but I was happy that I had done it.

I look back at those movies now and there was no reason why I should not have done them. They were all leading roles, good directors, very interesting scripts. To have a successful movie is a rarity. It took me a long time to realize that for every successful movie you see, you can count 40 that are box-office failures.

AMERICA AND HOLLYWOOD
I went to America because I had a curiosity about it; I was going to go there whether I was in movies or not. And I went there and I found myself being offered a job. And then I got married there, and that tends to keep you in a particular country.

In Britain I felt that the people were-not resentful, but that they didn't quite go out of their way to be hospitable to foreigners, but America was different. America is a country of transients, of immigrants; people have come there from somewhere else. So there's not the same kind of antipathy towards foreigners-outsiders are welcomed. And that makes a profound difference to the way you feel about yourself in a particular country.

I like living in Los Angeles. I like my house there, I like my life, my children are there, I like the sun. I know that's very prejudiced view of Los Angeles, because I also know the negative side of it. But to me, Hollywood is a pleasant place where I live. It's the center of my business-if you made cars you would live in Detroit. I'm lucky to be able to get home as often as I do.

I don't have any real ambition to do anything. There are no great parts I want to play, I don't feel in competition with anybody. I don't think that anybody gets the roles they expect. There are very, very, very few god roles around. Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman-why do you think they work once a year, sometimes, once every two years? Because that's how long it takes for a good role to come their way again.

But to be working in film is a thrill beyond belief, because I never thought that I would be doing that. Whether I do it in Ireland or England or Israel, or wherever, the job of making movies never really dissipates. And I'm moving out into producing, writing, and so forth, so I feel I'm constantly involved.

Every movie is a gamble. A good script does not necessarily make a great movie-it can be turned into a successful movie, by the right combination of editing and directing and so forth. Anybody who thinks they can plot a career making great movies has to be either extremely privileged or extremely careful in what they do. Funnily enough, as a child I always preferred British movies, the black and white movies of the 50's. I loved Terry Thomas and Peter Sellers, and all those guys. I guess I felt I could identify more with the English movies because Hollywood to me was such an inaccessible place. There was a part of me that didn't believe it really existed.

I'm still looking for it today. I think that the idea of Hollywood is far more potent than the reality of it, because I think that the inaccessibility of Hollywood when you actually go there further strengthens the idea that it is some kind of a mythical place. And I sometimes think that the place that wee look for as Hollywood doesn't really exist at all, or only exists somewhere in the mind.

I think that every art form has its cycle. I think painting, for instance, was much more important centuries ago than it is today, in terms of how it influenced popular perception and perspective. Literature, I think, was more powerful a century ago. Radio has lost a lot of its power too. Movies had their golden age, in the 30's and 40's; the 50's, I think, at least for me, wasn't a great time for movies; then in the 60's you had a kind of rebirth, a renaissance. But now a lot of the movies are what I call McMovies-they're thought up by marketing people for a target audience, and they deal with a very limited range of subjects. And now in Hollywood they're remaking all the movies they made in its golden age-It's like they've come to the end of the road. The monster is eating its own tail now, and it'll eat itself up until it eventually annihilates itself.

LEADING MAN
If you had told me maybe 15, 16 years ago that this was going to be my lot in life, that people were going to say that I was handsome, and a leading man and stuff, how could I have believed it? It's so far removed from any idea I had of myself that to this day I don't think I've ever really sat down, even for 2 seconds, and basked in the glory of that type of image. The image I have of myself is the only image that's real to me-it may not be what other people see, but it's the only one I think of as real. So if anyone says to me that I'm handsome or a sex symbol, their words have almost no effect whatsoever on me. Yet because people say it a lot, it must have some reality for them. But I've never been able to enjoy it, and it's never done me much good.

I used to be ashamed of my broken nose for a long time, and I thought that if only I had a nose like Cliff Richard, the world would be my oyster. When I was much younger, I didn't like turning sideways ...These are the things that affect you when you're 16, 17. You think you're an abhorrence, because you don't look like what you regard as the ideal.

I used to think, when I went to dances and sat in the corner petrified, that maybe I could turn my petrification into some kind of sexual allure. I was hoping that some girl would say, "God, who's that incredibly interesting guy over there in the corner who doesn't say anything and just kind of looks at the floor? Maybe he's somebody I could get off with." They never actually said that; they just said, "Jaysus, who's that bore over in the corner? Make sure you don't get caught over there."

