February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Though the 30-year-old Dundalk nativ, made clear that she loves making pop music with her sisters and brother, she confessed that she has long felt something was missing from her life as an artist. Small roles in the films “The Commitments” and “Evita” gave her a taste of what that was, but her hectic recording and performance schedules prevented her from further exploring a career in acting. Then, one night a couple of years ago, Corr was talking to her sister Caroline and everything changed.
“We were up until the early hours of the morning and we got to talking about me and acting,” Corr said. “And it’s really not like me, but take it that maybe I had a few drinks or something. I was kind of getting a bit despondent about it and thought that maybe as our parents watched us do music, I would watch my children act, and that’s a bit defeatist, but I just kind of thought, ‘This is one dream I’m probably not going to be able to fulfill.’ That was a big deal for me to say that and Caroline kind of went, ‘No way. You have to do this.’ “
Not long after that night, Corr was offered the role of a young musician named Anne whose life is turned upside-down when she performs with her band in an Irish ceili competition. The film, “The Boys and Girl of County Clare,” stars Bernard Hill and Colm Meaney and premiered recently at the Film Fleadh in New York.
“I think it’s a lovely film,” Corr said. “We all had a great time together doing it and it was such a labor of love.
“I feel the film is honest. I feel that it is truly reflective of Irish people in that as soon as it is about to make you cry, you roll laughing and it does it consistently. And that is Ireland.”
Corr’s first major role wasn’t an easy one to tackle. As Anne, a woman caught between two warring, middle-aged musician siblings (Hill and Meaney), she had to be sweet, funny, dramatic, romantic and musical. In addition to pulling her weight in the battle of the brotherly bands, Anne also falls in love with the “wrong” boy — her real-life love of two and a half years, Shaun Evans — and discovers the identity of the father she never knew.
“I got the script and I just really, really believed the character, Anne,” Corr said. “I believed everything she said was true and she goes through an awful lot. The story through Anne is a very big evolution, really, and what she imagined of her life isn’t at all what it was. When I read it, it really moved me. I felt close to it. For some reason, it just really seemed to resonate.”
Although shooting the low-budget film was tough — there were few amenities and most of the cast and crew worked six-day weeks in a remote part of Ireland — Corr said the hardest part of the actors’ experience seemed to be pretending they knew how to play the instruments their characters had mastered.
“Even before we started it, we all got together for this boot camp for learning these instruments,” she said, laughing. “If people could only hear what we actually sounded like. That would be a whole other movie.”
Noting that she plays numerous instruments in real life and would have happily played any one of them in the movie, Corr admitted, “I don’t play the violin at all.”
“If you’ve heard a child learning to play the violin, I think you can sympathize with this: It’s not a good sound,” she said. “I play the piano, the tin whistle. I could have done the flute. But the violin? I was in there with everyone else. It was horrible.”
As offensive as the actors’ noise might have been to her musician’s ear, it did break the ice and help the cast bond before shooting began.
“I remember the first week and we’re playing and we’re really concentrating and trying and just that moment when you look in someone’s eyes when you’re concentrating and you’re like, ‘Oh, that is so horrible,’ ” Corr said. “I think it just made things so earthy and real and that we were very, very able to get extremely vulnerable with each other very soon.”
That feeling of closeness among cast members lasted through the shoot and remains today, the performer said, pointing out that Charlotte Bradley, the actress who played her mother in the film still calls her “Anne” and she is starting to feel a daughterly affection for Meaney, with whom she had worked on “The Commitments” more than a decade earlier.
“Every day had something that is diary-worthy,” she said of the film’s production. “This was so special because we were in this remote part of Ireland and all we did was this. I had the time of my life. I had actually, probably the best time in the whole wide world and I think we all did.”
That said, the artist whom Hello! magazine voted the Most Attractive Woman of 2004, revealed that she was more than a little anxious when she first arrived to work on “Boys,” mostly because she feared her full-time actor stars would think she was an interloper from the music world.
“I went on to the set a little apprehensive going, ‘Jesus, I don’t want anybody to think I’m presumptuous,’ that I think I could just walk into this outfit after they’d busted their backsides for years,” she said. “I wanted them to know that it came from a very deep place of passion. This is not presumption. This is something that I’ve wanted to do for years and everybody was very, very good to me.”
Despite her lack of traditional stage or screen credits, Corr noted that she has been honing her skills as an actress for years by playing characters and working out scenes on stage in her musical concerts.
“People who love our band know that if I perform a song, my way to do it is to be the character that I’ve either written about or to make some farce of it,” she said. “I don’t just sing it; I kind of play it and people who know our concerts will know that.”
So, what do the famous Corr siblings make of their little sister’s fledgling film career?
“I do believe our most profound experiences we have had together and I do know that we want each other’s happiness and our fulfillment,” she said. “I suppose we differ from other bands because we’re family and with what we’ve been through together, that’s more important than anything and I had their full support.”