We know her as Nicola in 'Fair City', a snobbish businesswoman, currently coping with breast cancer. In life, actress Claudia Carroll is soft-spoken, self-critical and nervous about her foray into chick-lit. She talks to Róisín Ingle.
Claudia Carroll is nothing like the character she plays in Fair City. People tend to be surprised by this. Over the past 12 years she has made the role of hard-nosed businesswoman Nicola her own, and as one of the more consistent performers in what is an unforgivably patchy cast, people expect the Dubliner to be haughty and hard as nails in real life. She isn't. She is softly spoken and down to earth and, at the moment, slightly apprehensive about the reception her new venture is going to get from critics and from the public.
"I just hope that people won't vomit when they read it," she says of He Loves Me Not ... He Loves Me, her first novel, which she still can't quite believe exists. In the book's acknowledgements the actress is effusive in her thanks to literary agent Marian Gunne O'Connor, of PS I Love You fame. According to Carroll, the agent she shares with Cecelia Ahern should have a plaque on her office door that says "Dreams come true here".
Carroll has been "tinkering" with the book for years, and got the idea for the plot during the early 1990s, when she was given a part in a short film. The cast stayed in Co Monaghan's crumbling old mansion Castle Leslie before it was renovated to McCartney wedding reception standards.
"It was a mess back then," she remembers fondly. "In the ballroom there were pots dotted around to catch the rain. The family were such a load of characters, you couldn't have made them up. One of them was making spells and incantations and talking about ley lines, and of course there was Sir Jack, whom everyone knows from the raves."
They say write about what you know. Carroll's romantic comedy is set in a crumbling old mansion, Davenport Hall, somewhere in Co Kildare.The mother of the house is an eccentric gin lover with long matted grey hair who wears wellies and rambles about ley lines and incantations. Her husband, Blackjack, has just run off to Las Vegas with the stable hand and all the family's cash. Desperate to make money, the family has no choice but to accept when Hollywood comes calling.
The film they make on the sprawling Davenport estate is a sequel to A Southern Belle's Saga which of course means it is really a sequel to Gone With the Wind. It revolves around the character Magnolia O'Mara instead of Scarlet O'Hara. The Hollywood starlet who plays Magnolia once had a starring role in Screech 3. The leading man who plays the Rhett Butler character Brent Chareleston once starred in Thugs of New York and Cell Block Redemption. For this reader the faux film names began to jar after a while. Servant in Seattle, The Hours 2: How the Time Drags being just two of many, many more.
"It's pastiche," says Carroll who used, as a reference point for the book, the critically panned Scarlet, a sequel to Gone With the Wind which was filmed in Ireland starring Joanne Whalley-Kilmer and a host of Irish actors. "To go into this business you have to be fundamentally batty and I have met a lot of bizarre people over the years which inspired some of the characters."
It was a Fair City producer Anita Notaro, now a fully fledged writer herself, who inspired Carroll to stop tinkering and start getting serious about her book. "She said you should get yourself an agent. I sent 10 chapters to Marian and then six weeks later we met and she said she would represent me. She had the publishing deal within a week. She is amazing," says Carroll.
Now 36, she has been acting since she was six years old, when she would demand that her unpushy showbiz mother "drive me to drama" at the Betty Ann Norton school. After studying accountancy, she began taking small theatre roles such as an Irish version of Look Back in Anger, set in contemporary Ireland and unwisely staged during Italia '90. "Three people went to see it and one of them was my mother," she laughs. "Nobody can say I didn't start at the bottom."
She landed the role in Fair City in 1992, three years after the soap launched, planning to stay for a week in the bitchy Nicola role.
Twelve years later she is delighted with the storyline she is filming at the moment which shows her character coping with breast cancer.
She has only ever visited people in hospital, so lying on a bed with tubes sticking out of her, and saying lines for hours, is sometimes tough.
"But it's not as if you are working in the A&E for 100 hours a week; you are only an actor saying lines," she says, anxious not to sound like a moan. "But I do hope it works because when you get a meaty story like this you want it to go well." Isn't she worried that Nicola contracting such a serious illness might mean the character is about to be killed off?
"You just never know. Any of us could be killed off at the stroke of a pen," she laughs.
Which, it's probably fair to conclude, is probably one of the reasons why Carroll has taken up the pen herself. A successful writing career would mean she wouldn't have to be at the mercy of RTÉ for regular employment and anyway it gives her something to do during the often long periods, sometimes up to a month, when she is not filming.
But while it's easy not to take criticism of Fair City personally - after all, as Nicola she is just one part of a multi-faceted production - with the book she is out on her own. "It's nerve-racking from that point of view," she says.
She likes to travel, wants to check out India next, and has been single for a while. "I haven't gone out with anyone in so long I am actually wondering if dating has changed," she says.
"When I was writing the book last year I used to joke to myself that David Blaine had a better social life than I did. So I can't really moan about being single; if you don't go out what can you expect? I'm not really a party person, I'm not a boozer. I'm really, really boring. And anyway I think these things are bigger than us, you know?"
Her second book is nearly finished. "It's set in a renovated Davenport Hall and features a celebrity footballer who comes over from England to marry the Irish president's daughter," she says,adding that it's in the same comic style as her début, much of which was written between takes on the Fair City set. "I never realised I was that mad until I started writing."
Carroll is not stupid. She knows there will be people lining up to say she only got her agent and her publishing deal because of her famous name, the way people spoke about Cecelia Ahern. Will that be hard to cope with? "I've coped with worse," she says. "I've been called the worst actress on the planet. You develop a thick skin. You have to."
She has grown used to disdain from certain quarters and says it is inevitable with her new career. "There is snobbery about anything commercial. Look at the snobbery about soap opera. I was reading quite a nasty article recently which said chick-lit is dead, but really people are still buying it in their droves," she says, getting ready to return to the Fair City set.
"I am happy," she replies when I ask how she feels at this stage in her life. "I went to a fortune teller years ago who predicted I would write a book and marry someone tall and gorgeous. I'm still waiting for half of that to come true."