This much I know: Catherine Byrne, actor

I’ve always done what I wanted to do. I’ve just been very lucky. My husband John is the more patient and nicer person.

I’m very impatient. Luckily, my husband and sons are very tolerant people.

Unless you feel you are going to die if you don’t act, don’t act. I think it’s a vocation. You’re put down, you’re criticised and competing all the time. Even if you get good reviews, the one bad review will be the one you remember.

I do it because I enjoy being somebody else. To be a good actor you’ve got to be vulnerable — so you are open to being hurt all the time.

Fair City is intense for me at the moment. It took me ages to try and get to grips with television, having always done theatre. It’s a totally different process, having to learn four scripts a week.

When I was 46 I discovered sculpture. I left the business and spent a year at the Leitrim Sculpture Society. It was fantastic, mixing with different people and working with stone and wood and bronze. Now, I work mainly in stone, out in our garage and I go to Italy every year to sculpt. It is totally absorbing and so physical. Acting is physical too, of course, but requires you to work with other people.

I returned to acting, but three years after that I left again to work in IMMA for a spell. Then out of the blue, the role of Judith came up.

My father was the actor Eddie Byrne and my mother had been an actress before she married. When I went to school in the late 50s, I didn’t know anybody else whose father was an actor.

My school days were miserable, I’m dyslexic. Back then, people thought I was stupid and mocked me for my inability to read so I just clowned around.

I got a job doing window display in Arnotts, thanks to my sister who was working there — the rest of my family all have a very artistic bent. The bus stop for work was just outside The Abbey and I decided I’d like to be a costume designer there. But I ended up auditioning for the acting school.

My mother helped me prepare my audition pieces, she encouraged me like mad.

Patrick Mason had just started at The Abbey and luckily for me he realised that I had some kind of problem reading lines. He was very kind and told me that I could say my pieces really slowly and calmly.

So, I ended up working and going to acting school three nights a week. It’s hard to describe the effect it had on me — it just felt right. After I graduated, I didn’t get into The Abbey so I joined The Gate as an assistant stage manager and over the years I also worked in sound and as a dresser, before acting full time. I worked with every actor in Dublin.

I met my husband John (Olahan) when he was in the Young Abbey in the ’70s. It’s wonderful to be married to an actor as you each totally understand the demands of the other person’s work.

The biggest challenge in life has been losing my parents. My dad died first. Then my mother. She was the light of my life. When something good or terrible happens, the first thing I still think of is her phone number even though she’s 25 years dead.

I’m 58 now and when I look in the mirror I still think — I could do something else entirely.

Catherine Byrne plays Judith Dillon on Fair City at 8pm on RTÉ One.

Hilary Fennell