Right after her Leaving, Nora-Jane Noone grabbed our attention in 'The Magdalene Sisters'. Now she's making a name for herself on 'Coronation Street', writes Lorna Siggins.
Joanna Lumley, Prunella Scales, Ben Kingsley, Richard Beckinsale, Joanne Whalley . . . The list of actors who made their names after appearing on Coronation Street is long and impressive. Now Nora-Jane Noone will be hoping she can join them. The Irish actress, who starred in Peter Mullan's controversial film The Magdalene Sisters, in 2002, is the latest love interest in the veteran soap opera, making the world's longest-running television drama the biggest platform in her young career.
The 21-year-old, who is the youngest of four children from Newcastle in Co Galway, is still pinching herself at her good fortune. Her home town is no Weatherfield: its residents are generally middle-class west-coasters with little in common with the gritty Mancunian characters who populate the soap. Nor does Noone have any formal drama training. "I joined Performing Arts, an academy run in the city at weekends, for a year when I was 13, but after that it was school shows, really," she says. She also joined Renmore Pantomime Society, appearing in its annual shows.
A turning point was a role in the musical Grease, which her school, the Mercy convent, staged with St Mary's College, the boys' secondary school next door. "She was great," says Noone's sister, Clare. "I think that was when we all realised how good she was." Noone responds: "And she has a PhD in physics." (All four children took science degrees at NUI Galway.)
Noone got the role in The Magdalene Sisters, which won best film at the 2002 Venice Film Festival, during the summer break between Leaving Cert and college. "My cousin Michelle Burke is an agent in the West End. She rang and told me there were open auditions for it at the Galway-Mayo Institute campus in Cluain Mhuire. Lenny Mullan [the film's casting director] saw me, it was taped, and I was one of a group which went to Dublin. There were two more auditions, in Dublin and Glasgow, and that was it."
For the next few weeks she was based in Dumfries, about 30 miles from Glasgow. "It was a very harrowing story to work on, and I suppose it was only when I started with it that I realised the full extent of what used to go on," she says. One Magdalene laundry was still open in Galway city when she was growing up. "To be honest, we used to lighten things up when we were finished shooting in the evenings. It wasn't something we talked about."
That didn't stop her from giving an attention-grabbing performance. "When first sighted in The Magdalene Sisters, Nora-Jane Noone burns up the screen," one critic noted. "Cheeks flushed, eyes ablaze, finger in her half-smiling mouth, she is sexual catnip to the boys ogling her."
The finger, she explained at the time, was due to nerves: it was her first day on set and she was biting her nails. During the shoot, she agreed to do a nude scene, to reflect the humiliating awfulness of life at the laundries. "If you can't show your body when you're young, when can you?" her mother told her.
She arrived back in Galway just in time for her first year in college, and then had several more offers. They led to a part in Ella Enchanted, with Minnie Driver, Anne Hathaway and, as it happens, Joanna Lumley, and the lead role in a short film, News for the Church, directed by the St Elmo's Fire actor Andrew McCarthy (and filmed during an Easter break in Canada). She also recorded Walking at Ringsend, a play about James Joyce and Nora Barnacle, for BBC Radio 4. Noone has recently finished work on Crawlspace, a horror film in which she plays one of a group of friends who go on a white-water rafting break.
It's just over a fortnight since she finished her 10th episode of Coronation Street, playing a young mother from Blackrock who meets Steve McDonald while she's on a trip to Weatherfield. "Again, the opportunity came through my agent," Noone says. "They were looking for Irish actresses within a certain age range, and so I had two auditions a week apart, and that was it."
She commuted to the Coronation Street studios from London, where she has been based since she graduated, last year. "They are a lovely bunch of people to work for, and of course they are used to a regular rotation through the green room. So everyone has been very friendly." That said, the routine was very different to what she was used to. "They like to keep options open up until the last minute on storylines. So you wouldn't get the script until a couple of days before, and you wouldn't know from one episode to the next what was going to happen."
Although strong female characters have been one of the programme's trademarks, from Ena Sharples and Annie Walker to Elsie Tanner, Noone's character is "quiet and sweet", and "very normal" compared with some of the women McDonald has been involved with.
So will this be life as she knows it for the next 10 years? "The contract was for 10 episodes," she laughs, "and that's so they can keep their options open and gauge the reaction, I suppose. I won't know for a few weeks if I get the callback. Acting is insecure, and of course something like this represents a stable job. But I have to say I'd like to try all sorts of things."
Noone, whose role models include "flexible and adventurous" actors such as Kate Winslet, Johnny Depp, John Cusack, Susan Sarandon and Meryl Streep, says she would love to tackle the challenge of "holding a live audience on stage" rather than on screen. And then there's the career she once intended to follow. "Not science, I don't think," she smiles. "Writing was always something I was interested in." She can even see herself back at college, but not just yet.