Sad decline of an acting great
ACTRESS ★★★★★ Anne Enright
Jonathan Cape, £16.99
GLAMOROUS actress Katherine O’Dell takes centre stage in the glorious seventh novel from Booker Prize-winner Anne Enright as we follow her trajectory from a youthful and glittering Hollywood heyday to depression and madness in Dublin.
Born in London to parents in a travelling theatre company, Katherine found fame in small venues in rural Ireland then was reinvented by the film industry as an Irish colleen. But before long, she became too old – by Hollywood standards – for the big screen.
Observing from the sidelines is Norah, her daughter and narrator of this absorbing book, describing her complicated relationship with her mother. Much as she loves her, she’s also slightly wary of her.
She finds it exhausting being the child of someone famous and it’s hard to trust the emotions of a mother who spends so much of her life “pretending”, especially as Katherine shares the tricks of the trade with her daughter.
She conjures a look of love by imagining “cherry blossom… drifting on the wind”, her eyes soft and fond, and it is exactly this look that Katherine O’Dell turned on her beloved daughter “by the tree-load”.
As well as the mother/ daughter relationship, Enright explores more dangerous passions, the violence of Bloody Sunday and its aftermath, and violation – both women were victims of sadistic sexual assault. “We were,” Norah says, “all half mad in those days. The men were beside themselves, the women were always crying”.
This makes the novel sound gloomy and indeed there is darkness aplenty as Katherine succumbs to madness, shoots a producer in the foot and is sectioned in a psychiatric ward. But Enright’s prose is so beautiful that even the shadows are graced with flickers of light.
It helps that Enright has a keen eye for absurdity. There are tales of Katherine’s father, the “gorgeous” Fitz, and her mother Margaret who “played milkmaids, abandoned sweethearts” and stories of life on the road with the theatre company, where actors visit small Irish towns, sourcing timber for the scenery from the local undertaker and selling it back to him after the run to be made into coffins, the scenery still visible on the inside.
Enright is brilliant on tracing Katherine’s transformation from the London-born “littlest mouse… scurrying around” with plain brown hair, to an Irish flame-haired Hollywood star, until she wasn’t any more.
And Katherine’s return home to Dublin is enthralling, forming the backdrop to her slow decline into depression.
Actress is an elegant novel, examining the corrosive nature of celebrity while taking a canny, candid look at maternal love and daughterly affection.
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