Fame was awful...now people go naked on TV to get publicity!
The Commitments made her a genuine star – and she hated it. Now Angeline Ball has some hard words for today’s wannabes
ANGELINE Ball is walking out of a tube station in London when a passer-by clocks her, something that has followed her for more than 26 years since she played sultry singer Imelda Quirke in The Commitments.
The situation normally plays out and she ignores it, puts her head down and carries on her daily commute.
But today is different. ‘I think he was trying to be smart,’ she reveals. ‘He said to his friend that he had just seen Imelda. I just rolled my eyes and then he said, “That one from The Commitments, Imelda May.” ‘I was about to turn around to him and correct him that it was Imelda Quirke. I should have but I let it go.’
In the immediate years after Alan Parker’s hit movie in 1991, Angeline just struggled with the fame and instant celebrity.
‘For a time I ceased to be Angeline and I became Imelda,’ she says with great acceptance. ‘It is 27 years since we made it and it is a character I detested for a long while, and now I don’t know. Youth is wasted on the young. It is a funny thing that I can now say I am happy about it. If anything I have to look objectively about it and say I would be jealous if I wasn’t in that film.’
It is just after 3pm in the luxurious surroundings of Dublin’s Radisson St Helen and the flowers in the manicured gardens are in full bloom. Angeline sits at a wooden table cradling a cup of tea as the shade from the stately house has eclipsed the warm afternoon sunshine.
‘It may be almost three decades since she made The Commitments but she could easily have filmed that role last year. She is fresh-faced with a glint in her eye and an infectious laugh.
Eyes peer out of the glass-encased lounge as one by one, diners clock the actor who famously played Imelda Quirke. If she had a love/hate relationship with the role that both made and consumed her she has made her peace with it.
‘What made me get into acting? I think it was The Commitments. I enjoyed the work ethic and I enjoyed doing it. I love acting. I don’t really like the publicity, going to the opening of envelopes, which I don’t do.
‘I only do what I have to do. I love acting as a craft and creating a character and being on set. I don’t like the rest of the trappings and losing your anonymity. I am now leaning towards singing again. I kind of missed it and I didn’t realise how much I did until I started doing it again.
‘As a woman as you get older, the doors close and you get a bit tired of waiting to hear if you have got a job or not.
‘If I did music, sometimes you can create your own work and you don’t have to wait for a yes or no.
‘Auditioning is really tough – I don’t care what anyone says. It is horrible. It is like going for a job interview every week. It is not the best way to earn a living.’
Back when Jimmy Rabbitte got the band together, Angeline, along with Glen Hansard, Andrew Strong, Maria Doyle Kennedy and Bronagh Gallagher became overnight national treasures.
It was the sort of instant stardom that modern-day fame-seekers are so desperate to find through social media and reality TV. But it was a level of celebrity that to this day doesn’t sit well with Angeline.
‘When The Commitments came along it was awful, we didn’t want to be famous. Nowadays it is different – because of social media, people equate fame with money.
‘I certainly didn’t want that. There are celebrities who crave that attention but there are also people who don’t like it and crave privacy.
‘Before I did The Commitments I would have said ‘‘Wouldn’t it be great?’’ and then it exploded and it wasn’t what I wanted.
‘These days you watch as people get instantly famous and it either works for them or they become public car crashes and it is awful. There is no line between their private and public life and you wonder what they are famous for.
‘In many cases it is for being naked on television and it is silly. And if they haven’t got anything of substance to back it up, that fame tends to be a very short-lived 15 minutes in the spotlight and they can’t deal with the fallout.
‘I am old school – I find it all a bit too much. For me it is about doing a job that I love. And it helps that I get paid for it.’
It is true that Angeline doesn’t court the media. You won’t find online snaps of her falling out of nightclubs or sunning herself on sandy beaches. She is all about the work.
