Fair City actress puts down roots in Union Hall

BY CONOR POWER

ACTRESS and organic food pioneer Fiona York launched her memoir in Union Hall last week.

Born in Waterford in the late 1930s, she lived in Northern Ireland before the family moved to Kenya when she was still a child. For Fiona, however, what drove her as a young lady was her dream of pursuing an acting career.

‘My passion was always to become an actress,’ she said. ‘To be in Kenya at the time felt like being in prison … I didn’t enjoy Kenya as much as I should have done in those teenage days.’

Drawn towards the bright lights, she moved to London where she became involved in the theatre, working in a number of prominent productions on stage and where she met a young Oliver Reed. They even became an item for a period. She then decided that she would move to California and get work in the film industry over there. This was part of a childhood dream, partly inspired by the name of the town she had lived in.

‘You’re going to laugh at this … we used to live in Cultra in Co Down, which is right next to Holywood. As a child, I was obsessed with movies. I spent any pocket money I had on really rubbishy movie magazines … I knew everything about who was married to whom – all that stuff.

‘I hung onto that all through my life until, in my twenties when I was in London, I decided that I had to do something about it. I had to go… to the other Hollywood!

‘When I arrived in California, I could get no work at all except for a play. It was a bit weird and very ironic to be working in Los Angeles – this city of dreams – in a play and not in a big-budget film. There were a few times where, if I had gone one way, I would have probably got the work but I wasn’t into any of that – the ‘casting couch’ – as it was called in those days. There was an awful lot of that going on. Maybe it’s stopped to some extent in the last few years, but I began to dislike Los Angeles very quickly. It was so false and full of beautiful young people driving around in open-top cars. I couldn’t wait to get out in the end.’

After two years in California, Fiona returned to Europe in 1963. After a time working on a commune in Gloucestershire, she got involved in organic food production in Ireland.

‘Through all the years in London, I was always planning to come back to Ireland but it never seemed to be the right time. I never forgot it. Growing things has always been my passion – the theatre and growing things in the ground. It has always been a wonderful balance because you went off on these silly journeys and ego trips in the theatre and then you had to come back and just get on with it.’

She set up an organic food company in Sligo with her then husband. Back then, she says, organic food was a very alien concept that very few people understood or cared for.

‘It was a long slog in the beginning, but we kept at it,’ says Fiona. ‘We were there in the very beginning, when the farmers’ markets were starting.’

After Sligo, they moved to Lismore in Waterford. While there throughout the 1980s and 90s, she continued to work in organic food and acting. She was a very familiar face, playing the role of Penelope Drake in RTÉ’s Fair City.

‘Lots of people were watching it at the time because it had a really good storyline and a really good beginning and end,’ Fiona recalls. ‘And she was a terrible bitch! I loved it.’

Today, after a career that has seen her rub shoulders with the likes of Paul Newman, Robert Morley, Joan Woodward and John Huston, tread the boards in several countries at the highest level, become a household name on national television, she lives in her home in Union Hall, where she contentedly grows all her own vegetables.

Fiona’s memoir A Life in Many Acts was launched last Thursday at the Cnoc Buí Arts Centre in Union Hall by her friend, theatre director Ben Hennessy.