(Published in Galwaynow and Limericknow September 2009)
After 25 tumultuous years of drink and drug abuse, 32 hospitalisations and numerous near-death experiences, Mary Coughlan is finally happy. She tells Jo Lavelle ho writing her new autobiography, Bloody Mary, helped to banish her demons.
Talking about her feelings was never something the acclaimed signer was good at; she was outspoken on every other matter, but never on the things she desperately needed to get off her chest. And then like anything that’s been buried deeply and needs to find it’s way out, the past came knocking on her door and she couldn’t handle it. And so, at the age of around 30 and with three young kids, Mary began to attempt to battle her demons in the only way she knew how.
Her memoirs are disturbing, shocking, but as a reader, you feel an immense respect for what this woman has gone through, how openly she talks about the most vulnerable times of her life. The abuse she suffered as a child, the 32 hospitalisations for alcohol poisoning, the broken relationships, drug abuse, a miscarriage…
“Writing a memoir is like peeling an onion; everybody has layers of stuff they want to hide and with every layer that’s pealed away, hidden layers are being revealed. You choose to tell what you want to tell and you choose to hide what you want to hide. They’re my memoirs and they’re my stories and there’s nothing in there that I’m afraid of anymore; it’s all true.”
“There was an awful lot of stuff that I had to get out of me. I felt that it would have a healing effect on me, and it has done that. It’s closure. I’m not afraid to say the things that I said in the book; they no longer have any hold over me. From all that I’ve learned in 40 years of therapy and counselling, it was a relief when my counsellor said to me, ‘Given the life that you’ve had it could never be any other way’. I had this feeling deep inside me; I knew I wasn’t going to cave in under this thing forever. I had to go through whatever I had to go through and I do believe it was part of my journey. I had to drag everyone down with me, and that’s the unfortunate part of it. If you don’t learn from these experiences, it’s useless, but if you do there’s some redemption.”
A self-confessed wild woman who enjoyed the ‘craic’, Mary’s drinking was considered sociable back in the days when she lived in Galway, hanging out in Neactains, The Crane, the old Quays. It was the late 70s, early 80s, and the arts scene was starting to grow in the city, the atmosphere electric, and this Shantalla woman was bang smack in the centre of it all. “Hanging around Galway years ago, we were all the life and soul of the party in the pub, having a few pints, having the craic. It was a real social thing, hanging around and the kids would be hanging around on a Saturday afternoon as well and you’d be having pints. Everybody was doing it; it was our way of socialising.” It was when success came knocking on her door, and she moved to Dublin when she was 29 that her “huge love affair with booze” really started to take hold. “I started drinking shorts and tequila and gin and tonics. In the music business, it was everywhere and it was free. I just took to it like a duck to water.” On the night of her 30th birthday while playing a gig, she was given 30 brandy and ports…and drank them all.
Mary’s story only gets bleaker in the following years; there were suicide attempts, huge binges, near death experiences on numerous occasions, all the while attempting to bring up her children (she’s now a mother of five). At one stage, Mary was downing three to four bottles of vodka a day, not eating, and adding Ribena to her drink for vitamins. There were so many admissions to Dublin hospitals that they began to refuse to take her. Following her admission to a mental hospital in Newcastle, and a miscarriage, she finally called in quits. She stopped drinking in 1993 after a stint in the Rutland Centre and has stayed clean apart from a relapse into drug use five years ago. It’s only now, at 53 years old, that she’s finally made peace with herself.
“It’s nice to actually be sitting here saying these things out loud. So I’ve done an awful lot of healing work over the years and it’s only now that they’re clicking into place, it’s taken all this time for all this stuff to make sense. I almost died from drinking; I ended up in the intensive care unit with a couple of hours to live and it was basically because I was not able to talk about anything that was bothering me. I’m not unusual in that; an awful lot of people I’ve met in recovery have had terrible secrets that they’ve been hiding all their lives. I haven’t had a drink in 15 years and I think if I had had a drink five or six years ago, I would not be alive today.”
With the book closed on the darker side of her life, Mary Coughlan’s grabbing her second chance with both hands. She’s just bought a “beautiful, beautiful, beautiful” old house on the Sugar Loaf Mountain, her children are around her, her boyfriend of four years, John is by her side, and her famous sense of humour is intact…it’s Mary’s time to shine.
Bloody Mary is published by Hodder Headline Ireland and is available from all good bookstores.
Published in GALWAYnow LIMERICKnow and CORKnow Magazines February 08
By Jo Lavelle
View the print version (pdf).