She was in John Boorman’s The General. She received rave notices – and an IFTA Award – for her 2002 role as Nora in Any Time Now. In 2003, she starred as Molly in Bloom, the movie adaptation of Joyce’s Ulysses, and later on appeared in Albert Nobbs with Glenn Close.
Angeline also worked with a certain Marlon Brando on the ill-fated Divine Rapture, the movie that collapsed just two weeks into filming in 1995.
‘You had all these incredible actors like Deborah Winger, Marlon Brando and Johnny Depp in Ballycotton. It was around the time of the hysteria over the moving statues.
‘Someone had written this great script about this priest who pretended that these statues were moving to bring the community together and bring in tourists.
‘We all went down there and Brando arrived – he was staying in Darina Allen’s house and they used to say “the Eagle had landed” when he got there in a stretch limo.
‘He was pretty big then but he was lovely. He could be a bit naughty and controversial and I met him a couple of times. I had to
Brando’s eyes were really, really blue and he was charming and kind of flirting with me
run by him in a scene and he called me back and asked: “Could you just run by a little slower?”’
Another time, Angeline was walking through the woods when she passed Brando and his entourage. He stopped and eyeing her up said: ‘And in the woods too…’
‘The one main thing I couldn’t get over was that he had the bluest eyes, really, really blue, and he was charming and kind of flirting with me,’ she says. ‘That was amazing. Then one day it was pulled.’
Her latest venture had no such financial problems as she is part of RTÉ drama’s latest big budget offering Acceptable Risk, spearheaded by Jane Gogan who greenlighted Love/Hate.
The drama is played out in Dublin and Montréal and begins when Lee Manning (Paul Popowich), a top executive for a multinational company, is shot and dumped in the middle of Montréal while on a business trip. His wife Sarah Manning (Elaine Cassidy) is devastated by the death of her husband and she struggles in the aftermath of her loss. Angeline plays investigating garda detective Emer Byrne, who is convinced this is not a straightforward case, and Sarah is not as innocent as she seems. It is a part that Angeline has already made her own. ‘I was lucky enough to have met a female detective inspector who helped me with the character. She was amazing and she wasn’t what I would have imagined whatsoever – we talked a lot about the job. ‘There have been a lot of cop shows – some have been done well and others are bad so it is taking what you want from them.’ And there’s a lot to live up to as well. ‘The first main female protagonist in that genre was Helen Mirren in Prime Suspect and she set the bar. ‘It was to be true to the character and I wanted to make her slightly invisible because these people are in bars in the city centre at night and you have no idea that they are on a stakeout. That is intriguing; to be present but invisible. ‘I don’t go down the Daniel Day Lewis path and bring it home. I did my research and my own background on Emer Byrne and I built her from the script and the clues about her there. ‘I call it my Columbo look, the hair, no make-up and the Columbo jacket with the hood. I wanted to make her more north Dublin because she straddles the line between drug dealers and people’s fancy houses in D4.’
ACCEPTABLE Risk has already been muted as a success and the IFTA winning actor is very happy with the two episodes she has already viewed. It’s about someone realising that they never really knew their husband at all, begging the question how much do we really know our partners? So did she think about looking up her own partner Patrice, a French graphic designer form near Marseille?
‘I think if someone comes from a different country you don’t know anything about them before you meet. The world is getting smaller and people are meeting from all over the place.
‘You always read these stories in magazines of this girl who got involved with a guy and usually they turn out to be rats and have fleeced them of all their money... It is like Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.’
But as far as Angeline is concerned, work gets left behind when she shuts her front door.
‘If you do your homework and your research you can tap into a character quickly when you are running your lines,’ she says.
‘I don’t bring my work home with me, I couldn’t do method acting and I wouldn’t want to be with a method actor.
‘Each to their own and whatever works for you but you have to give your own life some breathing space. We are not saving lives here. It is just acting.’ The first episode of Acceptable Risk airs tomorrow on RTÉ One at 9.30pm. The series will run for six weeks.