‘He would tell me what I thought. It drove me insane. I used to throw plates’ — Smother star Fionnula Flanagan recalls her ‘tempestuous, wonderful’ second marriage
"‘Was I there? Did I have a good time? It’s all a blur." Smother star and 'Hollywood's Irish queen' Fionnula Flanagan. Photo: Andres Poveda
"Oh, I never reflect on anything. I never do. No, it puts me into depression. And then I would think I would just hurl myself under the nearest train. So I don’t reflect; I just get on with it, you know." Flanagan holding her Emmy Award in 1976 for her performance in Rich Man, Poor Man. Photo: Getty
“It’s always interesting to play a trollop,” Flanagan declares of her character, Caro, who features in the final season of Smother. Photo: RTÉ
Kathryn Holcomb and Fionnula Flanagan in The Scavengers in 1979. Photo: Getty
Trenna Keating and Flanagan in Defiance. Photo: Getty
“She rescued me,” says Fionnula Flanagan of her dog Betty, a poodle/terrier cross. Photo: Andres Poveda
When we meet to talk about her role as Caro in RTÉ series Smother, eminent actress Fionnula Flanagan is, well, smothered with a cough and a cold. Not that she’d have dreamed of cancelling the call.
You don’t get to be a woman in her ninth decade and still working continuously in a notoriously difficult industry without having a heck of a lot of determination.
Instead, she has stocked up on Exputex and Lemsip and keeps the tissues at hand as she chats from her home about love, marriage, second marriage, mansplaining, death, her infamous LA parties, being “a wicked stepmother”, the meaning of life, the ghost in her house… and her plan to sell up in California and live more permanently in Ireland.
In the third and current season — also the final one — of Smother, Caro joins the cast as the glamorous, flaky mother of matriarch Val, played by Dervla Kirwan. “It’s always interesting to play a trollop,” Flanagan declares. “Caro is a total hypocrite too. She does love her daughter and her granddaughters but her primary interest is herself; preserving herself a place to live and money in the bank. It’s much more interesting to play that kind of character than to play a goody-goody.”
Caro also accelerated the plot by warning Val that Paul, Val’s new husband, had previously known her unstable daughter Grace. “He gets his comeuppance, as they say,” Flanagan grins.
For the filming in Lahinch, Co Clare, she brought along her beloved dog Betty, named after the Betty Ford Institute, of which Flanagan’s late husband, psychiatrist Garrett O’Connor, was president and CEO for many years.
Today, Betty, an 11-year-old rescue — “She rescued me,” says Flanagan — has been to the groomers. Flanagan tilts the laptop to introduce the black terrier/poodle cross.
“She’s an emotional support dog, so she would travel with me, curled up like a doughnut in her bag at my feet. And she was better behaved than anybody else on the plane, including me. She was no trouble whatsoever.”
Airlines have recently clamped down on bringing dogs in the cabin, so Flanagan has had to leave Betty with friends when she travels. But she has another trick up her sleeve.
“I’m having her trained as a service dog. Once she’s trained, she’ll be able to travel with me in the plane.”
What does service dog training involve?
“Well, it’s rather complex. It’sactually done online, can you believe? The lessons are sent to me and then I do them with Betty. It’s really obedience training and she’s very biddable but she’s also a bit of a scallywag. So provided she doesn’t shit on anyone, bite anyone — those seem to be the criteria. And she’s never done that anyway.”
“She rescued me,” says Fionnula Flanagan of her dog Betty, a poodle/terrier cross. Photo: Andres Poveda
Flanagan is “terrified” of flying.
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“Always have been, but, you know, one has to get somewhere, somehow. Like, I’ve just come back from Belgium and that’s a relatively short trip,” she says, of a new film project where she and her “great pal” Dearbhla Molloy play “quite eccentric sisters in this extraordinary hotel”. Just over Flanagan’s shoulder, her suitcases are visible by the door.
Flanagan is hit with another coughing fit. “Excuse me, this is awful. I’m waiting for someone to come and offer me the role of Mimi, where I don’t have to sing, I just have to die,” she says drily, namechecking the tragic heroine of La Bohème.
Flanagan is a reluctant singer, though she sings in her upcoming role as Grandma’am in Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds andSnakes, a prequel to the juggernaut dystopian film series, and due out later this year.
