In a thespian career spanning over ten years, Aidan Quinn has become one of the most versatile and able actors in Hollywood. Still enjoying the success of his movie Michael Collins, in which he easily mastered the Dublin accent necessary to play Collins’ sidekick Harry Boland, his latest venture is the black comedy Commandments, where he plays opposite Courtney Cox and Anthony LaPaglia. He has also recently completed production on Jackal, in which he stars with Ben Kingsley and Donald Sutherland.

An authentic Irish accent is of course second nature to this blue-eyed star of such movies as The Playboys (in which he sported a Cavan twang), Benny and Joon, and Legends of the Fall, due to a childhood spent in both Chicago and Birr, Co. Offaly, moving back and forth while his Irish parents decided where they wanted to make a permanent home.

Despite the reluctance of Quinn to embrace the trappings of fame, he loves being an actor. “I’m a private person,” Quinn insists. “I don’t enjoy all these parties, premieres and public things. They are work.”

Quinn has also had stage success, garnering himself a couple of awards for his performance as Stanley Kowalski in a Chicago theater production of Streetcar Named Desire, a role he describes as “one of the best experiences of my life.”

Married to actress Elizabeth Bracco (currently starring in Steve Buscemi’s Trees Lounge), Quinn has one young daughter, Ava. In time he hopes to move on to other projects, writing, directing and producing. “Ireland has more stories packed into a smaller geographical area than anywhere in the world. More stories that desperately need to be told,” Quinn muses. So will he return to Ireland and buy a castle? “A cottage,” he says, with his usual understated style.