FILM IN IRELAND
I think there's a great myth about the Irish film industry. What does it really boil down to? A couple of huge, mega-budget productions that come in every so often-Braveheart, Far and Away. These huge-budget movies are an aberration, they're not going to be a consistent factor of life in films in Ireland. Then at the other end of the scale you get a plethora of low-budget movies that come in here-I'm talking specifically from the actor's point of view-where they use actors for less money. It's cheaper to make them here, everybody speaks English, et cetera. It's not really a film industry as such. You can only speak of an "industry" in Hollywood, where there's the infrastructure to support one. And Hollywood's been there for more than 60 years.

What we have at the moment is a pattern, that may or may not even out, of major-budget movies coming in every so often, but mostly low-budget movies being made. A lot of them feature Irish actors only in supporting roles-something which has consistently plagued our business over the years. Yes, it means work for crews, but a lot of these crews are coming in from England and America. There doesn't seem to be any place for young people to go to learn the craft of making a movie. Where do you go in Ireland if you want to learn to be a screen actor, a cameraman, a director, a producer?

A couple of people, like Jordan and Sheridan, have had success abroad. But it's misleading to think that American audiences are just waiting for Irish movies, because they're not. The truth is that no Irish movie apart from The Crying Game has been a spectacular success in America. And for a film to be a spectacular success in America, it has to, number one, make money. It's not just enough if it gets critical reviews saying "This is a great movie," or if it is nominated for Oscars. In terms of practical success, a giant sweep-the-boards movie, is not going to lead to an Irish film industry, because we can't support it here. In practical terms, in wintertime it's dark at half-past three. That's why people went to Hollywood in the first place-because of the weather and because of the light.

I've tried to work with the Irish film industry in my own way, by coming back here to do movies. I think we've moved away from the literary kind of convention, where we used to write short stories and poetry and so forth; people are now beginning to focus on trying to make movies. And I like working with young writers and young directors and helping them get things off the ground and so forth. To date I've done 5 movies there, and I think it's important that people who achieve a bit of success abroad come back and put something back into the country. There's absolutely no reason why they should, but I think it's nice if they do.

My roots are still in Ireland, and my Irish background is very important to me. I feel that it's really important that Irish people get to make their own movies, because the perception of Ireland out there comes mostly through American movies. When you ask most Americans who have never been here about the country, they'll think of a movie they've seen and say, "Oh, that's what it's like." so what we get out there is important.

THE ACTOR TURNS PRODUCER
My producing career is opening up in the States, and I'm now a major producer with the studio system in Hollywood. I have just signed a major deal with Columbia for two years. It's very exciting to be able to develop and produce my own material. I won't develop anything I'm not passionate about-I'm not going to waste two years of my life. I ask myself, What is important to me, what do I want to say about my life and the world around me, and can I make a movie about that? I've made a movie about the tinkers in Ireland-that's Into the West, which I stuck with for four and a half years. Into the West was really an accident, in that Tim Palmer, with Michael Pierce, was the original creator of the idea. We all just muddled along and tried to make the movie. We didn't really know much about producing, but I learned a lot.

After a while it became a kind of obsession., The movie was about something that was very close to me-the idea of a father trying to communicate with his children, in extremely abject conditions. And it was also about the children looking for a mother, the idea of alienation, and the isolation of the Irish gypsies, the Irish traveling people. And it was about the idea that the line between fantasy and reality is actually very, very thin. There were a lot of themes in this movie. It's had a profound effect, I think, on a lot of the people who've seen it. I think Jim Sheridan wrote a beautiful and profound script.

The next movie was In the Name of the Father, which was a book I found and bought, and developed, and then gave to Jim Sheridan. I did the film because I was obsessed with the Guildford Four, the Birmingham Six, the whole British justice system.

In the Name of the Father was not a very happy experience, and I hope never to have to go through that again. But one of the gratifying things about In the Name of the Father is that, despite the falling-out that I had with Sheridan, the movie achieved everything I'd hoped that it would. It gave people an awareness of the plight of those men. It's interesting when people come up to you on the street in America and say, "I never knew about these people." They realize now that the same thing can happen in America-it's not just a British thing. The upcoming movies I'm producing vary from a movie about the nature of romantic love, to a movie about the environment and the culture clash between America and the rest of the world. These are the things that interest me. And I'm going to direct and produce The Doctor's Wife, from the novel by my favorite living writer, Brian Moore.