“I had to sing and so that’s where most of my terror and energy got placed. We shot this prequel outside Berlin, and I had a wonderful Australian music teacher here in Wicklow who worked with me and she got me sort of up to speed where I could not disgrace myself.”
In 2017, Flanagan sang five songs in the play The Ferryman in New York, directed by Sam Mendes (American Beauty; 1917; Skyfall).
“I remember saying to Sam, ‘One of these is a poem that I know, because I learned it at school. So why don’t I just recite it?’ And he said, ‘No, you’ll sing it’. So I put everything else aside and I concentrated on the songs.”
This laser-like focus on the task at hand is the hallmark of Flanagan’s approach to life. She looks horrified when asked whether she reflects on the meaning of it all.
“Oh, I never reflect on anything. I never do. No, it puts me into depression. And then I would think I would just hurl myself under the nearest train. So I don’t reflect; I just get on with it, you know. It’s a daily process. Maggie Smith is a good friend of mine and she is of the same state of mind,” she adds, of the Downton Abbey actor. “You know, you just get on with it. I’m lucky to be here. Very lucky to be here.”
Born on December 10, 1941, Flanagan grew up in a council house in Whitehall, Dublin.
“I had fabulous parents,” she says, of the early experiences that shaped her. “My father Terence was a very brave man and he fought in Spain against Franco. It was difficult for all of them who went to Spain and fought against Franco, and they were accused of murdering nuns and priests and whatever. And so it was very difficult for those men and women to get a job after the war when they came back to Ireland.”
Her mother, Rosanna McGuirk Flanagan, was “a terrific manager”.
“It’s always interesting to play a trollop,” Flanagan declares of her character, Caro, who features in the final season of Smother. Photo: RTÉ
“I mean, we had no money at all. None.”
Flanagan trained in the Abbey, moved to LA in 1968 and has won Emmy and Ifta awards throughout a hugely successful career across film, TV and theatre.
She starred alongside Nicole Kidman in The Others.
“I think her marriage to Tom wascoming apart at the time so the production shut down twice for lengthy periods of time. It was very tense for her but she is a consummate actress and I enjoyed working with her only for that reason.”
She backed herself to the hilt to get the role of a hunger striker’s mother in Some Mother’s Son.
“I can’t remember who I said it to, but to somebody who mattered, I said, ‘I am the best person you could have for this part because I cannot imagine anybody would serve it as well’. And I believe that.”
Was there ever a wobble, a midlife crisis or a hard time that she now has a different perspective about?
“So I got married,” she laughs. “I got married twice. I mean to different people,” she clarifies, because no trace exists in the public domain about her first marriage and she won’t reveal his name to protect his privacy.
Did she marry him because of societal norms at the time?
“No, I was in love with him, that’s for sure. And he was very handsome. And he was the first man who ever told me that I was beautiful. That’s why I said to my stepsons, ‘You must tell your daughters that they’re beautiful even if you do not think they are. You must tell them so that they don’t go and turn around and marry the first guy who says, ‘You’re beautiful’.
“We got divorced and, yeah, he was a nice guy. A very good guy. My granddaughter said to me, ‘You were married before?’ And I said, ‘Yes’. And she said, ‘Why?’ and I said, ‘Because everybody has to rehearse!’ And then I was married to a terrific man who died just seven years ago and that was tempestuous and wonderful.”
She met Garrett O’Connor in Baltimore in 1969 while on a national tour of Brian Friel’s Lovers, the play that had brought her to the US. He was running the Psychiatric Emergency Clinic at Johns Hopkins University Hospital at the time. What was the dynamic between the actress and the psychiatrist?
Kathryn Holcomb and Fionnula Flanagan in The Scavengers in 1979. Photo: Getty
“Great. Except in a fight when he tells you what you really mean,” she says, wryly.
I think they call that mansplaining now, I tell her.
“Mansplaining. There you go. Perfect description. He would do that. And that would drive me insane. And at that time many years ago, I used to throw plates. There are marks on my floor in California where I threw plates. I don’t throw plates any longer. I mean, they’re very expensive to replace.”
What does she think that was all about now?
