Since acting as a singer in The Commitments, Maria Doyle Kennedy has managed to forge a career doing both. She talks to Kate Holmquistabout juggling motherhood, music and movies
The streets of Manhattan currently boast billboards showing a regal Maria Doyle Kennedy in period costume in The Tudors, the Showtime network's sexy historical soap opera with Jonathan Rhys Meyers as King Henry VIII. Doyle Kennedy has got rave reviews for her role as the long-suffering Catherine of Aragon. When she films the second series at Ardmore studios in Co Wicklow this summer, Tudor fashion will no doubt cover up the actor's growing bump - Doyle Kennedy (42) is expecting her fourth child in September, ironic considering that an inability to give birth to sons was Catherine's downfall.
US reviewers have remarked upon the Irish actor's mature beauty and presence, while describing The Tudorsas enjoyably bodice-ripping history lite. As the New York Timesput it, the series "weaves its way through all kinds of court intrigue and bawdy sexual escapades, but for some reason it leaves the greatest romance of the Renaissance hazy".
Doyle Kennedy's ambition in film doesn't match her passion for music, although she does admit that if someone approached her with a screenplay she really believed in and allowed her to act in it as well as write the music, she'd be in heaven. And if Sam Neill, who plays Cardinal Thomas Wolsey in The Tudors, could play the male lead, even better. Doyle Kennedy struck up a friendship with Neill, who plans to travel to Co Wicklow this summer for a cast reunion even though his character was killed off in the first series.
It is her musical career, however, that allows her full creative freedom. Her voice is mesmerising, slightly sinister and a lot sexier than a Tudor queen. Hypnotic yet hip, Doyle Kennedy's new album, Mütter, has an astonishing atmosphere of aural colour and rhythmic emotion.
"I do think it is the best thing I've ever done and it's great to feel that," she says. The hand of her husband, music producer and composer Kieran Kennedy, is there, but when co-writing, the couple produce a sound that is clearly Maria Doyle.
"Kieran can read my mind, pretty much. I can describe atmosphere and colour and he knows what I mean. Because we are strong enough independently, it's extra special to have the time together to work on an album."
Mütter- with its cheeky little single called Fuckability - is grown-up music for grown-up women who still have a bit of the child inside. There's the gentle and nurturing mother in some songs and the anxious, panicked, sexually frustrated desperate housewife in others.
"I don't see it as a conflict," says Doyle Kennedy of the delicious contradictions in her composing. The title Mütter, a play on the German word for mother, indicates her fascination for the role of being a mother and having a mother. The title song is about "how unbelievably important the connection is with our mothers; how badly we want our mothers to love us," she says.
Tuning in to the atmospherically poetic lyrics is a lot like "reading" a captivating book, which makes sense because the atmosphere of Mütterwas inspired by a novel: Chuck Palahniuk's haunting horror story, Diary.
The book's heroine is Misty Marie Wilmot, an artist who is manipulated by evil inter-generational forces towards an island where she starts a family, only to end up in the midst of a nightmare that inflames her creative power so that she paints manically.
A lot like life really. One of the best compliment's she's gotten so far about Mütterwas from a friend who remarked, "I've read your album." Over the four years it took for her to write the songs, Doyle Kennedy inhabited Palahniuk's doomed heroine in her imagination, writing from the point of view of Misty - not in plot terms, but more in relation to the dark places Misty goes to in her head.
Musically, her inspiration was the "slowcore" Minnesotan indie rock group Low, who use slow tempos and minimalist, yet striking, arrangements. She has also been inspired by the individualism and staying power of nonagenarian painter Patrick Scott, about whom she made a documentary for RTÉ last year, and singer Patti Smith, now in her seventh decade.
But those influences aside, Mütteris all Maria Doyle Kennedy, and that earthy voice of hers is even more interesting, now that she's 42, than it was in 1991, when at the age of 26 she played a streetwise backing singer in Alan Parker's film of Roddy Doyle's novel, The Commitments.
Now that she's about to start touring the album, Doyle Kennedy has got over the shock of unexpectedly expecting, 15 years after her third son was born. The only hitch is that she won't be able to tour as energetically or as long as she had hoped. "I get very nervous before I perform and the adrenalin is running during the performance, so I have to be aware of that," she says.
This summer, Doyle Kennedy will be filming the second series of The Tudors(the first series will be aired on BBC in the autumn). In between the demanding work of acting, singing and composing, Doyle Kennedy enjoys being with her family and always puts them first for no other reason than that it feels right. "I hate the notion of scripted living," she says. "I don't fit into boxes easily. Everything has its own time."
Maria Doyle Kennedy plays Half Moon Theatre, Cork on Friday, May 25