Niamh Cusack: ‘My mother was keen that none of us would become actors. She thought it was a very unstable profession, and right she was.’

I was accident prone. I don’t think I spent a week of my childhood without a bandage somewhere. I was always out in the garden in my own world, making up stories.​

Choose three words to describe yourself.

Warm, reflective and scatter-brained.​

Tell us about your childhood.

My mother wanted to give us as normal an upbringing as possible. My father Cyril wasn’t around a lot. He was away working.​

Best Christmas as a child?

I remember Santa coming in the middle of the night. I knew he had come because I could smell the satsumas and hear the rustle but I kept my eyes closed.

Best Christmas as an adult?

When my son was five, he wanted a cowboy suit. At 3am on Christmas morning, he arrived in our room fully-dressed in Santa’s gift – ready to take on the world.​

Tell us about your life before you became an actress.

I was a classical musician and I played in the RTÉ Symphony Orchestra for a year after college.​

Where did the music come from?

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My mother was keen that none of us would become actors. She thought it was a very unstable profession, and right she was. She was an actress and being married to an actor, she was struck by the shifting sands of the profession. And that is a fact. You can never be sure of where the next job is coming from, so you have to have the steel in you to deal with that. She wanted us to become electricians or plumbers. It didn’t work. All of us went into the arts.​

Tell us about your other hobbies as a kid.

We had tennis, ballet and music lessons. I had great teachers in the Academy in Dublin. Flute was my first instrument and piano my second. I won a scholarship to the Royal Academy in London and I did three years there.​

Why did you finally become an actress?

I couldn’t get work as a musician in London, so I tried to enrol in French classes. They were full but the acting classes weren’t, so I signed up. I knew it was what I wanted to do. After I did A Woman of No Importance in 1984, I never looked back.​

Tell us about your memories of watching your dad on stage.

I acted with him in Chekhov’s Three Sisters. During one tech run, I stood in the back of the theatre and watched his performance. It wasn’t him and yet it was him. There was such detail. I realised why my mother had fallen in love with him. She saw him on stage one night and said: “That’s the man I’m going to marry.” As Fluther in The Plough and The Stars, he had to fix a lock on a door and he really was fixing that lock.​

Any acting advice from him?

He thought I was too quiet and said no one would hear me past the first two rows. Years later, he told my husband that I could fly. I remember him coming round to see me after a play. He was clearly moved.​

Where does your love for the Irish language come from?

My parents were the founder members of Scoil Lorcáin. My father kind of taught himself Irish. His mother was English and his father was second-generation Irish. He was very proud of the Irish language and thought it a beautiful language.

​Tell us about your father passing on his passions.

I remember him striding up Vico Road with his walking stick, and me trailing behind. He wanted to share his passions with us – walking and swimming in White Rock. He used to pick us up after our music lesson in Westland Row, then he’d walk us round the National Gallery. He’d give us tea and cake as a reward for gazing at the paintings of Jack B Yeats or Walter Osborne for what felt like the zillionth time.​

‘Cyril Cusack: Lár an Stáitse’, December 25 on TG4 at 9.30pm