Culture That Made Me: Aidan Quinn on Brando, Billy Connolly, and West Cork travels
Aidan Quinn is currently starring in The Walsh Sisters on RTÉ.
Aidan Quinn, 66, grew up in Chicago as well as Dublin and Birr. In 1984, he made his film debut in later starring in movies such as and In 1988, he won a prestigious Theatre World Award for his performance in a production of He is married to the actress Elizabeth Bracco. He stars in Sunday nights, 9.30pm on RTÉ One.
My father was a professor of literature, so I was tripping around Beckett books my whole life. He forced me to do when I was nine years old. His friend was theatre director at the community college where he taught. At the last minute, the kid playing the boy in the play cancelled. My dad comes home and hands me this book and says, “This is what you're doing for the next six weeks.”
Reading it, I couldn’t understand what they were talking about. Then rehearsals started. This was 1968 so the cast were all hippies, in costumes, all cool and getting high. They'd start off normal, they'd disappear for a bit, then they'd come back, all giggling. I knew something had gone on out there, but I wasn't sure what, but whatever it was, it looked like a lot of fun. That was the first place I got bitten by the acting bug.
When I finished high school in the States, I went back to live in Dublin, with dreams of being a writer. I started to see bits and bobs of theatre. We're talking about 1977. There was lunchtime theatre at TCD Players in Trinity College. Some interesting young actors were doing Yeats’s and the Lady Gregory plays. I went as much for the food – for £1.50, you’d get a hunk of cheese, a piece of white bread, soup, and your lunchtime play as well. That whetted my appetite.
I remember driving around West Cork and Kerry in a Ford Cortina with my father driving, my mother in the front seat, my sister sitting on the handbrake, with four boys in the back, on a week-long vacation. The fights that went on in the backseat – there were so many times where someone was going to get left on the side of the road – and the laughter as well. And the cheese sandwiches you got in the pub back then – one piece of horrible cheese on terrible white bread. We were Yanks, having just moved back to Ireland, looking for McDonald's cheeseburgers or something edible.
What topped it off that year was seeing at the Project Arts Centre. Jim Sheridan directed it, with Gerard Mannix Flynn and Gabriel Byrne acting. It was very modern and raw. It was about the Irish prison system. The work that the Project Arts Centre did was very exciting. That got me thinking – man, I'd like to try my hand at that.
There's no more engrossing character to play on stage than Hamlet. I had a lot of his angst bred into me. Me and a friend of mine were outcasts in our school. We saw ourselves as poetic outsiders. It's obviously the most brilliant writing, too. I'm not an actor that was trained in drama school. I learned on the boards from the age of 19. Some actors would get a bit upset because my Hamlet performance could be different every night, depending on where it was going that night. It’s why you could never, ever beat the role of Hamlet. It has everything in it. Every night was a different ride.
Sebastian Barry is a brilliant writer. I remember seeing Donal McCann doing his play As Donal was doing a monologue, it was like I left my body. I completely forgot where I was. I was in that story he was telling. I remember waking up at the end of this monologue, and saying, “My God, we're in the theatre.”
It wasn't just me. I don’t mean to name drop, but I went with my good friend Liam Neeson, his wife Natasha Richardson, and my wife. We came out of the theatre like walking zombies, shaking our heads. “What have we just experienced?” That's how incredible it was. He was mesmerising.
Like most of the world, especially the male world, I was completely captivated by Brando, and the work he was doing, like We all completely looked up to him and his inventiveness and his improvisational thing. He was amazing to watch. He had incredible charisma, intelligence, wit, humour, and the capacity for deep emotions and tragedy.
Richard Pryor's documentaries were very big to us growing up. Whenever they put his one-man shows on in the cinema, we would all go, sometimes successive nights in a row because they were so funny. The way he mined the difficulties of growing up that all of us could relate to like the mother with the spoon.
Every single hit had a word to it: “Don't!” “Do!” “That!” “Ever!” “Again!” Those of us that grew up with corporal punishment in our family remember that. Or when the father's driving, reaching back, hitting as many as he could to tell them to stop messing back there. Whoever he could hit, it didn't matter. Terrible things that we would not do to our children anymore, but they're terribly funny when we recount them.
I've been blessed to become a friend of Billy Connolly. My wife did a movie with him, Stanley Tucci's Billy had a beautiful, big period home in Scotland – he called it “the castle”. We went there once a year, this big gathering with friends staying over for a week, having these big dinners. You'd have Robin Williams, Eric Idle, Sean Connery – this incredible group. They’d be one-upping each other at dinner.
At the end of that week, I had stomach muscles I'd never had, just from laughing. When Billy has a go at someone – there's a gentleness underneath it in the end – but you don't know because you think you're gonna get crucified. He's so funny.
At 19 and 20, I was obsessed with JP Donleavy’s His character Sebastian Dangerfield was also a Yank living in Ireland. There was that thing. The humour of it was great. Dunleavy understood Irish characters too.
I first tried reading Joyce’s Ulysses when I was 18 in a cold bedsit on Richmond Road next to Dublin’s Croke Park. I remember going to sleep, having read a section about horses coming down Richmond Road. I woke up hearing horses clanking down the road, glass bottles going back and forth. I thought, am I dreaming?
I pulled aside the lace curtain, looked out, and indeed, the milk was still being delivered by horse and carriage in glass bottles, along Richmond Road, just as I read in Ulysses the night before.
It took me almost 50 years to finish reading that book. Listening to Jim Norton doing the audiobook got me over the line. It's one of the highest feats of acting. He understood the musicality. He could do every dialect – from West Brit, Belfast, lower-class Dub, highfalutin Dublin 4, Cork, you name it. That’s how I got to really enjoy
