There's an apocryphal actor who goes around the place telling people: "Everybody hates me - except the public." Whether it's true or not I don't know, but the phrase could certainly be used about certain films, ones where the public steadfastly refuses to believe the bad notices it gets and flocks to it in numbers. This year's sleeper has undoubtedly been Waking Ned, or as it was called in the US, Waking Ned Devine. It got what's euphemistically called "mixed notices", but has already taken more than $30 million in the United States, with more to come, took over £1 million in London in its opening week (more than the box office returns of three of this year's Oscar-nominated films added together) and is doing similar business everywhere from Sweden to Australia.
For one of its leading actors, David Kelly, it has brought stardom at the unlikely age of 70. Not that it's all that surprising for those who know his work. For many years he has been recognised as one of Ireland's best actors, though a long career in which he has frequently worked abroad has curtailed the number of appearances he has made on the stage here. He is a trim figure, a sharp dresser and one of the wittiest people you're ever going to meet. Understandably, he is tickled pink with a success which has propelled him into the front rank of bankable actors, with Hollywood scripts thudding through his letter-box daily. Laughing, he says: "My agent keeps talking about `good career moves' ".
The scale of Ned Devine's success was completely unexpected. "We arrived down at the Cannes Film Festival," he says. "The small company that made it had flown down the two stars, myself and Ian Bannen, but the rest of them arrived by car, with the movie in a tin box. All the publicity down there was for the likes of Armageddon, Godzilla and The General, but before the credits had stopped rolling at our showing there was a bidding war for the rights going on at the back of the cinema. The next morning all the trade magazines had headlines like `Waking Ned wakes up Cannes'. The New York Times critic came up to me as we were walking along the Croissant (or whatever it's called) and said: `I've been here all week and I've been watching murder and incest and rape and I'm thinking, is life worth living? Then I went to see Ned Devine and it had the quality films used to have - you feel better coming out than you did when you going in.' And that's exactly what he wrote in the New York Times."
Did Kelly know when they were making it that the film was something special? "We thought it would be a good movie, because the script was beautifully worked. They talk about Kirk Jones being a first-time director, but he's really no beginner because he's been an award-winning maker of commercials, where you've only got minutes to shoot a story. That was the reason for the accuracy of the man. Everything he wrote he shot and it was printed. If you did that with most films they would last 12 hours, but this came in at a magic 92 minutes. He knows the value of one second, because of his background in commercials, and from an actor's point of view he knows the value of a look, because that can be as good as three pages of script. He trusted the actors and gave us our heads.
"We had only six weeks to make it. Originally it was to have been eight, but there wasn't enough money. Instead we had the luxury of two weeks' rehearsal. Well, you know what film rehearsals are like usually. It's a process of sitting round a table and saying: `Oh God, I can't say that!', basically of rewriting the script. But we did this like you would a play at the Gate or the Abbey, actually learning our lines and where we were going to stand and who came on where. There wasn't any of what I call the Marie Celeste school of production, where you stand around and say: `maybe you should stand there . . . No, maybe you should walk down . . . No, maybe you should sit . . .' "
At present, Kelly is doing the international promotion circuit. "I'm a very busy chap," he admits. "But I have to get back to work. Four-star hotels and limos are fine, but you can't eat them. Maybe I should do a split week in the Eblana!" This is a reference to the little theatre where we worked together many moons ago. "There have been some big offers," he continues, "some of them, mind you, that we wouldn't have done, even in the Eblana. A hell of a lot of scripts are coming in, but an awful lot of dross, even if financially tempting. But I am doing a film in Britain in June or July, a lovely story called Wildflowers that I'm dying to do. So I will be gainfully employed."
It all seems a long way from the early poverty-stricken days of his acting career, though he still remembers it as a magic time. He went to school at Synge Street, Alma Mater of a string of future actors and entertainment personalities such as Milo O'Shea, Eamonn Andrews, Gay Byrne, and the brothers of Maureen O'Hara (who he remembers getting beaten up on their first day at school, just for being Maureen O'Hara's brothers). "It was savage there," he says, "but you learned two things. How to run very fast, so as to get away from trouble, and how to act, also to get yourself out of trouble." Through a stagestruck teacher he found himself in an R and R production in the Gaiety, played with an amateur group and, as early as the 1950s, was working with Michael MacLiammoir.
Though the pull of the stage took him away from it before very long, he worked briefly in an advertising agency as an artist and calligrapher. He's still an enthusiastic and highly competent weekend painter and had a sell-out show at the Arts Club a couple of years ago. "It got the bloody things off the wall," he says, "cause Laurie" - his wife, the actor Laurie Morton - "used to say we have the biggest private collection of David Kellys in the world." He still paints and says "I find it incredibly relaxing. You can be somewhere like Madeira, sitting on a rock, sketching, and after an hour or two your bum is absolutely numb and you haven't even noticed."
Acting, when he turned to it full-time, was even worse paid than it is today. He tells a story of the late Harry Brogan, then paid the Abbey's top wage of £5 a week, being offered a film role. "They said to him: `I'm afraid it's only a small budget movie, so all we can offer you is 30 a day'. He said, thinking they were offering 30 shillings: `It's not much. I'll do it for two pounds'.
"I remember going on our honeymoon, with a cast of 40, with your musical Glory Be! to Joan Littlewood's theatre in Stratford East in London," he recalls. "She ruined the whole thing, changed all the lines and said there was too much `good acting' in it, but we stayed on because I was on £12.50 and Laurie was in it, also on £12.50, so we had £25, good money at that time. Then Littlewood threw Laurie out of the show, which she was doing to members of the cast left, right and centre, and we went down to £12.50. It was pretty thin, but we had digs for a pound a week with a window cleaner in Stratford East, so somehow we survived.
"I'm very proud of the musicals by yourself and by Wesley Burrowes that I did back then," he says, "and I'm not just saying it because you're here. They loosened one up as an actor, the singing and dancing, apart from the joy and glamour of it all, with the big bands out front. Milo O'Shea, a long time ago, said to me: `Try the comedy thing, because it's like having two jobs'. Mind you, I remember when I first started, in a famous revue in the old Pike Theatre that ran for six months, and I came out to do a point number. I'd never been on the stage alone and there was a musical intro and then a little tacit before you went into the number. And in the pause I heard a voice from the audience say, as clear as a bell: `I can't stand this fellow!' How I ever played comedy afterwards I don't know."
BUT play it he did on the stage and in literally hundreds of television plays and episodes of sitcoms, including Fawlty Towers, On the Buses, Oh Father, Never Mind the Quality Feel the Width and Robin's Nest, of which alone he did 50 episodes. There were more serious roles, too, which he remembers with particular affection, including the early Hugh Leonard plays, and the role of the down-and-out Rashers in the TV series based on James Plunkett's Strumpet City. ("I'm surprised," he says, "that they never released that on video, it would have sold like hot cakes. I think the Sheridans own the rights now and plan to make a film of it.")
But perhaps most of all there is his intensely moving and definitive performance of Beckett's oneman Krapp's Last Tape, which he first did in 1959 and repeated more recently to acclaim at Expo '92 in Barcelona, in Australia and at the Gate's Beckett Festival which toured to the Lincoln Centre in New York in 1996. "I adore it, it's terribly important to me," he says. "I think it's the Beckett everyone identifies with most, both the youngsters and the older ones, because it comes terribly close for everybody."
And then there's Waking Ned. "Whatever they say about it, the acting or the script or the cinemaphotography, God, it's funny. Wherever I go, all over the world, people are telling me that."