It's all in the accent of an Irish star

She may have survived the sinking of the Titanic, but veteran Irish actress Fionnula Flanagan admits to be terrified during the making of The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood ... because of the accent she had to use.

In the terrifically-titled new movie, in which Flanagan plays Teensy, one of the ladies who get involved in a kidnapping, she had to come up with a Southern States drawl and she recalls it thus:

"Taking on both the accent and the character of someone from the Deep South was terrifying. I wanted to play the part of Teensy, but I was terrified, too. It's not just the accent, it's the whole sensibility. You hope you'll be able to absorb enough and learn enough of it in the few weeks that you have before you start shooting.

"Dialogue coach Lilene Mansell was great. She sent us all some fabulous interviews with people, some of whom were witnesses around the time Huey Long, the infamous Louisiana Governor, was shot!"

Oh yes, and you can add one more terror to Fionnula's list: "In the scenes where I have to drive a Rolls Royce I did my own stunt-work ... I was so terrified of that because I thought if there's even a scratch on it, I'll have to mortgage my house to pay for it. I was really driving it.

They didn't have it on a truck pulled by something. We did a couple of shots where we had a camera car, but that was it."

Flanagan, a renowned stage actress, survived the Titanic disaster by playing the 'unsinkable' Molly Brown in the episode of Voyagers. She also played Mrs Mills, Nicole Kidman's mysterious housekeeper, in last year's ghost hit, The Others and was in The Ewok Adventure.

She has a recurring role on Poltergeist: The Legacy and Beauty and the Beast and she has also chalked up three guest star appearances in Star Trek episodes of The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Enterprise.

In the original Ya-Ya book the part of Teensy was a fairly small one, but for the movie - in which Flanagan stars alongside Maggie Smith, Shirley Knight and Sandra Bullock - writer-director Callie Khouri beefed up the roles of the older gals and made them the comic relief in trying to patch up the relationship between mother Vivi and her estranged daughter.

During the movie, Flanagan chews constantly on gum, a device she admits was entirely her own idea: "Teensy is the only one of the characters who doesn't drink, so the cigarettes and gum were substitutes."

She loved meeting up and working with Smith and Knight: "I'd never met Maggie before, though I knew a lot of people she had worked with. We all hit it off right away."

Now, they all still keep in touch: "We spent so much time together during the shooting that when we were off we all went off together ... we stayed at the same hotel and hit all the nearby shopping malls and had our nails done together ... we even got food poisoning together. The restaurant was very nice and asked us back for a free meal. We passed on that!"