Culture That Made Me: Ciarán Hinds on Donal McCann, Cate Blanchett and Succession
Ciaran Hinds is one of the stars of The Dry, on RTÉ One. (Photo by Tolga Akmen / AFP)
Ciarán Hinds, 70, was born in Belfast. In 1981, he made his feature film debut in John Boorman’s Excalibur. Since then, he has won awards around the globe for his screen and stage work, including an Oscar nomination last year for Belfast. He lives between London and Paris with his actress wife Hélène Patarot. Their daughter, Aoife Hinds, is also an actor. He stars in The Dry, a comedy drama series which also features his wife, starting Wednesday, March 1, on RTÉ One.
People talk about the usual suspects – Al Pacino and Robert Di Nero, but for me Gene Hackman was a great actor. Pacino and Di Nero were kind of small, wiry men in trouble. Gene Hackman had a way of talking and being on screen, which was so easily truthful and dangerous and warm. He had a lot going on.
Succession is a phenomenal piece of work – the performances and writing. An extraordinary cast. It holds you. It’s horrible, but it's the horrible world we live in, the conflict in the family. At the same time, it's mesmeric and brilliantly done.
Peter Brook passed away last year at the age of 97. Hélène, my wife, worked with him quite a bit. We used to see him twice a year socially. He was still working the age of 94-95, still taking a play like The Tempest and reducing it to the essence of what it was all about. He was an extraordinary man and very warm and very funny. He had a beautiful wit.
I worked with Peter Brook on The Mahabharata, which was a two-year commitment. I was in my early thirties. It got me out of Britain and Ireland and moved me into mainstream Europe. I saw the world through completely different eyes. I was working in a company of 23 actors and five musicians, and 15 different nationalities. Suddenly, the world was not what I thought it was. Behaviour, manners, morals – it was all up for grabs. It was an extraordinary experience with an amazing group of people. We were doing this big, Indian epic, a 10-hour piece. Playing in canyons and quarries, all open air, all night, in Australia, over in America and Tokyo and Glasgow. It was a huge moment for me.
I don't think any of us who saw him will ever forget the great Donal McCann. He was extraordinary on a stage. It's hard to determine what it was he had – it was something magnetic and full of soul and danger. I remember he opened Brian Friel’s Faith Healer in Ireland around 1980. I didn't see it, but we worked together in a small film called December Bride. This was 10 years later. We were playing brothers. I was in awe of him. He was very generous with me. When we were going to work, he carried this play script in his pocket. He said, “Ah, I did it years ago. I have unfinished business with it.” He did it again about two years later and it was phenomenal.
Working with Conor McPherson as a writer-director has been one of the great joys of my life. He's gracious enough to say, “Well, look, lads, there's the page. There's a lot of black on it, that'll be the writing, but there's a lot of white on it as well, and that's what you guys will be bringing – the in-between stuff.” A true collaborator. The way he writes is special, beyond the here and now in his plays. They’re written very realistically. They’re about the human condition and memories but apart from the hardcore reality of the now, there's always something lurking somewhere else as well – that one's never sure about.
One of the greatest nights I've had in a theatre was seeing The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol. It was adapted from a book by John Berger, who was a leftfield art critic. He moved to the Haute-Savoie in south-eastern France. He lived and worked a farm there. He wrote this story about an old woman peasant who survived up there, through all seasons, on her own. Simon McBurney of Théâtre de Complicité adapted it for a theatrical experience. It was like something I hadn't seen before. It would put you in mind of Paddy Kavanagh’s Tarry Flynn – that rural landscape. It was thrilling, very different.
The Dragon’s Trilogy was a six-hour epic in the 1980s by Robert Lepage, the great Canadian director. It was spoken in French, English and Chinese. Even though you got lost in the story – because some of the language was inaccessible; there weren’t surtitles – you were taken into a completely new world, over a period of 80 years, of the history of Quebec, with all its immigration, and movement, and new blood coming in, and changing attitudes. It was jam-packed. An astounding feat of imagination and visual impulse.
The National Theatre of Scotland’s production of Gregory Burke’s Black Watch around 2006 was extraordinary – an epic piece on the history of the Black Watch regiment of the British Army. It was so inventive and creative and balletic and personal and dangerous.
Cate Blanchett is a brilliant film actress; on stage she is phenomenal as well. She has this easy magnetism. Whatever she does is done with such ease and yet the work itself is so complicated that it has to be technical and clear and free, interior and exterior. She has it all going on. I remember seeing her in Gross und Klein (Big and Small), a German play. When you're watching somebody, as brilliant as her in that play, time stops. You're in another world.
I finished Better Call Saul recently. I thought it was a work of genius. It's phenomenal. It’s a spin off from Breaking Bad, but it veers into this extraordinary world in its own right, with magnificent leading actors. Cool as can be.
I was passed a book called One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez in the 1980s. I didn't know of this man. I disappeared down this hole into another world – into a hot, steamy jungle. It was the most fantastic book. It led me back into literature because I had been spending so much time reading play scripts.
Joseph O’Connor’s Ghost Light is a beautiful book. It’s about the actress Molly Allgood and the end of her sad, tragic, lonely life in London, but full of memories of being an actor at the Abbey Theatre and her relationship with John Millington Synge. It’s such a delicate, beautifully crafted piece.
