Book review: Actress, by Anne Enright

Actress opens with a to-and-fro account of the narrator’s twenty-first birthday party in early Seventies Dublin. The focus however is on her mother, Katherine O’Dell, actress, singer of Irish songs and briefly, around 1950, a star in Hollywood, her only marriage to her stage and screen partner being made by command of studio bosses as was often the case then. (The husband was gay, and not daughter Norah’s father, though for much of her childhood she believed he was.) This party and the evocation of Dublin’s theatrical and cultural life long before prosperity changed the Republic and when it was still a city free of tourists, one in which everybody smoked and drank and talked the hind legs off donkeys, are so brilliantly and delightfully done that you may read entranced but fearing also that the author may not be able quite to keep it up.