ACTING AND THE ACTOR'S LIFE
Acting, to me, is a mysterious process that I can't even articulate-I believe that in trying to articulate it, it becomes intangible. To me the actor is a channel through which the thoughts and opinions and philosophies of writers pass-he's the vehicle for all that, and he allows himself to be in a state of readiness and preparedness for that.

Acting isn't the be-all and end-all for me. It's important to me, it's how I make my living, but it's not my entire world. In fact, it occupies very little of my world really; I tend to have interests that are altogether outside acting-although I have many friends who are actors and producers and directors and so forth. But I'm not obsessed by the life of the actor.

I think that the emphasis that's put on the celebrity of the actor, especially today, is misguided. People are obsessed with actors. It has to do with an inherent amazement that someone can adopt the personality of someone else. It's a primitive thing; it's almost like the shaman in a primitive society, who puts on a mask and becomes another character. We're amazed by that. I think film stars occupy the same place in the public imagination as the ancient Greek gods, who had immortality attached to them, once did. We don't like to see our stars get older, we want them to stay the same. I remember when Robert Redford's movie Havana came out, he was attacked by several critics for looking old. And I remember thinking, How can anybody not remark on how bizarre this is? Do they really, deep down, believe that Robert Redford is not going to age?

Actors being the focus of this attention from the public which is fed by the media, is disturbing. The new religion now in America is celebrity. Everybody wants to be famous, everybody wants to be a star. And I know a lot of "stars," and I know that being a star is not going to make you happy. If it's something that you crave and obsess about, and desperately desire above anything else, the achieving of it does not bring you contentment. That's fact. It's not just an easy clichi. There are one or two people I know who celebrity has made benevolent, but in those particular cases it has gone hand in h and with a change of perspective from within.

As soon as you become famous or well-known, a dual reality starts up. Your perception of yourself is one thing, other people's perception of you is another. You're saying, "You're telling me I'm that, I'm telling you I'm this, but you want me to be that, but I have to be this." It's a very dangerous thing. To be honest, Faust, about the man who sells his soul to the devil, is one of the very few plays that I really want to do, because basically it's an examination of the bargain you make when you become famous. Whether that fame is thrust upon you or whether you actively seek it out, it brings with it all kinds of problems that nobody can foresee.

So I'm very scared of fame. My life isn't reclusive, but I don't go seeking the limelight, I don't go to premieres, I don't go to parties. I don't like being singled out. It's a funny thing: during childhood and adolescence the desire not to be singled out was important; now the desire not to be singled out is still important. That clash between the introspective and the extrovert, which was always there, is still there.

You kind of get used to celebrity after a while; and then on another level you never get used to it. When I did Bracken-the first television series that I ever did in Ireland-I went, almost overnight, from being an unknown theatre actor to being someone almost everyone recognized, and it frightened me. It really did, because I never felt that I had time to get ready for it. It was a bizarre experience, and still is. A television series is an incredibly dangerous thing.

I understand that actors have to work, and they have a job to do-it's just that you have to be very careful how you use your life. And my life outside movies and acting and producing and all the rest of it is very, very important to me. It's more important than acting, it's more important than producing, more important than movies. I don't want to be remembered as a guy who made maybe ten great movies; I want to be remembered by my children as somebody who was a great father, I want to be remembered as a good friend, I want to be remembered as somebody who took chances, who tried to do things that were different. I don't just want to devote my life to being on one movie set after another. And the obsession about fame is so all-encompassing that you can lose sight of who you truly are yourself. I often think, walking down a street: how many people are actually thinking about Clark Gable at this moment? Hardly anyone, I'd say.

I remember Richard Burton-I worked with him just before he died-trying to remember how many movies he'd done. He lost track at about 70. I said to him, "Why did you make so many movies?" And he turned to me-and I'll never forget what he said, "When I would wake up on a Monday morning, I would say, 'I can't bear reality, I'll do another film'." The film world is a cocoon, it builds a warm shell around everybody in it. Everybody has their functions, everybody has a purpose, everybody has a time limit; the world outside ceases to exist, and life is lived in fast-forward for two months. Relationships become intense. It's an unreal world by a very addictive world, and you have to be very careful about becoming addicted to the process of making movies, and to fame. I used to smoke cigarettes-even though I hated them, I still smoked them; and I know people who feel like that about their fame. I'm very wary of the whole thing.

