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Wednesday, December 17, 2008

The Telegraph........

Dervla Kirwan: whirling Dervla
By Lucy Cavendish
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This is what happens when Dervla Kirwan and I arrange to meet. We are going to have brunch at the Wolseley restaurant in London at 11.30am. The table is booked in my name. I get there bang on time and then I wait. The clock ticks on. I wait some more. I call Kirwan's PR, who tells me, in a very authoritative manner, that she is already here. 'No, she's not!' I squeak. But, as I am in mid-protest, a very attractive dark-haired lady, who is sitting with her back to me, turns around. She is unmistakably the former Ballykissangel actress Dervla Kirwan.

It turns out that this is a very good way to meet someone. It is such an icebreaker – all that apologising and the 'it's my faulte_SSRq, 'no, it's my fault' banter – that within minutes we are gossiping away as if we are old friends. For this is the strange thing about Kirwan. She is somehow immensely approachable yet interestingly intense. She has such a darkly pretty face – all pale skin and big eyes and a mass of brown hair – it's impossible to stop staring at her.
This Christmas she is about to become even more stared at when she graces our screens in the Doctor Who Christmas special. She plays the evil Miss Hartigan, controller of the Cybermen. 'It's all fun and games and Christmas spirit,' she says. 'But I am purely and simply a baddie. Twelve-year-old boys are going to love me.'

But then who wouldn't love That Voice? Kirwan is the woman in the M&S adverts who says, 'This is not just chocolate pudding. This is M &  S…' spoken as if someone is about to have a sexual encounter. 'They were toned down!' she says, laughing. 'I went and auditioned and I had a cold so my voice was husky and they loved it.' She says that she made the voice-overs as sexy as she could. 'I went totally over the top. When I hear them on the radio I can't stop laughing. I can barely believe it's me.'

Before M&S – which has now replaced her with David Jason and Joan Collins – she was best known for playing Assumpta Fitzgerald, the ballsy bar owner in the BBC series Ballykissangel. 'That was ages ago,' says Kirwan, tucking into a ham omelette. 'I was only 23. Do people really think of that when they think of me?' Yes, I say. I tell her that the programme seemed less schmaltzy than other Sunday night fare, and she agrees that it initially had an edge to it. Kirwan's character spent most of the first series clashing with the English priest, Father Peter Clifford, played by Stephen Tompkinson. When he and Kirwan got together during filming the media went into overdrive. 'It was sort of a feel-good thing,' she says. 'Everyone loved the programme. They all wanted Assumpta and Father Pete to get together, which they couldn't, but in real life there Stephen and I were.'

Newspapers devoted endless column inches to the couple and, tangentially, Ballykissangel became one of the most popular Sunday night shows ever. However, while all this was going on, no one seemed to have noticed that Kirwan was getting monumentally bored. 'I think I've got some actor's form of ADHD,' she says. 'I just can't do the same thing day in, day out. I kept telling myself it was a great job to have and all that but, when it got to the third series, I felt as if I was on autopilot.' So she resigned. 'I know people loved Assumpta, but I just couldn't stand it in the end.'

Essentially, Kirwan walked out on a programme in its prime. Was that a crazy thing to do? 'I don't think so,' she says. 'I just didn't want to do it anymore.' Before Ballykissangel she'd left Goodnight Sweetheart, another Sunday night hit, starring Nicholas Lyndhurst, after three series as well. 'I just really don't want to do more than that at a time,' she says. 'I am quite a mercurial person. I can be a totally different person from one day to the next, so it is difficult for me to stay in one role over a prolonged period.'

She and Tompkinson stayed together and were engaged for two years. The wedding never happened, however, and they eventually split up. 'Look, I decided the best thing to do was to stay quiet about this,' she says. 'I haven't spoken about it for all these years because it would be disrespectful to do so. All I will say is that there were a lot of emotions and pain involved, especially as it was so public.' Tompkinson later married, but has parted from his wife, with whom he has a daughter.

Kirwan's husband is the actor Rupert Penry-Jones, who is most famous for having been in Spooks (and for apparently dating Kylie Minogue in the late 1990s). He generally either plays toffs such as Captain Wentworth in the ITV adaptation of Persuasion (clad in tight breeches) or spies – he was Maclean in the BBC drama Cambridge Spies. I find myself asking Kirwan what it's like waking up next to such a beautiful man. I don't know why I ask this, for Kirwan is very much her husband's equal in the beauty stakes. It's just that… 'He's more famous than me?' she says, raising an eyebrow. 'Well, it's lovely waking up next to him, but I know him in a way no one else does. He's my husband, so I know all the good bits and the bad bits. I bear that in mind when I think of all those female fans out there.'

