‘The more I tried, the less I got’ — Amy on actor’s life

AMY Huberman feared her acting career was over after the arrival of her children.

She reveals this in conversation with Mary McAleese in her new RTE series All Walks

of Life, in which six different guests go on pilgrim trails with the former president.

The Finding Joy actress opens up about the highs and lows of her career, being one half of the country’s most famous couple, and dealing with her father’s diagnosis with Parkinson’s disease.

As Amy (40) hikes along St Kevin’s Way in the Wicklow Mountains with McAleese, she says her career is still unpredictable. And she reveals she was convinced her acting was finished when daughter Sadie and son Billy were young.

“I genuinely thought it was over, I thought I was not going to get a job again. I felt the more I tried, the less I got. It can such a chaotic world at times where you’ve got very little control,” she says. But the unpredictability pushed her into writing her own material.

Meanwhile, she says she felt for her sports star husband Brian O’Driscoll when he had to exit his playing career. “It’s really hard, it just ends. One day you’re a player and the next day you’re not and it’s tied with such patriotism. You’ve played for your country.”

Amy says husband has emerged relatively unscathed from rugby.

“He’s actually surprisingly OK... I don’t know if he is going to suddenly fall apart and just be in pieces on the ground,” she laughs.

She also opens up about her fashion designer father’s attitude to being diagnosed with debilitating Parkinson’s disease in 2016.

“He’s incredible, he’s always done things his own way and I think he’s doing his illness in his own way

“I think I was in denial initially because he’s really positive and he’s really fun and he was able to laugh at himself and it. You kind of forget he’s not well.”

Amy was raised in a Catholic-Jewish household. “I feel fiercely proud of being Jewish. I don’t know many Jewish-Irish people. But I always say I’m ‘Jew-ish’,” she says. She travelled along with her father and his brother to visit Auschwitz. “It was incredibly moving. It was an incredibly powerful experience to go through that with my dad and his brother,” Amy says.

All Walks of Life — Amy Huberman is on Friday on RTE One at 8.30pm