"You know, people here don’t really know what I do! I could probably count the number of people who’ve actually seen my work on the fingers of one hand," said Kate, as we sat drinking coffee on a sofa in the house that she proudly described as having once been her grandmother’s. Living on the Sky Road, just outside Clifden, Kate O’Toole is justly proud of her recent British Arts Council Barclay’s Theatre Award.
The petite white gold tumbler-shaped trophy, engraved and resplendent with her name and title ‘Best Actress 2001’, nestled in a sumptuous satin lined box placed unobtrusively beside the TV. She was unexpectedly nominated for the award for her performances last year in a play called ‘Three Tall Women’ by Edward Albee.
The production toured extensively in Ireland after a two month opening series at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, but was actually curtailed by the foot and mouth epidemic. Starting in the North, it immediately attracted great critical acclaim. It also led to Kate’s nomination for this prestigious major award - previous winners of which have included Kevin Spacey and many other top artistes. As an indicator of the calibre of this competition, all productions outside the West End as well as other ex-West End touring productions - over 700 shows - were eligible for nomination.
Genuinely surprised even to be nominated for the Barclays Theatre Best Actress Award, Kate only knew of her nomination when she received a letter from the organisers to that effect. To have actually won the award was more than she could ever dared hope, she remarked. The award ceremony took place in London and was apparently one of those posh-frock, glittering occasions that most of only glimpse on television.
Kate has since been nominated for yet another prestigious award - again for Best Actress - in the Irish Theatre Awards, sponsored by the Irish Times. Once again, said Kate, she had no warning of her nomination, just a simple letter from the organisers. Of course, to win such an important award on her home territory would be very special indeed, but Kate characteristically played down her chances of doing so by saying it would be, "too much to get two in a row!"
This nomination was for her part in a play called ‘Dead Funny’ by Terry Johnson. She described the play as a farce in the truest sense of the word. "It was all running about the stage in knickers and gratuitous custard-pie throwing," said Kate who, as part of her preparation for the role, was required to study the ‘Buster Keaton Method of Custard Pie Throwing’. She quipped, "there’s even a special ‘Comedy Recipe’ for custard pies - with extra stickiness - did you know that?" The award ceremony for the Irish Theatre Awards is due to be held in Dublin in early February, so Kate does not have long to wait to know the outcome of her nomination.
This year has, in this sense, been a turning point for Kate O’Toole. Like all actors, her career in theatre and film has been punctuated with lengthy periods of inactivity. Her biggest ‘gap’ so far has been a period of six years without acting work. Even then, she said, her TV ‘voice-over’ work kept her going. She is, you may or may not know, quite famous for her work in advertising. She was for some time the voice of Scottish Widows and McLean’s Toothpaste, to name but two.
She described doing voice-overs as, "incredibly easy money - just ten minutes in the studio and they give you three hundred quid! Mind you, that’s fine if you’re living close to Dublin and can pop in at a couple of hours’ notice and do two or three of them. With me living out here, though, it became a case of dashing into Galway, sitting on the train for three and a half hours to Dublin, racing into the studio - all for ten minutes - and then doing the whole return journey all over again. So I don’t do so much now."
Her approach to her career is philosophical, though, and she insists that you need a structure in your life to be able to cope with the uncertainty. She knows of actors who sit around the house all day watching daytime TV and getting depressed about lack of work. Her own approach is to set the alarm clock in the morning to get out gardening for a full eight hour day. "You have to create a life for yourself, invent things to do - like this house."
Her grandmother’s house is a stone cottage that had been ‘messed about with’ many years ago, said Kate. It had been allowed to go derelict of late and its renovation had become a recent major project. She talked animatedly about her time in the house as she grew up there with the whole family. There had been her grandmother, her father (who is, of course, the famous actor, Peter O’Toole), her mother (who is the equally famous actress Sîan Phillips) and the two girls, Kate herself and her sister, Patricia.
Her father built ‘the big house’ nearby in the late sixties, she said, and that then became the family house while her grandmother retained the small stone cottage. Her grandmother, Mrs Phillips, was, said Kate, a local personality in and around Clifden. "My grandmother was, of course, pure Welsh," she said, "but her association with Ireland began when she came over to Ireland on her honeymoon in the twenties."
"I am delighted to have finished this renovation," she said, "because it has restored it to something like its original layout - a big high-ceilinged main room, a half-loft at either end with a bedroom below at one end behind the chimney. My grandmother would have loved the house now - my father certainly approves!"
Kate O’Toole was actually born in Stratford-upon-Avon, in England. Her father was so anxious for Kate to have Irish citizenship (himself the son of an Irish bookmaker) that he immediately went to the Irish Embassy and registered her arrival with the Department of Foreign Births. Having spent virtually her entire life on the stage, Kate lived for a short time at the age of ten in Venezuela and also, in her twenties, in New York, where she worked as a waitress in a jazz club. Kate received her formal training at drama college at Yale University.
Her first ‘paid’ acting role was in a play by Jim Sheridan (of ‘My Left Foot’ fame) called ‘The Hostage’. She later started to get work offers in Ireland, including a role in ‘Double Cross’ by Tom Kilroy. This began her career in this country and the production achieved critical success. She toured extensively throughout the north and south of the country with the play, ("I even played in Clifden!," she recalled,) before travelling to the Royal Court Theatre, London.
Kate’s film acting career has been a source of some satisfaction, although she describes most of her appearances as ‘cough and spit’ roles. She played a dour chemist in ‘Dancing at Lughnasa’ in 1998 and remembers having to be "particularly nasty to Merrill Streep". Her other film roles have been as Miss Delahunty in ‘Nora’ (2000) and as Miss Furlong in ‘The Dead’ (1987).
Of ‘The Dead’, she said, "this has to be my most memorable acting experience so far - working for three months with John Houston. We arrived at this warehouse in the desert outside Los Angeles and didn’t know what to expect. When we went inside it was just as though they’d transported a whole area of the City of Dublin! It was bizarre, there were all these Joycian characters in full period costume and make-up, with fake snow on the ground! It was boiling hot, of course, yet the set looked so authentic that critics have since argued that it was actually shot in Dublin itself!" Kate O’Toole has clearly arrived. She is as content as anyone could be and expresses herself in optimistic terms. Her life is complete, living here in Connemara which she says is without doubt the most beautiful place on earth, with her ginger cat, ‘Porgy’ and her one year old Boston Terrier, ‘Bess’.
We wish Kate every success in the forthcoming Irish Times Theatre Awards and for many years to come.
