My parents, May and Hugh Feehily, were originally from Co Leitrim but emigrated to London, where my father ran a pub in Lewisham called the Sydney Arms. We moved back to Ireland — Bundoran in Co Donegal — in 1975 when I was about six.
It was a place steeped in Irish culture: in school we learned a lot of poetry, there were plays and singing, and competitions such as Scor na Nog. When I left school I wanted to study English at University College Dublin, and while I got enough points for it I didn’t get enough honours marks for a grant, and my parents couldn’t afford to pay my way. I wanted to be a writer.
I had heard stories from friends who had gone to New York and made piles of money from waitressing, so naively I thought I would go to London and save enough to pay for university myself. I was unskilled and had no third-level qualifications, so I ended up working in retail and had just enough income to cover my travel and accommodation.
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I realised I was never going to get to UCD, so I started thinking about an acting career. I came back to Ireland and applied to the Gaiety School of Acting around 1990. I was with a lot of like-minded people there and made lifelong friends, all as driven as me and who always wanted to be on the stage. That appetite is very powerful.
I began getting more and more work on stage and towards the end of my acting career — from 2003 to 2005 — I had a stint as a leading character in RTE’s soap Fair City. I played Sorcha Byrne who was having an affair with her student Ross, played by Jamie Belton.
This kind of work is a dream for actors because it’s regular, you know where you’ll be on any given night and you’re sure you can pay the bills. I remember the first day I arrived on set I thought I was very lucky to be working with Pat Nolan, who played Barry O’Hanlon. About 10 years earlier I attended his drama classes before my drama school training, and in the mid-1990s I was in The Rocky Horror Picture Show with him. Little-known fact: Pat is a great singer and dancer. He took me under his wing at Fair City and was incredibly kind because I was extremely nervous.
I became very friendly with Orlaith Rafter, who played Robin Doyle. She’s a beautiful person, inside and out, and taught me how to spend money. Before Fair City I had sometimes struggled to make a living, so when I started to earn I was afraid to spend. Orlaith would say: “Come on, Stella, you’ve only got one life, treat yourself.”
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I was worried about playing such an unlikeable character as Sorcha, who was having an affair with her daughter’s object of love, the student, and was having a thing with a garda, on top of seeing Barry. It was all very sordid.
Some people are rude to unpleasant characters from soaps when they see them in real life because they believe they are that person. Mostly I used to get women coming up to me saying: “Go for the young fella — my old man is wretched.” One day Jamie and I had left a radio interview and walked on to Mount Street where a women’s mini-marathon was passing. I heard a massive roar and a group of women were shouting “student shagger”.
Soap is a high-pressure environment as the actors don’t get extra rehearsal time. You get your script a few weeks in advance, rehearse your moves on the Saturday, learn lines on Sunday, changes are sent by courier on Monday, and Tuesday you’re ready to film.
I wrote my first play, Duck, while in Fair City, and I was writing my second when my husband, theatre director Max Stafford-Clark, suffered a stroke, which blinded him on the left side. He couldn’t walk and I needed to be there for him.
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I continued with the writing during this time and dropped the acting, but the further I got from it, the more I preferred the other side of it. I loved creating ideas and I’m happier on this side of the table. I ended up being the writer I wanted to be when I left school after all.
Interview by Larissa Nolan
Ballet Ireland’s new version of Coppélia, created by Stella Feehily and Morgann Runacre-Temple, tours 25 venues nationally and visits the Gaiety Theatre on November 18-21; balletireland.ie