This much I know: Anne Gildea

I’ve always had a wry, Beckettian view of the world — we try so hard, but ultimately we are all going to die.

My first love was art. I did it for the Leaving Cert and even won a Texaco prize and had a painting in their calendar one year.

I was an outgoing child and, although I was a pretty good student, I was a bit of a joker down the back of the class. I knew I wanted to go to college and became an excellent last minute crammer for exams, able to learn off huge tracts of stuff, including words that I didn’t even know the meaning of.

I grew up on a small farm in rural Ireland in the ’70s. We never went anywhere. I don’t remember holidays by the sea side or anything, although I might have gone to the cinema once or twice. But I always loved performing. I went to a Catholic convent and our school concerts were a big thing for me.

If I wasn’t a performer, I’d be probably be working in television now.

I hate tidying, although there’s always a voice in my mind telling me to be more organised. I’m the biggest slob around the house, it’s chaotic. There is regularly no food in the fridge.

My family moved to Sligo from the UK when I was five and a half and I always felt like a bit of an outsider. When you feel like that, there’s great power in comedy.

I did some acting when I was studying Communications in DCU and then I moved to London and started temping in British Gas. I’d scour the back of Time Out and City Limits and started doing acting and improvisation workshops. Then I got a drama scholarship from The Academy of Live and Recorded Arts.

I never had any money. The worst job, which I did for years, was as a wench in a medieval restaurant at Tower Bridge. I kept going back as it was the kind of cash-in-hand job that you could just roll up to.

Eventually, I realised I needed to go back to Ireland. When I moved back, in the mid-’80s, Dublin was quite miserable — there was no money around and everyone was on the dole, but I look back very fondly on that time as it’s when Ireland finally started to really feel like home. I began to do comedy and my brother — comedian Kevin Gildea — has always been massively supportive.

One thing I hate about our society is the weird attitude to authority, how we tolerate corruption.

I’m not great on balance, I can be quite obsessive. I have a bad habit of putting work before everything else. First time round with The Nualas, at the end of every day I still seemed to have a million things to get done.

I was diagnosed with cancer seventeen months ago and finished treatment in March.

It’s still too soon to say how the experience has changed me but I’m certainly trying to be more chilled and less hard on myself.

We all seem to have this thing around thinking that everything is our choice — but, so far, life has taught me that’s not the case — everything changes and you can take nothing for granted.

Anne Gildea speaks at a free symposium “The Experience of Illness — Learning from the Arts” at UCC on Saturday, Dec 1. (The symposium runs over Nov 30 and Dec 1). The Nualas: Christmas Special is at The Button Factory, Temple Bar, Dublin on Sunday, Dec 16.