THE unemployed Northsider in Tide Van contrasts with the comfortable niche Colm Meaney has carved out as a respected and much liked character actor, with Shakespeare and Star Trek under his belt.
The third of four brothers in his Finglas family, he had "vague notions" of becoming an actor from the age of 13. Following the advice of actor Vinnie McCabe, he went to evening classes at the Dublin Drama Centre and had a lucky break. A production of The Hostage in which he was performing in Dun Laoghaire was transferred to the Gate to replace a show that had flopped.
After school he went fishing for a year in Donegal, before auditioning successfully for a two year course with the Abbey' Theatre's acting school, followed by a contract. He first appeared in Friel's The Freedom of the City and in The Silver Tassie.
When his Abbey contract expired, Meaney moved to Britain, working with the radical theatre groups 7:84 and Belt and Braces, and returning to Dublin for performances in the Project and the Abbey. He also began to get work in film and in television series such as Z Cars. His theatre work included T.R McKenna's production of The Shadow of a Gunman and Friel's adaptation of Three Sisters, directed by Stephen Rea.
In 1982 he moved to New York, appearing in the RSC's American production of Nicholas Nickleby and Vincent Dowling's version of Henry Vin Michigan. But in Los Angeles in 1985 he was spotted on stage by producer Wieland Schultz-Kiel, who introduced him to Huston and a role in Huston's swansong film, The Dead, the interiors of which were all shot in LA. His television career also began to take off, with appearances in episodic series such as Remington Steele and Moonlighting.
Back in New York he had a nine month Broadway run in Breaking the Code. Returning to Los Angeles, he became a fixture on Star Trek: the Next Generation, as Chief Engineer Miles O'Brien, transferring in 1991 to the spin off, Deep Space Nine. He still has two years of his six year contract to run.
When Alan Parker chose him for the film Come See the Paradise, about the internment of Japanese Americans during the second World War, Meaney could hardly have imagined that it would lead to his best known cinema role. But Parker had decided that his next project would be an adaptation of a cult book by a Dublin schoolteacher.
In Dublin to cast The Commitments, the director needed professional actors for the older characters. "Colm was the only Irish actor Alan had worked with," remembers one of the director's colleagues. "So he felt it was ridiculous to think that he was the right one for Jimmy Rabbitte snr." It soon became apparent that Meaney was right for the Elvis loving father of the band's manager.
When Stephen Frears came to direct the second part of Roddy Doyle's Barrytown trilogy it was decided to avoid making The Snapper an obvious Commitments sequel. The Rabbitte family became the Curleys, with Meaney as the only casting link between the two films. While The Commitments had been a fairly big budget movie, The Snapper was conceived as a TV drama for the BBC, with no cinema potential. Only after a rapturous reception at the Cannes Film Festival did it get a limited cinema release.
In The Snapper Meaney's character was the focal point of the story; the middle aged unemployed Dubliner whose struggle to come to terms with his daughter's pregnancy yields a string of wonderful comic moments.
It was Meaney's first central screen role, and demonstrated the actor's huge charm and sense of comic timing to the full. In The Van his character has a darker, more troubled dimension, in its depiction of a man who has little or no chance of ever getting a job again.
Along with his ongoing "day job" on Deep Space Nine he has also appeared in supporting roles in Hollywood blockbusters such as Under Siege, Die Hard 2 and Last of the Mohicans, along with many of the Irish themed dramas of the 1990s, including Far and Away, Into the West, War of the Buttons and the Gone with the Wind sequel, Scarlett.
He worked with Alan Parker again on The Road to Wellville, and his performance in the British comedy, The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain in 1995 was widely praised. He has a comfortable lifestyle in Los Angeles, where he lives separately from his wife, the actress Barbara Dowling. The couple have a teenage daughter, Brenda.
Leapfrogging between Deep Space Nine and films on this side of the Atlantic is not always easy, since the series operates to a demanding six day schedule every week. But according to a friend and colleague, "Colm was a talented GAA player at school, he's still an avid supporter of the Dubs and Shamrock Rovers. He's physically very strong, a real Northside grafter."
