Designing for the Stars

SHE'S worked with A-list Irish actors like Colin Farrell, Liam Neeson, Brendan Gleeson and Cillian Murphy, and legendary British veterans like Emma Thompson and Dame Maggie Smith, but in Brideshead Revisited, which opens this week, Co. Limerick native Eimer Ni Mhaoldomhnaigh is tackling the biggest challenge of her career.

Considered surefire Oscar bait, Brideshead Revisited is the epic tale of a doomed aristocratic English Catholic family between the World Wars that opens this Friday. For Irish costume designer Ni Mhaoldomhnaigh it's the chance of a lifetime to recreate the high fashions of the interwar era, and to shape the entire film's look and feel.

Clothes are the other characters in this lavish period drama starring double Oscar winner Thompson, and Ni Mhaoldomhnaigh designs are already being hailed as a triumph.

Speaking to the Irish Voice by phone from the set of Neil Jordan's new film Ondine in West Cork, where's she's currently designing the costumes for the film's Irish leads Colin Farrell and Stephen Rea, Ni Mhaoldomhnaigh, 41, reflects on her career to date.

"I went to Art College in Limerick where I studied fashion," she says. "Then I lived in Spain for a few years and I got friendly with filmmakers there. That got me interested in film work. When I came home in the early nineties things were really getting off the ground in terms of films here. I went from job to job, really."

Ni Mhaoldomhnaigh's work on the Jim Sheridan film In America led to her first big break. From there she moved on to Jordan's Breakfast on Pluto and from there to The Wind That Shakes the Barley, the 2006 Cannes Palm d'Or winner directed by Ken Loach.

To date she has worked on a wide range of film and television projects including the BAFTA award winning film Omagh (about the Real IRA's infamous attack). She also worked on the TV film version of best selling Irish novelist Marian Keyes' Watermelon, for which she was nominated for an Irish Film and Television Award for Best Costume Design. (She received similar nods for her work on Breakfast On Pluto and Becoming Jane.)

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Nster.com