Despite being born into a wealthy family, actor Victoria Smurfit was brought up with a strict work ethic, and it's something she's keen to pass on to her own children, writes Catherine Cleary.
IT IS NOT difficult to see why casting directors look at Victoria Smurfit and think, "ice queen, married to the job and childless by choice." Smurfit looks nothing like her real-life role.
If life was a kitchen-sink drama, she should shamble into the hotel bar for this interview, hollow-eyed and round-shouldered with at least one splodge of baby sick on her. It is just four weeks since she gave birth to her son Flynn, making her the mother of three small people under four. Yet she looks as far from the twilight post-partum world of elasticated trousers and bewilderment as a woman can get.
It would be insufferable if she wasn't so funny and articulate about the challenges with which working mothers grapple. "Look deep into my pink eyes and you'll know I did," she says when I ask how it could be possible that she had a baby so recently. Right now she has a profound longing to sleep for more than an hour at a stretch.
She has not played a modern mother since her children were born. "The last time I played a mother was in About A Boy, when I had no kids. Oh, and in Berkeley SquareI was a mother. But that was in 1901, different time altogether, all about trying to avoid consumption. But since becoming a mother I play these women who are far too career-oriented and tough. I've got a face that lends itself to ice queen."
So will we see her on-screen hair awry, baby on hip and toddler wailing at her knee? "I'd love that. I haven't had hair awry since Cold Feet." The 35-year-old actress has walked away from a big television role in Britain to come home to Ireland and the juggling act of doing what she loves and spending time with her young family. Next month she steps on stage in Dublin, (for the first time since she was six and played the mouse in The Nutcrackerin Dalkey Town Hall) to play a part that is a typical Smurfit role. In Fiona Looney's new play, October, she'll play the glamorous, childless and self-absorbed woman home from London with a bombshell to drop on her stage sister, Pauline McLynn.
But first to the babies. The newest arrival, her first son, and a brother for daughters Evie and Ridley, is "delicious", she says, visibly melting at the edges at the thought of him. At a year and a half, Ridley, her middle daughter, has had to be talked out of putting him in the microwave, not out of sibling jealousy but because she does this to her own dolls. "There's a safety guard on the buttons, so she can't actually switch it on but she pops them in, closes the door and she goes 'Mmmmm', so she knows what she's doing."
Three days before Flynn was born, Smurfit found herself in the grip of powerful nesting hormones. "My bump's out to here and I'm there trying to paint the gate as if the baby's gonna be very upset about the flaky paint. Because you do go to this very strange place. Would you ever even think about skirting boards unless you're pregnant? Do you ever even say the words 'skirting board'? No, you never even think of them at any level and then suddenly they become an absolute focus."
Until recently, readers of the Dublinermagazine were given regular glimpses of her domestic life. Her column became a series of vignettes about the struggle to have it all. In one, she wrote about being rushed from a fake hospital bedside scene to a real hospital corridor, where her daughter sat ghost-white and feverish. Her husband, advertising executive Doug Baxter, asked her before she sent it in whether she really wanted to reveal something like that about her life. "But the thing I enjoyed about the column was I got to be as honest as I could be about the chaos that is life. I'm not in the market for saying I'm a perfect mother, perfect actress and a perfect wife. It's much more fun to be able to see the ludicrousness and the chaos that a full life brings."
There is plenty of material still bubbling around in her head. Chatting with a friend recently, it came to her that "the difference between having your first child and having your third is that you have to have the blues on the hop. There's absolutely no chance of sitting and having a cup of tea and a cry into a Kleenex."
The Dublinergig was the "the only child I can legitimately get rid of without social services coming for me," she wrote in her farewell column recently. Earlier this year she told the makers of the Lynda La Plante police drama Trial and Retributionthat she couldn't continue the nine-months-a-year commitment to the series that involved splitting life between London and Dublin.
She will miss her character, DCI Róisín Connor. The tough woman cop wears her hair in a scalp-tinglingly tight ponytail and spends much of her time on-screen looking as if, in the words of Smurfit's mother, she's "sucking lemons". The ponytail looks as if it must hurt just a little? "It does actually. It's my little mini-facelift."
