Choosing a career can be tough, but Antonia Campbell Hughes is spoiled for choice, getting to pick from fashion designing, modelling and acting, writes Denis Clifford
The concept of the Renaissance man or woman, someone who has acquired success or proficiency in several fields, holds a deep appeal in our multi-tasking present. This, after all, is the age of the juggler. Given the limitless opportunities available in our complex society, the notion of pursuing just one career seems a bit pedestrian.
Antonia Campbell Hughes, currently starring on the Dublin stage in the play Roberto Zucco, appears to be the consummate Renaissance woman. In her 25 years, she has crammed in stints as a fashion designer (flogging frocks both under her own name and as part of a diffusion line for Topshop), a Paris catwalk model and a star of the big and small screens. Her television work includes a leading role in Jack Dee's sitcom Lead Balloon, while her film CV lists parts in Shaun of the Dead and Breakfast on Pluto.
The industries in which Campbell Hughes chooses to work may seem disparate, but they have one trait in common: glamour. She may, perhaps, be a member of the slasher brigade: an actress-slash-model-slash-designer who is eager for fame and happy to pursue any route to its attainment. The key distinction between the Renaissance woman and the slasher is devotion to one's pursuits. So, ACH: dilettante or devotee?
The woman herself insists that her careers have flowed organically from each other. "People never really see the connection between fashion and drama, but I think there's a huge connection. I saw fashion as creating a scene and a setting and characters, building the entire cast effectively. All my collections were always about creating a mood and an atmosphere and a character. Fashion seemed the most direct avenue.
"I never understood how people who are creative are satisfied with one outlet, one medium. I always did all kinds of things. In Paris we didn't have enough money to do catwalk shows, so we'd take gallery spaces and set up a soiree-type thing. You put the various pieces on mannequins and have installation videos and all that kind of vibe. I'd do favours for friends as well and act in their videos."
Campbell Hughes was born in Derry, but her family left Ireland when she was two, and she grew up in Switzerland and the US. She moved to Dublin in her mid-teens but didn't find the Leaving Cert syllabus particularly absorbing.
"I didn't go to school much. I was very much a rebellious teen, and I wanted to sing in bands and travel the world and be away from my normal environment. I thought art school was the best avenue, so I went to NCAD, and then I went to New York for a bit and got into fashion."
Her move into acting was almost accidental. "A man called John McGuire stopped me on the street and asked me to do a music video, some little kind of ambient trip-hop thing," she says. "That made me quite uncertain as to which avenue I was going down. From there I very much fell into television, into comedy. I just went for an audition and got it; I never had a hankering to do British TV. But I think the comedy field in British television is quite strong, and I really respect Jack's work and Lead Balloon; it's such a lovely job to work on. It's very scripted, but they're open to suggestion. If things crop up on the day, they're very much incorporated, which is a lovely way to work."
Campbell Hughes's love of improvisation is unsurprising. In person she comes across as charmingly childlike, continually fidgeting and changing conversational tack mid-sentence. This impression is compounded by her elfin appearance - few might guess she has been on the planet for a quarter-century. She's happy to play up the childlike image, and has been known to spend parties sitting under tables, affecting a girlish blitheness.
This insouciance, contrived or otherwise, does not prevent her from worrying about being typecast as a comic artist. "I wanted to do a theatre piece because it's a completely different approach [from comedy]. Jimmy Fay, the director of Roberto Zucco, is one of the few people in Dublin who's putting on the kind of plays that I'm interested in; he's quite into pushing boundaries and finding meaty material. I went and saw his play Saved and loved it, and then he said he was doing Roberto Zucco, which is very much in the same sort of area."
The play, written by the late French playwright Bernard-Marie Koltès, is inspired by the life of Roberto Succo, who murdered several people across Europe in the late 1980s. Campbell Hughes explains that "Koltès took all the female characters in Roberto Succo's life, ie the women he raped, and made them into one character, called The Girl. That's who I play."
Campbell Hughes has clearly acquired a taste for the darker end of the dramatic spectrum. She recently shot a film adaptation of August Strindberg's playella The Stronger (where, as in Roberto Zucco, she plays a nameless character) and a surreal Channel 4 drama called Scapegoat, which is set in a grimy south London council estate.
It's tempting to conclude that the little slasher has become addicted to slasher flicks. But this is probably just a phase. Everyone has a friend who can't decide what to do with their life. While many twentysomethings trek through southeast Asia in search of meaning, Campbell Hughes, following her nomadic childhood, is seemingly keen to travel in other ways. Even when describing her current passion, her mind is never far from her next move. "I'm very much obsessed with what I'm doing at the moment," she says. "That is the beauty of acting: you're working on a different, completely diverse project every given month. I'm quite interested in writing also, but I'd like to do more theatre before I start writing plays."
Campbell Hughes is perhaps less a Renaissance woman than a Baroque woman. Her career has been flamboyant and convoluted, and she has a taste for the bizarre and grotesque ("Ted Bundy was hot!"). Her future career, we can only assume, will follow paths as engagingly meandering as those that have brought her to the Dublin stage.
Roberto Zucco is at Project arts centre, Dublin, until September 8th. See www.bedrockproductions.com