It’s a long way from Holywood to the red carpet of a film festival in France, but that’s the journey that actor Lalor Roddy has just made.
Not Cannes, but a prestigious event in Dinard, Brittany, recently renamed to include the best of Irish as well as British cinema.
There were full houses all week and, in the end, the jury chose Roddy, a well-known figure in Irish theatre and TV, as best actor.
(The unusual name, sounds like Law-lor, recalls a family relation and respect for Fintan Lalor, a leading Young Irelander in the 1840s and champion of small farmers).
Lalor’s film, in which he plays an ageing jack-of-all-trades, That They May Face the Rising Sun, is an adaptation of the last novel of John McGahern, and already has won this year’s RTÉ best film, having had 11 nominations.
The cameras rolled in Connemara, rather than the quiet lakeside area where the novel was set, and there were regular drives home to Belfast in the car of old friend and distinguished producer, Brendan Byrne.
The two were together again for the Dinard outing, eagerly seeking the seaside town’s connection with Alfred Hitchcock. Although there is a statue in the main square, complete with birds, and locals swear that a spooky house on a hill was the model for Psycho, the nearest proof is Lalor’s Hitchcock, with the familiar rotund profile in glass.
When I caught up with him, he was back on a film set in Ballymena, in a four-part TV series based on Louise Kennedy’s novel, Trespasses, set in 1974 Holywood.
It seems there’s plenty of work for character actors like Lalor — the recipient of a special award at Belfast Film Festival this week — who have a lifetime of experience in all genres.
Lalor at the Dinard award ceremony
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It all began near Stormont with the encouragement of his mother, who acted in amateur drama as well as the early years of the Lyric, and an accountant grandfather who let six-year-old Lalor join him on his rounds to the Clonard and Savoy cinemas.
“I did some acting at my boarding school in Dundalk, but other interests took over. I followed a girl to America and was good enough at reading the game to get a college scholarship in soccer, centre half,” he says.
Back home, reality set in and he studied psychology both in Ulster University and Trinity College. A career opened up, after a course in drama therapy, but soon closed. “I took on the problems of the clients. It was too painful.”
The theatre saved him, he might say, involving him at every level, from the classics, in the Royal Shakespeare Company, to Tinderbox, with Tim Loane. Mention every great, in Britain and Ireland, and the chances are he’s lived in the same house or acted with them, including Liam Neeson, Gabriel Byrne, Daniel Craig, Paul Mescal, Ian McIlhenney and Ciaran Hinds.
He has worked with Steve McQueen on Hunger, and lately had a part in Kneecap.
Lalor adds: “My one regret is I didn’t work with Donal McCann, though we shared a house. We had a common bond, both of us had lost a sibling in a tragedy.”
While Arts Council grants kept hopes alive during the Troubles, Lalor says landing the making of Game of Thrones was the game-changer.
“It’s not just the acting possibilities, there’s a whole industry, working in 14 departments. In Hunger, carpenters built the Maze”.
He’s even complimentary about the part the politicians have played, describing Robinson and McGuinness as ‘always helpful’.
When he’s not before the cameras, Lalor loves taking his two grandsons to north Down’s play parks or swimming at the Culloden spa.
Their father, Bobby, is a twin of Maya, a marine biologist on an Attenborough-type mission to save Red Sea coral from climate change extinction.
Away from acting, Lalor has always found solace in the poetry of Seamus Heaney, especially Clearances in memory of his mother. For his next appearance on stage, for a private audience in the Heaney home place, he has planned a tribute to his mother, using the same poems.
I had thought of asking if he was thinking of retirement, at 70, but clearly it was pointless. He’ll keep going, just as he’ll keep rolling cigarettes, as long as the home-grown drama scene is as active as it is at present.
To his younger self, his advice would be “slow down”. And to aspiring young actors: “Do it, if you have to. And commit yourself, 100%.”