The two met in 2001 when they were appearing in a JB Priestley play in Leeds and, early in the relationship, decided to keep a low profile. 'It really is possible,' she says, with a throaty laugh. 'Roo [her nickname for her husband] and I just keep ourselves very low-key. I can't stand it when I see people complain about press intrusion. Don't go to the parties! Don't fall out of the dress! Don't have dalliances with other people!' They moved from London to Hampshire earlier this year for the sake of their children, four-year-old Florence and two-year-old Peter. 'We both felt very strongly that we didn't want to bring our kids up in the city,' she says. 'The great thing about our jobs is that we don't have to be in London to do them and we can take time off.'
The children apparently love it in the countryside. 'It's all welly boots and dogs and making cakes,' she says. 'Roo took the summer off and so we all had a lovely time.' Yet Kirwan still worries, constantly. 'Oh, I fret about the kids all the time. You know, are they happy? Am I screwing them up? Have I got it right or wrong? I make breakfast for them and try to get them to eat fruit and yogurt while they throw toy cars at me. I mean, the human race wouldn't continue if anyone told you how hard it is having kids, would it?'

She says she worries less about her career. 'Well, let's be honest, it's not as if I'm inundated. I'm very truthful about these things. Roo is very much in demand and I'm not. I don't know why that is, but of course I ask myself those questions. Is it because I have had children? Well, Roo also has children and he is a devoted dad. We have both made a pact never to be apart or away from each other or the children for long periods of time, but that doesn't seem to affect his tally of job offers compared with mine. Is it my age? I'm 37 and I feel invisible as an actress sometimes. My husband can carry on being a male lead forever. He will probably end up being teamed with love interests half his age. I find that creepy but it happens all the time. For women over a certain age there's a limit to what you get offered…' It's worth noting that Penry-Jones, who will shortly appear in the BBC film The 39 Steps, is actually one year older than Kirwan.
Is she prepared for the surge of excitement that accompanies the Doctor Who Christmas special? 'I'm not sure. I know people feel passionate about it. It was such a fun thing to do, although slightly odd in that grown men are wandering around dressed up in plastic suits. The assistant director has to say the lines as no one can speak through the layers of plastic.' She has worked with David Tennant before in Casanova, where she played his mother, and with the writer Russell T Davies. 'I don't think I get the phenomenon as much as some people do,' she says, 'but I will be proud to show my children, when they are older, that I played an evil woman in charge of the Cybermen. That's pretty cool, isn't it?'

In an ideal world, although she does very well by television – her most recent performances were in the BBC dramas 55 Degrees North and True Dare Kiss – she would do more theatre. She has appeared in Billy Roche's Wexford Trilogy, Peter Hall's adaptation of An Absolute Turkey and last year was in Harold Pinter's Betrayal at the Donmar. 'I find a live audience stimulating,' she says. 'I like the fact that I can fit my life around theatre.'

She tells me that she started out in the theatre, moving from her home in the suburbs of Dublin to London, as a teenager. 'Jesus, I was very young,' she says. 'I got cast in a play that was on at the Bush Theatre in London so I left home and moved here when I was 16.' She describes it as a very scary time. 'I was lonely, I didn't know anyone. I was way too young to be in London on my own. You'd never get that now.' She almost went home, but feared where that might lead. 'My mother's ambition for me was no higher than to become an optician. No disrespect to opticians, but…' Her mother always worked. 'She's a language teacher and my father was in insurance,' she says. 'It wasn't glamorous but it was fine.' Her two older sisters still live in Ireland. 'They were better at school than me so I think their options felt broader. I wasn't interested in school. It was that boredom thing again. I just wanted to leave and get on with life.' She also wanted to escape her Catholic upbringing. 'It was a liberal Catholic upbringing, but at that time in Ireland it was all about religion, and religion didn't make sense to me. It really didn't. I struggled with it then and I struggle with it now.'

To avoid returning to her homeland Kirwan applied for a place at the Central School of Speech and Drama, and got in. 'I was so excited. I needed a break and I also needed something structured in my life.' However, at the time she was working with the director Neil Jordan and one of his producers told her not to go. 'He said, "You'll go for three years and then come out and do exactly what you are doing now. Why waste those years?"'

Kirwan turned down the place but regrets it now. 'Actually, I think it would have been a good thing for me to do. I ended up doing everything that other kids of my age were doing – going to parties, getting drunk, smoking spliffs – and I would have preferred to have been studying acting. I think I would have enjoyed it.' She ended up back in Ireland anyway, doing Ballykissangel. Do all roads lead back there eventually? 'No, I don't think so,' she says. 'But I have to say that I am not sure what I am doing yet. My future is unknown to me. That's a good way of putting it, isn't it?' Yes,I say, I think it probably is. Before she goes, I ask her to say just one sentence to me in her M&S voice. She laughs. 'I only do it as mobile phone messages for my friends,' she says. Does it freak out people when they hear her? 'Absolutely. That's exactly why I do it.'

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