This much I know: Eileen Walsh, Actor
But the actors choose to be there and the audience chooses to support the bravery of the people stepping out on stage. I once asked a fellow actor — why am I so scared?
He gave me this advice — you can either try chanting and meditating and repeating om shanti over and over and all that stuff — or, you can repeat what actor Niall Buggy had told him, ‘leap darling, theatre will always catch you’. That became my new mantra.
Home was Cork but now it’s north London. We’ve been living here for the last three and a half years when my husband Stuart started a postgraduate at The Royal College of Art.
My work continues to be mainly in Ireland, so I have to go through large periods of being separated from my family for a few weeks at a time, which can be really tricky. Sometimes, like when we were beginning rehearsing for DruidMurphy in March in Galway, the whole family can come with me which is wonderful, but it doesn’t always work out that way.
Tippy is six and a half and Ethel — or to give her her full name Ethel Rita Jeanne — is three and a half. Tippy has on occasion announced that she hates my job and she doesn’t want me to be an actor anymore.
I did a lot of Youth Theatre growing up so acting just seemed like the obvious next step for me when I left school.
Youth Theatre is such a massive grounding for any actor. It’s good to put yourself out there when you are young and fearless, it’s probably the bravest time of your life. Then, when you get older, you can tap into that fearlessness.
I never saw a career in acting as being even remotely glamorous. My sister Catherine is an actor too and she left home at 17 to do National Youth Theatre in Dublin. Whenever I went to stay with her, I got completely homesick, and saw close up exactly how much hard work was involved.
I know I’ve been very lucky in my career, right from the start, with the type of work that came my way and the type of people who approached me. I took it completely for granted back then, of course. It seemed simple — we were good and we knew we were good, but not in an egotistical kind of way. The insecurity only kicked in later on!
I was only 16 going on 17 when I did my Leaving Cert and got accepted to do drama in Trinity. They allowed me to defer for a year, so my parents urged me to repeat the Leaving to see if I could get into Arts in UCC. But, that Christmas, I got Danti-Dan with Rough Magic. And that summer Enda Walsh came up to me in Bewleys, said he was an actor who was starting to write, and that led to Disco Pigs. My parents had to accept that Arts in UCC just wasn’t going to happen for me.
I love running, and I love yoga. I don’t get as much time as I’d like to do either, but when I’m home I’ll nip into this amazing yoga studio on Douglas Street, just around the corner from where I live.
When I hit thirty I went through a short phase of thinking oh, this life is too hard, I want another one. I’d just had Tippy and thought, maybe I could become a mid-wife. The phase passed, naturally, but its surprising how many actors do become midwives. There are a lot of parallels, or course.
Eileen Walsh is appearing in DruidMurphy — Plays by Tom Murphy — Conversations on a Homecoming, A Whistle in the Dark, Famine at Clifden Arts Festival Sept 24-25, Inis Mór Sept 27, Inis Meáin Sept 28, The Mall Theatre, Tuam, Sept 29 and Dublin Theatre Festival, Oct 2-13 before heading to Washington DC.
