Culture That Made Me: Irish actress Olwen Fouéré picks her touchstones
Olwen Fouéré is part of the Tradition Now festival at Dublin’s National Concert Hall. Picture: Rich Gilligan
Olwen Fouéré, 71, was born in Galway to French parents, growing up on the Aughris Head Peninsula. She has performed in lead theatrical roles across the globe, including London’s West End. In 2014, she received the prestigious Herald Archangel Award for her project and her outstanding contribution to the Edinburgh Festivals. Recent screen credits include and She will perform at the Tradition Now 2025 festival in Our Time in Space: A Tribute to Tim Robinson, Dublin’s National Concert Hall, 2pm, Sunday September 28. See: www.nhc.ie.
Charlie Chaplin was a genius – as a performer, as a creator. His physical comedy was incredibly funny. He had this wide range of states. His physical abilities were extraordinary. The movies he made cut into all sorts of societal injustices. Look at his film How he didn’t get shot for doing it.
Growing up, I remember being very affected by the wonderful Dirk Bogarde version. I used to re-quote his final lines: “It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done. It is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” Dirk Bogarde was such a wonderful actor.
It’s not that I particularly liked Roman Holiday, but there were certain scenes which affected me. I absolutely loved Gregory Peck. He was my first pin-up – I was about 10 or 11 and I had a photograph of him in my bedroom. He was good looking, a wonderful actor who had this incredibly powerful inner life. He didn't have to do much because he was really inside the character. He showed very little, but you were intrigued by what was going on with him. I don't know anything about him in real life, but he felt like he had a very rich inner life.
It’s like Lankum summon their music up from the earth. It's this reconnection with folk tradition, but also something more ancient. Also, it's mixed with the metal. Daragh and Ian Lynch had a punk band. It's that combination of elements. I always feel their concerts are like a dark ritual. They’re fantastic.
One of my biggest influences as a filmmaker, in terms of his aesthetic, his way of making films and the experience you have watching them, is Andrei Tarkovsky's films. He's a Russian filmmaker who left the Soviet Union. Probably his best-known film is which was made in 1979. He was the first filmmaker I saw who challenged the more western perception of filmmaking. His films most of the time had no real narrative, were quite nonlinear, and but they were experiential. There would be a whole shot which would go on for seven minutes without a cut. He went into surreal territory without any effects.
I'm fascinated by Wes Anderson's films. I’d love to work on one of his movies – I'll put that into the universe. It's the way he works. Sometimes, it’s like watching a play. It's very different. It's not like so-called real life. He uses the film medium in a particular way. They're so funny, kind of absurdist.
I love the concept of filming something in one space. Louis Malle filmed in a New York theatre. The actors got together for weeks, apparently, just rehearsing. They're chatting away. Then one of them says to the other: “How long have we known each other?” I did Uncle Vanya, so I knew that was the play’s first line. Slowly, the trappings of New York life fall away, and it's just them on stage. Slowly you see their clothes are changing a bit. Eventually there's nothing left of New York apart from one “I love New York” cup. Slowly a carriage’s sound effects come and you hear horses coming. The play comes alive in a different dimension. I love that – where the theatre becomes a film. He did it brilliantly.
I remember seeing Marie Kean in in the Abbey, probably the first Beckett production I saw. I love Beckett’s inner world. When people talk to me about Beckett, I always define him as the first playwright that made sense to me. I’ve subsequently worked with loads of Beckett stuff. For somebody to write a play for a woman who is buried up to her waist and then up to her neck – I hadn’t seen anything like that, ever. Yet it made total sense – that's what so-called real life is like. It was this environmental expression of her actual situation, internally, and how she dealt with it.
Marina Carr’s work creates alchemy, which produces something else you don't expect. You can be working on her plays, and there's something else going on which then acts upon you. I was sent an early script of It became an important play for me to do – I did the première. I remember when I finished reading it, I broke into floods of tears, but I didn't know why. Her work is like that. It works on you on a deeply subliminal, visceral level. She taps into your unconscious in a way that I can’t describe. It takes you by surprise.
The greatest theatrical event of my life was Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach. I saw a remounting of the original production in London’s Barbican about a dozen years ago. I went to see it again when it went to Amsterdam. It was an incredible production, five hours long. They made it almost 50 years ago. It put them on the map. The music is utterly riveting.
The best thing I saw this year was Oona Doherty’s dance piece Specky Clark. It was in the Abbey, part of the Dublin Dance Festival. It was a play through the medium of dance. It had an incredible musical score – a mix of David Holmes, Lankum. It was absurdist, biting, very contemporary in relation to Northern Ireland. It was brilliant.
In childhood, I loved Jack London’s novel. It's about a wild wolf dog's journey to domestication. It’s wonderful. He also wrote another one called Both are about wolf dogs. Basically, we’re animals. By the time we're born, we're domesticated. I've never fit into my domestication. I hate anything to do with domestication! I'm lucky to live in a house which came to me through inheritance, but I don't want to live in a house. I want to live in a big old warehouse. Anything domestic, I don’t like.
Rebecca Solnit’s talks about how the only way to walk or travel is to be lost, then you start learning other things, developing another instinct to find your way through the world. It's brilliant. I would recommend it.
I'm currently re-reading Cormac McCarthy's It's about the massacre of a people – the native Indians, in this instance – and, of course, that's going on at the moment. It's a powerful book.
