Charming and resolute Saoirse (pronounced “Seersha”) Ronan, nominated for an Oscar when she was just 13, is an extraordinary young actress. Now 22, the Irish and American star made the front cover of June’s Time magazine as one of ten selected ‘Next Generation Leaders’! Yet Ronan’s upbringing was anything but privileged. Born in New York’s Bronx to Irish parents, she was taken back to Ireland when she was just a toddler. Her mother worked as a nanny and her father worked as a barman and occasional actor. Times were tough, Ronan later told the Guardian: “I don’t come from a family that has money”.
luck of the irish
Her father being a dab hand at acting, however, influenced his daughter who, when she was just eight, won a part in the Irish soap The Clinic. Then, in 2007, an audition for a part in a Harry Potter movie, though it proved unsuccessful, impressed director Joe Wright enough to cast Ronan in his movie Atonement (2007). In the acclaimed film, based on a best-selling book by Ian McEwan, Ronan plays Briony Tallis, an imaginative teenager whose accusations against an innocent man have terrible consequences. Her enigmatic performance wowed critics, and brought the teenager close to winning an Academy Award!
the fame game
After the success of Atonement, Ronan found that her life had changed forever - and not all for the better. She was taken out of school as she felt uncomfortable with all the attention and was homeschooled instead. And, as she learnt of the downside of fame, she also experienced disappointment in her career. Her subsequent films, the romantic comedy I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007)and science-fiction fantasy City of Ember (2008) both received mediocre reviews.
Ronan’s performance in Death Defying Acts, however, did hit the mark. In the film she plays the daughter of a woman (played by Catherine Zeta Jones), who has an affair with illusionist Harry Houdini (played by Guy Pierce), and Ronan was awarded an Irish Film & Television Award for her part. Following that, another literary adaptation saw Ronan really find her feet: in The Lovely Bones (2009), based on a 2002 novel by Alice Sebold, Ronan plays Susie, a 14-year-old girl in 1970s Pennsylvania who is murdered and then looks down on her family from limbo. While the film worked less well than the award-winning book, Ronan drew significant praise for her performance and won a Critics’ Choice Award.
brave roles
Ronan has since proven brilliant at adapting to a diversity of film genres. She played a Polish orphan in Peter Weir’s The Way Back (2010) and a teenage assassin in Hanna (2011). In the chilling How I Live Now (2013) she plays a war exile, she joined an all-star cast in Wes Anderson’s lavish The Grand Budapest Hotel, and topped that with a psychological thriller, Stockholm, Pennsylvania (2014). Saoirse Ronan is very much in demand: the widespread critical acclaim she received for her latest film Brooklyn (see box) saw her nominated a second time for an Oscar. In 2017, she stars in another adaptation of an Ian McEwan novel, playing lead in the simmering British drama On Chesil Beach.
CON AUDIO:
A New Life in Brooklyn
22-year-old Saoirse Ronan is the star of the film Brooklyn, which premiered at last year’s Sundance Festival. It tells the story of a young Irish girl who moves to New York in the early 1950s. The film is based on the novel of the same name by Colm Toibin, although Nick Hornby wrote the screenplay. As Saoirse Ronan explained when she met the press, she had already read the book when she was offered a part in the movie:
Saoirse Ronan (Irish accent): Well, I read it years ago. I must have been in my mid-teens, maybe, and I really loved it because it was an Irish story and it really kind of paralleled so many other people’s experiences – I have pretty much kind of gone through the same thing – when they move over to the States, especially from a small place like Ireland. It is one of those places where everyone kind of knows each other, and to go to this huge city that’s like a metropolis, and everyone’s kind of busy and rushing past each other and nobody kind of stops to take a second. I mean, now I love New York but it’s very, very different, culturally, for people moving over there. So yeah, I think that’s what I really kind of responded to with the book, but I had read it years ago and so I don’t think it really had the same impact on me as it did when I kind of went back and reread it before the film because then, at that stage, I had become more in touch with New York myself and had my own very special relationship with the city and have become more and more patriotic about being Irish as I’ve gotten older and lived and worked away, and then also just moving out on my own. Everyone kind of tends togo through the same pattern of just almost like floating above these two places for a while where you don’t quite know where to land, you know. Even though it’s exciting, it’s very scary when you don’t quite know where home is anymore. I got so much more from it by the time we made the film.
homesick
Saoirse Ronan was herself born in New York to Irish parents, but moved back to Ireland when she was three. That wasn’t the only aspect of the story that she could relate to:
Saoirse Ronan: I moved out when I was 19 and I lived in London for about a year, a year-and-a-half, and absolutely went through that intense homesickness that you get when you leave home, and even though you’re kind of motivated by needing your independence and wanting to kind of be your own person and become the adult or move on to like the next stage of your life or whatever, it’s scary, and I lived on my own as well. So you’re put in this new environment through your own choosing of like just complete self-dependence and dealing with... when you’re alone, when you’re like lonely in your flat and you have to like invite people over in order to have someone to chat to. So, yeah, it was great, it was the biggest learning curve I’ve ever had.
different times
And she enjoyed acting in a period piece, even though the film’s director, John Crowley, had to remind her and another member of the cast, Eileen O’Higgins, that Brooklyn was a period piece:
Saoirse Ronan: I think I’ve always been one of those people, anyway, that’s more kind of fascinated by the past and past years. And even if it’s just sort of socially the way people behaved, it’s really interesting and exciting to kind of delve into that world. I think the one thing that was tricky that John had to keep reminding us of, and trying to get us not to do it too much, was like physical contact with another person. We’re all so kind of tactile now, especially with people that we’re close to. And Eileen, who plays my friend, Nancy, in the film, the scene that we did where I’ve come back home and I’m at the church on Sunday, and I see her after a year, and Eileen and I like fell in love with each other straightaway, so we just wanted to hug each other and kiss each other and hold hands and all this kind of stuff and he had to dial it back because, you know, socially they didn’t do that. It was a lot more refined and kind of like kept back a little bit, so that was something that we had to keep in our minds quite a bit.
dressing up
She also liked wearing the costumes, which were designed by Odile Dicks-Mireaux:
Saoirse Ronan: The first thing that I always think about with a character is their voice and that’s something that’s very important to me and it kind of really, I think, defines a person. But with this, I’ve always had like really interesting costumes, but they’ve never been girly. This was the first kind of more mature womanly role that I got to play and I felt very ready for it, and so to get to wear these beautiful costumes that Odile had designed. I said to her at the time, and I didn’t even realize how much the ‘50s did this like so well, but because of the style of clothes they had, they really encouraged women to have a womanly shape, you know, to have boobs and to have curves and to have a bum, and so it was really nice to like be more in touch with that side when I was working, yeah.
