‘If you have something massive happen, and your heart is broken, you go, I can’t pretend anymore, I can’t pretend about anything anymore ’
that is a great thing to be able to pass on’. She doesn’t know any different. She thinks everybody is a singer at the moment. But she wants to be a doctor. I pray! Be my manager! Sort me out!” Does Aidan ever give her advice? “He does, he does. He is very supportive.”
On the few occasions I have met him, he seems shyer than Camille. “He is! He is!” she laughs. “How do we even talk to each other?” she laughs again.
“He’d be very honest, not in a brutal way, but he does say it as he sees it. He is quite clear. When I was in Edinburgh he came for the first night of Where Are We Now? Of course I feel freaked out performing in front of him. Luckily, he was nervous seeing me in shows too, because, I suppose, you want the other person to be good at what they do. Anyway, he loved it. I usually tell him, don’t come to the show.”
“It is a bit like parents,” Camille says before returning to the question of whether Aidan gives her advice. “With him, he’s great. He sat down and went through all my notes with me. ‘This would work better...Why don’t you do this?’ So, we are both good that way. I don’t really go too near what he does, because I think he is very clear in his mind.”
Camille is “clear in my mind but I like the advice. I like to discuss things. I need to talk about it.”
Talking to Camille O’Sullivan is a surreal experience in itself. It is like conversing with a woman who appears to be channelling the ghost — and the intensity — of the aforesaid Mr David Bowie, along with the equally intense spirits of Samuel Beckett, Lou Reed and perhaps Lady Macbeth. Camille simply doesn’t do conventional chit-chat very well, and nor would we want her to. She has too much of an interesting mind for that.
“You think you’re on one journey but as you get older, whatever you wanted or think you should be...” she begins at one point in our 90-minute conversation. “Then you lay yourself open to things that happen. I never thought that I would meet someone,” she says, “or how I would get on”.
“Like with Aidan, I met him once on a boat on an Icelandic blooming mountain. The volcano had exploded and we all had to get boats, instead of flying,” she laughs. “But, I think what was nice is that I hadn’t a TV so I had never seen him in his films. I knew he was an actor, but I didn’t know his work. So it was only later that I said, ‘Start stalking me now — now that I see what you can do!’” This is presumably a reference to the scheming Machiavellian Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish character in Game Of Thrones that Aidan played until recently when he met his gruesome end at the hands of the Stark sisters.
“If you have had something massive happen and your heart is broken — Mike and the 20 or so before him!” she roars with laughter — “you just kind of go: ‘I can’t pretend any more. I can’t pretend about anything any more. This is what you get. So this is what I look like most days. And this is me mostly without make-up. And this is me falling apart. And this is me whatever.’
“It was really liberating, because you think, yes, there is great sides to you which is fun but maybe all the previous relationships didn’t work because I was probably trying to do something I wasn’t. Also, I didn’t really think I would meet anyone else because, to be honest, when you have a little person, all you can think about is her. She is everything to me, I think also when you have a child everything goes. I don’t include her in social media to protect her but also to let myself know that I am also a person in my own right. I love being a mum but that is not everything I am about. I think it is very important in a relationship to let them do their thing, you do your thing and your child does her thing. I see things through her eyes and don’t think about myself all the time. That is a real blessing, especially as a performer...”
It is nigh-on exhausting just to listen to Camille reel off the projects (upcoming shows in London, New York, Dublin — the Olympia on November 17 — plus a live album of Jacques Brel songs out next week, Woyzeck in Winter at the Gaiety next month, Lucrece at the Gate next March) she is involved in on a seemingly endless basis. Camille never appears to switch off or indeed chill out.
“I actually did,” she laughs. “I went to Brighton recently and ate ice creams and went on funfairs. Aidan thinks my daughter has been on more Ferris wheels and carousels than most people in their lifetime.” Camille also took her daughter bungee jumping in Edinburgh. “Then we got the train to Brighton at 6am and went to a water park in Brighton. Aidan was laughing because the water was freezing and there’s me and my daughter trying to swim in the thing! It was a lovely break for me. My daughter remembers all these things.”
Unsurprisingly, Camille has carried forth this from her own childhood. “I remember myself as a child in France, smiling and beaming on this little carousel in Bordeaux where my mum was.”
She can remember when she was “really tiny” playing in the kitchen in Kent with spoons and “messing” with her sister Victoria on a “pink and yellow” bed. She also remembers the “joyful moments” of travelling to France to my “petite grandmother with the red hair and she plaiting my hair while I was having hot chocolate. It was a very different type of eating experience in that house where food was everything.’’ Camille recalls her cousin Didier crying once because he had missed his lunch. “And he was in his 20s.
Lunch is very important in France! My dad felt so bad and he brought him go-carting. I also remember as children the table went out around the corner into the hallway. The French thing was very strong”
Is it still strong now? What is a lunch experience like for Camille now? “It is a disaster. My daughter has an au pair while I’m working . Mike is away with his wife in New York with their baby. But I cook her fish pie, shepherd’s pie, chicken, mash potatoes and peas made into little faces. And pizza! I would be pretty practical, too!” This despite Camille when she was a young child in Co Cork seeing Dorothy in The Wizard Of Oz on the telly, and telling herself: “I want to be in there.” Somehow you doubt Camille O’Sullivan has revised her opinion much since.