On my way to meet with James Brown, celebrity hairdresser and best friend of Kate Moss, I’m bracing myself for lots of air kissing and dahlings. Instead, I am met with a genuine guy, who you quickly realise has zilt time for any of the typical pretentiousness that you associate with celebrity.
We meet in the Unicorn Restaurant in Dublin where James and his PR girl, Jennie are sitting patiently amidst the sea of suits. What was to be an interview over lunch quickly turns into what seems like lunch with mates over a really nice couple of glasses of Châteauneuf du Pape and great food.
Chatting about Galway, which he now calls home, his horses, Supermacs and getting a bit worse for wear at the races while trying to keep up with his beer drinking Irish friends, you get the impression that this Croydon-born chap is now ready to take a step back from the glitz and glamour for something a bit more real. The reason we’re meeting up is that James has just launched his new range of hair products, but he seems reluctant to discuss that side of things, preferring to chat about the possibility of him holding the stations at his house in Ballinrobe and his life as stylist to the stars.
But James’ real friends are those he’s had for years and admits that he meets lots of ‘wankers’, words he kindly puts in my mouth when I ask him how he deals with the whole ‘celebrity’ hairdresser label. “I don’t entertain it at all. At the end of the day, I blow dry hair - I’m a hairdresser, that’s all I do. I’m not saving the world; I’m not saving lives. Obviously, I’m good at it but it’s not brain surgery and I hate being called celebrity hairdresser.” Maybe so, but working with A-list clients like Gwyneth Paltrow, Kirsten Dunst, The Beckhams and Johnny Depp is obviously a tad more exciting than chopping hair in a salon down the high street. “I am lucky, when I find myself moaning, I think, I’m in paradise here.”
Some of his favourite celebs to work with include Sarah Jessica Parker and Demi Moore, “an amazing woman” who is he says is super professional and really nice. Julianne Moore is another of his favourites. “You just feel like you’ve known her forever. Most of them are my clients regularly, so it’s easy. You see them at their most vulnerable because you’re at their house and they’ve just got out of bed and your in their life completely which no one else would ever see in a million years. You’re there in their bedroom or even in the bathroom helping them wash their hair. So they’re in a very vulnerable state but obviously they can trust me.”
When in need of a bit of escapism from the whole scene, James hops on a plane and heads for Killimor, where he’s been coming since a little boy.
“Every time I come here I feel super, super at home like nowhere else I’ve ever been before. When I’d go the airport sometimes, I’d cry when I’d have to leave. A lot of people don’t understand it at all. During the summer, everyone’s going off to Cannes or sailing around St Tropez and I come to Ballinasloe - they can’t understand it. This Christmas and New Year, everyone’s going to Thailand, I’m coming here. I did that for years but now I’d choose this a hundred million per cent any day.”
He says he’d love to have Kate over to stay in Galway, but admits the last thing he’d want to do is bring the wrath of the paparazzi on the sleepy village of Tynagh.
“I am still in that scene and I speak or see Kate every day but I love having that balance and if I can’t manage to get here for some reason then I’ll be in the countryside at Kate’s but I’ll be up and out and still riding there as well - I just love the balance of that.”
Mentions of Kate are dotted throughout our conversation. He laughs as he tells me of how he was dying to get on the phone to Kate to tell her that the guy’s name who was renovating his outhouse in Killimor was called Mossy, his nickname for Kate. I ask him what it is about Kate that has the public in a constant state of fascination. “I think it’s because she has a way of disarming people. She doesn’t get out of a limo with 20 bodyguards and dark glasses on, making an entrance. She’ll get out, put her head down and get in. And the fact that you do see her without her hair and make-up, you do see her in the country with her wellies on. She’s not airbrushed all the time so I think she’s the most relatable out of everyone. You go to work with Kate everyone will tense and then she’ll come onto set and everyone is disarmed immediately - she’ll know every single assistant’s name by the end of the day. She’ll be in the corner chatting away to the caterers; their models and other celebrities don’t do that. I know not a lot of people get to see that but she is super down to earth and normal. She drives her own car, she’ll walk to the pub - she’s normal, as much as she can be for being Kate Moss.”
It was a collaboration with Kate, who he befriended in his late teens, which catapulted James into the world of celebrity and fashion. He dubs as “life changing” the first cover of Vogue he ever did with Kate at the age of 22. “It was so easy because it was a natural process, because I was doing Kate’s hair which I did anyway all the time, my friend Corrine Day was taking the pictures, who was my flatmate, it was just so mellow and easy and great and it ended up changing the whole industry really.”
Following over two decades in the industry, James decided to launch his own product range. “I was always mixing and matching products and it was never quite what I wanted. I just thought, wouldn’t it be great if I did my own products and then I just did it. I think the time was just right basically to do it.”
