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Fionnula

Patricia Harty talks to the enormously talented Fionnula Flanagan.

By
PATRICIA HARTY,
IrishCentral.com Staff Writer

Published Tuesday, March 10, 2009, 1:06 AM
Updated Thursday, July 23, 2009, 5:30 PM

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It's 8 a.m. and Fionnula Flanagan arrives for breakfast looking fresh as a daisy in a crisp white shirt. Her thick white hair swept back, not a lick of make-up. She looks beautiful; her once flame-red hair is now a luscious pearl. Antique earrings she picked up for 10 cents at a yard sale adorn her ears.

Molly Bloom is aging gracefully, but she still has the spit and fire of the sexy siren associated with "James Joyce's Women" - the one-woman show that became the 1985 movie in which she plays various women who influenced Joyce's life and writings.

One of the few Irish actresses to make it in Hollywood, Flanagan had been up until 3 a.m. celebrating Bloomsday, the day in the life of Leopold Bloom that is chronicled in "Ulysses." The readings by a number of actors began at 7 p.m. in Manhattan's Symphony Space and ended in the wee hours with Flanagan delivering Molly Bloom's famous soliloquy.

Joyce has been a major factor in Flanagan's career. In addition to "Joyce's Women," she played Gerty MacDowell in Joseph Strick's film of "Ulysses" (1973), and Molly Bloom in the Broadway production "Ulysses in Nighttown" in 1974.

So if she's not on a movie set, or filming the latest episode of the Showtime hit "Brotherhood" in Rhode Island, Flanagan flies in to New York to take part in the annual Bloomsday readings.

Flanagan grew up familiar with Joyce's Dublin in a family that treasured the Irish language, literature and culture. The eldest of five, she trained at the Abbey Theatre and struck out for New York, making her Broadway debut in Brian Friel's "Lovers" in 1968. A national tour with the play brought her to Baltimore where she met Garrett O'Connor, a Dublin doctor working at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

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