A consummate actress, Fionnula Flanagan’s portfolio includes a litany of stage and screen performances, including the highly-acclaimed James Joyce’s Women, which she adapted for the stage and went on to produce as a feature film.

Audiences who remember her as the green-eyed sultry redhead in the TV series Rich Man Poor Man, for which she won an Emmy, and How the West Was Won might have a hard time recognizing her in Some Mother’s Son. She plays Annie Higgins, mother of one of the hunger strikers, without makeup, with yellowed teeth, and clad in wellies and a bulky skirt and coat.

Flanagan was already a highly acclaimed actress in Ireland and England, with a stint in the Abbey Theater under her belt, when the role of Maggie in Brian Friel’s Lovers brought her across the ocean to blaze her trail on Broadway. Touring with this production proved to be fortuitous, not only in terms of her career, but also on a personal level, as she met her husband-to-be, Garret O’Connor. The Dublin-born psychiatrist, at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore at the time, was brought in to administer to the cast, and 24 years later he and Flanagan are still together.

Through the Institute For Innocence which he founded, O’Connor and Flanagan in have conducted workshops in the U.S. and Ireland which address healing in Irish and Irish American Catholics.

Flanagan feels she can accurately pinpoint the moment when her acting career took off. She was a schoolteacher in Marino at the time, and took part in a play called An Trial (The Trial) written by a woman who wrote Irish grammar books. When the woman who was playing the lead became ill, Flanagan took over. “Phyllis Ryan decided to do the play in English and I played that role, and then I did it for television in Irish and got the Jacobs award that year. So roles began to tumble at me both in Irish and English television.”

As well as her extensive acting roles, Flanagan is also an accomplished director and producer, co-producing Away Alone, a play about young Irish in the Bronx. She has also found time to turn her hand to writing, with a collection of essays for Cercanias Distantes (Distant Relations).