So what in James’ opinion makes a great hairstyle? “Simplicity. For me, it’s when someone looks like they haven’t tried, that they haven’t spent hours on their hair is the best for me really. You want the hair to be simple if you’ve got a ball gown on. And that keeps you modern and fresh. You never see Kate with huge hair and a huge dress and full make-up. The hair is always super simple but the outfit can be over the top. That’s why she always looks so good.”
How does he rate us Galway women on the fashion front? “I love the city; I think people look amazing in Galway City. You see really well dressed women, kids that have the best style; a lot of the students don’t have any money but the way they’re put together is amazing. It’s so weird now that I see people in Galway and I think God, that’s amazing and a season later, on the catwalk in New York, I’ll see the same stuff. Because the designers are out there on the streets copying what they see. I’m on the firing line of fashion - I’m at a show in New York, on the first week of fashion season and I see where the stuff is coming from and it’s coming off the streets. Women are really well put together in Galway.” I tell him the ladies will love him after that comment.
We head off through Stephen’s Green, and he’s asking me where he might find a pair of white fingerless gloves when we bump into Victoria Mary Clarke, girlfriend of Shane McGowan. She tells him it’s Shane’s 50th, there’s a party for him in London. Will he be there? Absolutely he will. Wonder if he’ll need a break in Killimor after that session?
Published in GALWAYnow, LIMERICKnow and CORKnow Magazines Dec/Jan 07
Having just finished the Cork movie, Strength and Honour, directed by Cork’s own Mark Mahon, Jo Lavelle caught up with Hollywood movie star, Michael Madsen, on the set of what is set to become next year’s blockbuster.
In our exclusive, Michael tells us why he loves Ireland, what he really thinks of Hollywood and why he badly wanted to play the lead role in the movie.
Strength and Honour, which will hit the big screens in 2007, is set in contemporary Cork and tells the story of an Irish boxer who accidentally kills his friend in the ring. He promises his wife he will never fight again, but when he discovers his only son is dying of the same heart disease that took his wife, he’s forced to break his promise.
Best known for his roles in Resevoir Dogs, Thelma and Louise and Donnie Brasco, it’s easy to see why Michael is typically chosen for the part of the tough bad guy. With his broad 6′ 2″ build, dark good looks and his gravely, testosterone-soaked voice exude masculinity.
However, this time around, Michael was happy to take a break from the bad ass guy and play the role of good guy, Sean Kelleher.
“Mostly, I’m pretty much remembered for playing various people - a lot of bad guys and killers and things like that and to be honest with you, I was getting a bit tired of it and I wanted to change. I wanted to be one of these guys who rides off into the sunset, which I don’t often get a chance to do. So originally, I was offered the other part in this movie of the killer, of the ‘Smasher’, but I said no.
“Then when I found out they had Vinnie Jones to play ‘Smasher’, I thought that was a great idea and I finally convinced them to let me play Sean. I think Mark wanted me for Sean all along but I think there was some other people he had to talk into it. And I’m working with people like Finbar Furey, and Patrick Bergin. I mean, these guys are great actors in their own right and it makes my job a lot easier.”
Pulling off the Irish accent is notoriously difficult for actors, with a long list of disastrous attempts down through the years, but hanging out in Ireland for a couple of months was all Michael said was needed to pick it up.
“I leaned a lot more about it from hanging out with the local people than I did from any books or anything of that nature. You pick it up pretty fast just being there, you know? Everybody talks a certain way and pretty soon, you start talking the same way and it just becomes part of your speech pattern after a while. And besides, I’m supposed to be Irish American, which is what John Wayne was when he did the Quiet Man. It was a similar story about someone who kills somebody in the boxing ring and later on, they have to come back and face the realities and what that cost.”
Although the father of six boys, whose Malibu neighbours include Mel Gibson and Pierce Brosnan, admits that Hollywood can be crazy, mad and extremely superficial, he says much of it is overly hyped and overrated.
“It’s a very, very aggressive business and a very manic way to make a living. And you know, Hollywood can be incredibly stale and overrated. The lifestyle is overrated. There’s not a lot of glamour. A lot of that stuff is in tabloids and papers and things like that. Believe me, I’ve been there and done that and been all over the whole scene, that whole Hollywood idea and I can tell you for sure it’s overrated. I just want to make a living. I just want longevity. I just want to work and all the rest of it isn’t important to me.