But despite the chilly exterior, the part is a great role for an Irish actress. "I adore her. For a 35-year-old woman to have a job where she's not defined by a boyfriend or a husband - she exists very much in her own professional world and she's as flawed as anything - I love that about her. She's chilly and confused and complicated."
Thanks to the role, she gets more fan attention in London than in Dublin, although she thinks that's partly because the Irish have a shoulder-shrugging nonchalance about celebrity. "We're sort of: 'There's Bono. Buying broccoli.' "
The series started as a five-week job, and grew into nine months a year. "That's what it was last year, 16 hours a day, every second week, a six-day week." That kind of punishing schedule was "not a runner for a healthy marriage or a happy family." She and her daughters based themselves in London, with Doug visiting at weekends. On light shooting days the girls played in her trailer so that she could pop down to have some time with them. "I would be discussing a corpse upstairs in the mortuary that we have set up and then skip down and sing Ring a Ring o' Rosies, which is still all about corpses as it turns out, but the kids don't know that."
But even the most flexible work arrangement grinds to a halt in the face of school schedules and a round-the-clock newborn. "I know I can't be part of the series in the way I was before. There's no way I ever want to end up in the position where I turn round to my girls and say, 'I know you didn't see me much when you were growing up, but here's a box set.' "
She finished shooting the series in London in April. After next month's theatre run, she is keen to work in Irish film and television for the first time since she got her big break in Ballykissangel.
"I just want to invest back here because it's been a long time since Ballykissangel and obviously the industry has changed in such a vast way. From the point of view of long-term goals, I want to produce things. I've got a business background in my genetics and I'm always fascinated by how everything works. I drive producers mad asking the questions about the deals done and how things operate. Long term, I'd love to make things here."
As a schoolgirl, she veered towards a career as an interpreter, not seeing acting as a serious option. "Anytime I looked at the school plays it was always girls with the shiny hair and the tap shoes and they were always being fabulous and I would find all of that really intimidating." When she was 14, her family moved to England and she went to St George's girls school in Ascot. Was it as posh as it sounds?
"Oh, absolutely it was. They were quite fascinated that I was," - and here she adopts a cut-glass British accent - " 'Irish', but the great thing about being Irish in a school like that was that it gave you a licence to be part of every group, whereas everybody else had to chose one gang, the horsey set or the cool set or the dork set or whichever group they belonged to. I was able to pop from one to the other."
A new teacher arrived, bringing with her an A-level in theatre studies and that appealed to Smurfit "as a businesslike way of getting into a creative field". She played lots of boys' parts in school productions and went on to drama school where she also played lots of boys. "Then, as soon as I left drama school, I was asked to play an Irish girl in The Run of the Countryso that was a bit of a shock to the system." The 1995 film, with Albert Finney as a gruff Border garda whose son falls for Smurfit's character, was a big break for a drama school graduate.
Her time in London coincided with a decade of boom in Ireland, so she had a slightly detached view of its effects at home. "You got this real sense of lack of reality when you'd be home, this extraordinary set of expectations that were everywhere. And really, ultimately, I just felt sad for the teenagers and the twentysomethings because we'd created this cycle of a generation which, instead of time and attention, are used to presents and cars and gifts and handbags and holidays and haircuts and fake tans. And that's not going to hold them up now, and I feel very sad for them really. As grown-ups we should know better and we should know everything's cyclical and it is only a matter of time."
Her own background, as a niece of Michael Smurfit, and growing up as a member of "one of the few wealthy families" in their day - "so these days we'd be considered very 'old money' in a funny kind of way" - gave her a certain attitude to wealth that she hopes to pass on to her children.
"I was never and have never been given anything for nothing. I was brought up to believe in value and cause and effect. You want extra pocket money? Go clean the car. So you understood the value of things. And I was very aware when I was at drama school. I said to my father: 'Can you fund me through drama school?' Because I didn't want to apply for the grant because I thought that's not fair, because I have a way to get through. He said: 'Okay, I said I'd do your education and this is the final leg of your education.' And then as soon as I got paid on The Run of the Country, I sent my cheque to him."
Did he cash it? She answers the question instantly with a grin. "No, he never did. Bless him. But I expected him to and that was the understanding both my mum and my dad had given me an understanding of how very very lucky I was. And that's something I want to make sure that our kids get."
• Octoberopens at the Olympia Theatre, Dame Street, Dublin 2, on February 6th