When girls just want to have fun
Although she plays the ‘elder lemon’ in Calendar Girls, actress, Gerry McLoughlin, says her character, Jessie, a retired school teacher, is the first to agree to strip off for a good cause. The play, which runs at the Everyman theatre in Cork from October 3-13, is based on the film starring Helen Mirren and Julie Walters. That was in turn inspired by the true story of a group of English women from the Women’s Institute, who agreed to be photographed nude for a calendar to raise money for a comfortable sofa for the waiting room in their local hospital.
In the play, their decision is sparked by the main character’s husband’s death from leukaemia at a young age. Annie (played by Paula McGlinchey) wants her husband to be remembered, while also doing something practical for visitors to the hospital.