“I was never one of those people who was chased around by paparazzi and you know slugging photographers and that kind of thing. It wasn’t really my thing. I mean, I had lots of fun but I never became tabloid fodder and I was lucky. I did a million things before I became an actor. So I had life experience. I was an orderly in the hospital. I was an auto mechanic and I built a couple of race cars. I worked for a landscaper and a pipe fitter and I sold Christmas trees, drove tow trucks and worked in construction. I think a lot of the kids that are in Hollywood, they jump into the career and it’s all bullshit. You know what I mean? They’re making a lot of money and they’re living the high style and they never had any life experience at all. At least I have something to compare it to.”
Of the 70-odd movies that Michael has made, he says there are a few he is truly proud of and believes that Strength and Honour is going to be one of those. “I’ve made a lot of pictures and I don’t necessarily think that all of them are good. There’s a hand full of them that are made well and done by good people. I think Donnie Brasco, The Getaway, Reservoir Dogs and Thelma and Louise. I just did a picture in Canada called vice with Daryl Hannah; I play a pretty dark cop. I think that one is probably gonna to make a big deal next year. Along with this one - Strength and Honour.”
Michael says filming the movie was made a lot easier due to a great working relationship with director, Rochestown native, Mark Mahon. “Me and him understand each other very well. I met him on a couple of occasions and he told me about this dream he had to make this movie and you know, I know how difficult it is to raise money to make a picture and I know how difficult it is when you’re not considered to have any experience and how people can not really want to give you a chance.
“I know what it’s like to be the underdog and I know what it’s like to have people doubting you and I think that he went through a lot of that - a tremendous amount of it and so I have this great respect for him that he finally said, “Fuck it. I’m gonna go do this on my own,” and that’s exactly what he did. He had to convince a few people to let me play Sean. But once I showed up over here, everyone realised that he was a little wiser than what they gave him credit for.”
One of the things that undoubtedly surprises a lot of people who knows Michael only from the characters he plays in most movies, is that he writes poetry and has had some books published.
“I think there’s a lot of things that would surprise people but for whatever reason, I’ve played a lot of characters that are etched in people’s minds because of the violence behind them but I didn’t write any of that stuff, I just interpreted it. All the stuff I’ve written is mostly short stories and poetry and biographical stuff and I didn’t really plan on it being a book, it just worked out that way.
“At one point in time, I was just going to destroy it and a friend of mine encouraged me to give it to a publisher instead. What’s good about it is that I look back on it now and I read a lot of stuff that I wrote a long time ago and I’m really glad I put it down because now I can see that there’s a memory of it and there’s a lot of lessons I learnt in my life and I learnt it all the hard way and if I can write that down and help someone else down the road who is going to read it, then they might be able to interpret it for themselves. You’re kind of almost a teacher in a way. You’re not going to learn everything there is to learn and God knows there’s a lot I have left to learn, but if I can pass anything on to anyone else then I’ve done my job, right?”
Leaving for the States just two days after we spoke, Michael says he would have loved to have stayed longer. With this being his first visit to Ireland, he says he’s come to love it so much, including the rain, that he’s planning on buying a place here himself.
“I liked Ireland so much that I didn’t really want to go. I wanted to look at some land and some property so I’d have some place to come back to. I’m just looking for 20 or 30 acres with a small house, some place I can keep a couple of horses. Nothing big, no big deal. I just know that if I had an address here, I’d probably come back and forth more often.”
“I’ve written a lot of things about Ireland, which will probably be in a book some day from my visit here. It would be pretty impossible to be here and not. I mean, it’s raining all the time and everybody has a lot of pub time and there’s the pub-crawl as they call it and there are a lot of things that put you in the mood of a writer. I’m sure that Beckett and some of those other characters got it from the mood of Ireland. It really gets a hold of you after a while. Travelling through the countryside - that was really educational to me and I also learned a lot about the history of the place, the difference between Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland.
Michael names Kinsale pub ‘The Greyhound’ as a regular haunt of his during his stay, along with ‘The Spaniard’ and one of Ireland’s best known restaurants, Man Friday and Italian restaurant, Portofino’s in Kinsale.
“I’m gonna miss a lot of the people I worked here with. I met a lot of great people and made some good friends but when you’re in film, basically you’re just a part of a travelling circus and everyone’s just a bunch of carnival people and we’re all just moving from one location to another and finally when it’s over, the circus just leaves town and there’s a lot of people left behind wondering whatever happened and then you meet a lot of folks you’re never going to see again for the rest of your life so it’s kind of a neurotic way to live your life, but it’s what I’m doing.”
“You know, it’s funny cause I think I’m having more fun now than I ever was making movies cause I’m settled into it now, everything isn’t so serious. I’m more comfortable in my skin than I used to be.”
For more info on Strength and Honour, log onto www.strengthandhonourthemovie.com.