I didn't become an actor to become a Hollywood star, though I hear young actors in Dublin now saying, "Hey, it's Hollywood for me." And there's nothing wrong with having that ambition, but I just wanted to become an actor because I loved being in the theatre, I loved doing plays, I had great fun, great craic. I never dreamed it would be like this. I've been incredibly lucky-but then again, things could just as easily have gone the other way. I often think that sometimes fame is based on an accidental configuration of facial features, and a certain inner vibe, and it's actually got nothing to do with acting at all.

And what people take for acting is sometimes not acting at all. Some people say there are two schools of actors: actors who basically play themselves and allow the work to come through them, actors of the type I hugely admire-like Spencer Tracy, who was always true, always full of integrity, always there in the moment; and then there's the other type of actor, who specializes in false noses and humps, and limps and lisps, and all that stuff. And people think, Wow, that's great acting! But when Olivier was asked to play himself there was nothing there, because he was hiding under his protective shell. It's a kind of acting, all right, but it's spectacular, flashy acting, like the goalkeeper who makes the save with his fingertips, knocking the ball over the bar, and the crowd goes crazy. The other type of goalie is the guy who's on the line where he's supposed to be, and when the ball comes, he takes it down without fuss. That's the kind of goalkeeper I admire, and the kind of actor I admire.

I don't know what type of an actor I am. I've never known. I'm sure there are people who hate me as an actor, and there are people who think I'm good. I've long ago ceased to worry about that kind of stuff. When I look back over my career, I don't regard anything that I've done as a mistake. Any mistakes were gigantic learning things for me. And every choice that I've made has been for absolutely the right reason, and has never been based on money or anything like that.

LOVE AND MARRIAGE
My marriage to Ellen Barkin ended recently, but this hasn't disillusioned me about marriage-not at all. I think that longevity, the yardstick by which most marriages-and indeed most relationships-are judged, is fundamentally erroneous. "Oh, so-and-so and s-and-so have been together for 40 years, so they have a successful marriage..." I don't see relationships in that way. Various relationships have different time-spans; your allotment with somebody could be 2 years, it could be 20 years, it could be 10 years. You don't enter a relationship just by accident; you're there not just to try and love the other person, but to try and learn something from them. And every relationship you have teaches you about life and about yourself. I don't regard a marriage as having failed simply because it ends. I believe that what happens is that you come to the mutual recognition of the ending of that particular path, and you must have the honesty to say, "I want to go somewhere else."

It's possible that I will get married again-put an ad in the Irish Messenger. "Respectable gent, early 40's, non-smoker, pioneer, wishes to meet respectable lady, with view to same"!

I'm not concerned about my children being in this situation. I was concerned for a long time, but I've seen the products of so-called "happy marriages," and they haven't been all that happy. There's no guarantee that just because you live with your parents up to the age of 18 or 19 or 20, you're going to be a well-adjusted, well-balanced individual. That's nonsense-if that was the case, the vast majority of people would be well-balanced and normal. And just because your parents are divorced, there's no reason to presuppose that you're going to be an emotionally damaged adult. Yes, divorce is traumatic, there's no getting away from that; but I think if you are honest with children and they know exactly what's going on, and they know that they are loved by both parents, the damage that divorce causes can be minimized. And myself and Ellen have been more than diligent about making sure that the kids are told, each step of the way, in their own language and in their own terms, exactly what is going on. So they're not being lied to, and they know they have two parents who love them.

I think that at a very early age they're beginning to understand that the nature of love is not simply black and white-that just because you marry somebody when you're 24 or 25 doesn't mean that you have to stay with them for the rest of your life because convention says so. I don't think so, and I'm here to prove it.

LOVE SCENES
Making love on screen is quite different from the real thing, but for the most part I've been very lucky with the women I've worked with-Kim Bassinger, Bridget Fonda, Kathleen Turner, Greta Scacchi, Lena Olin, Julia Ormond, Melanie Griffith, Nastassya Kinski, Winona Ryder, Faye Dunaway, Barbara Hershey...You have to have a rapport with them; they're as scared as you are about it.

I don't do sex scenes any more. I feel I've gone past that kind of thing. I look at any scene and ask, "Is it absolutely necessary?" If not, I get it cut.