“What’s it all about, Alfie?” she muses, quoting the Burt Bacharach song. “Well, he had two children by a former marriage and they came to live with us. And I was totally unprepared for that. I mean, I’d had brothers but my goodness, they were terrorists in training when I got them,” she says, of Matthew and Turlough, who she says were aged 11 and 10.
“Terrible age!”
The challenges of stepmotherhood are fabled. “Particularly if you’re a wicked stepmother, as I was; a wicked, wicked stepmother. And at the time, there were no groups available. There was no psychological help available. There is now, of course, but then there really wasn’t. They weren’t interested in sitting gazing at their navels and talking about life or their inner thoughts or whatever. They just wanted to get out and play and get into divilment.
Trenna Keating and Flanagan in Defiance. Photo: Getty
“So finally we sent them to a boarding school that was on an island off the coast of California, a terrific school. But there were shark-infested waters between us and them, so we thought, ‘they’ll never run away’ and it all worked out fine in the end,” she chuckles.
“We all managed to weather it somehow. And today, they’re wonderful men. They’re absolutely wonderful men and they’re wonderful to me. They now have their own children and grandchildren in some cases. And so we soldier on and that’s lovely. They live in California. They have been here many times to Wicklow and they love it here, but they live in California and I wish they did not.”
She says this because the woman known in the Irish-American press as ‘Hollywood’s Irish queen’ is contemplating selling her LA home and settling permanently in Wicklow, while continuing to travel wherever work takes her.
“It’s quite a difficulty living between both America and Ireland and yes, I probably will vacate California pretty soon. I will sell it, yes,” she confirms of the property that shares a postcode with the 1990s TV drama, Beverly Hills 90210.
If only the walls could talk. Renowned for their hospitality, particularly to the Irish acting community arriving in Tinseltown, parties chez Fionnula and Garrett were legendary.
“People say to me, ‘Oh, I was at a fabulous party in your house in California!’ And they’d wax eloquent about it and the music and I’d say, ‘Was I there? Did I have a good time? It’s all a blur’.
“Yes, we did give good parties over the years, it’s true,” she says. “I’m very grateful for the many, many, many talented people who came and entertained us. At one point, we had a mariachi band there; I don’t know how they came, but they were there anyway and they did their mariachi music and they were all in their regalia.”
"‘Was I there? Did I have a good time? It’s all a blur." Smother star and 'Hollywood's Irish queen' Fionnula Flanagan. Photo: Andres Poveda
Would guests perform party pieces? “Oh no, it was much too noisy for that. That was my childhood where people did their party pieces and everybody kept quiet. But no, my parties were much too noisy.”
Her husband, a trailblazer in the field of addiction treatment, died in 2015. Though heartbroken, Flanagan has done a remarkable job of keeping the good side out, working hard and continuing on with grace and fortitude.
“Well, to be quite candid, it was work that saved me,” she says. “I think the BBC called me, or they called my agent, about six weeks after Garrett died and offered me a series and that saved my sanity and saved me moping around and feeling sorry for myself. So I went to work. For an actor, I think that’s the great salvation. And yes, I do, I miss him still. Of course I do. I hear a story that’s worth repeating and I think, ‘Where are you?’”
Where does she think he is?
“Ah! Where is he? You mean in an afterlife? I’ll tell you, there’s no room for him to be around in this house because it’s already occupied by another ghost,” she says of the home’s previous owner, a woman who died by drowning. Flanagan has found taps running after making sure to turn them off and says Betty the dog will often stand at the bottom of the stairs staring up at nothing.
“And I can call her till the cows come home. There actually have been two occasions when we’ve arrived here and she gets out of the car and she will not come into the house. She’ll sit on the gravel outside and I’ll have to carry her in. It doesn’t bother me because I don’t know what’s going on. It seems to bother her.”
Flanagan has a humorous attitude to life and death. When she won her Ifta Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012, she says: “...the first thing I did was check to see if other people before me who had got the award were a) alive and b) still employed. So I was happy to accept it, given that they were. But, no, it ain’t over yet.”
She is amused by the idea of people having five-year plans.
“Well, I’d quote the creature who’s on an ad on American television and says, ‘Break out the biscuits, the good biscuits’. I’d like to have enough. Listen, enough to eat, a place to be, friends around me, a car that goes — and Betty, of course.”