Working in such close proximity to beautiful women has been called an occupational hazard; but I think that people who work I offices, staff rooms, boardrooms-anyone who works in close proximity to anyone else-will have the same kind of temptation.'

Infidelity is not confined to Hollywood; it's no more prevalent in Hollywood or on movie sets than it is anywhere. I know a great many people in Hollywood who have incredibly successful and happy marriages. Hollywood is held up as an example, in some way, of what we all aspire to, and so it's under microscopic examination. If somebody there breaks up with his wife or whatever, everyone says, "Ah, typical Hollywood"; but the guy down the road could have broken up with his wife. People who live in Hollywood have exactly the same problems as everybody else. The truth is that 50 percent of American children are the product of divorce, and they don't all live in Hollywood. To be honest, Dublin was a great preparation for Hollywood. Dublin can be a very bitchy, backstabbing, gossipy backwater, far worse than Hollywood.

BEING IRISH
When you leave Ireland and go away somewhere else, you never really belong in Ireland again. It's a peculiar dilemma that everybody who leaves their own country has to deal with at one stage or another. There's the danger of being in limbo-not really belonging in Los Angeles, not really belonging in Dublin. I now regard myself as not belonging in anywhere really. My roots are in Ireland, I am Irish, I am very proud of being Irish; I live in America, but I also live in Ireland; and I'm very lucky to be able to do that.

BEING IRISH IN ENGLAND
Although I lived in England, I never really belonged there. I think most Irish people don't belong there. I used to go to Camden Town and Cricklewood and see Irish people who should never have left their native places, desperately trying to recreate some nostalgic Ireland that no longer existed, in these bars called the King George or the Dog and Duck or the King's Head. And I used to wonder what these people were doing there, and what protection they had from prejudice and discrimination. The answer was none. And I realized that what happened to Gerry Conlon and the Guildford Four could happen to any Irish person, or indeed to any repressed minority. And the irony was that the Guildford Four were from the North of Ireland, so I suppose they would be classified as citizens of the United Kingdom.

When I go to England and I'm stopped by a big policeman at the desk at Heathrow-and this happened to me about 5 years ago-I can't help but rise up in bile against him, because he took my passport, which was stamped from almost every country in the world, and he said to me in that supercilious questioning voice they have, "Are we going on holidays, sir?" I said, "I don't remember asking you to go on holidays with me." I knew soon as the words were out of my mouth that I'd be pulled aside and taken in. They brought me to a room-and it's a short step from there to being held under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, and I suddenly saw how this could happen. Fortunately this other guy recognized me from some movie that he'd seen.

BEING AN IRISH ACTOR
When I went into American movies, I had to play American roles, and I often say to American actors, "If you had to do a different accent every time you got a job, you'd know what it's like. It's a relief now to be able to play the character Irish if I want, play it American if I want.

I'm tired of going through movies playing Germans, Italians, Israelis, Spaniards, French, English...I've played all those nationalities, but I never really played Irish until I acted in the Coen brothers' Miller's Crossing. That was a very important movie for me, because it made a different. I made it in 1989; I'd just gone to America, and it helped me to become known to American audiences. I played a gangster, and I chose to play the part as Irish because that's what I am, I'm Irish. And Miller's Crossing became an Irish movie because I came into it; it became uniquely what it is, an Irish-flavored American period gangster movie.

People have complained to me that it was stereotyping for me, an Irishman, to play a drunken writer in A Dangerous Woman. This is ridiculous, ridiculous criticism. Just because you're Irish you can't play people who drink? The truth is that this was a character who was in great pain, who was very lonely, and who drank to relieve his loneliness. He was a fully rounded character of depth, he wasn't a stereotype, and anyone who thinks it's a stereotype really doesn't understand the film or the character.

I don't believe in playing Irish stereotypes-badly written, ill-conceived, generalized stereotypes written usually by people outside this country. Why should I perpetuate that myth by playing these appalling characters? Why should I contribute to that? Hopefully, I won't have to do it. To me, it's my choice; but I don't blame other actors who do it, because actors are not supposed to be politicized in any way. That's what Mephisto was about: an actor who could be manipulated by the Nazis to do whatever they wanted him to do. I think that every artistic choice is, in the end, a political act; and that not being politically aware of what's happening in the world about you is naove and dangerous.