Jim Bartley sits outside the 'Fair City' soundstage with a cigarette and his memories. It’s lunchtime and the Guide photographer has disappeared to find a suitable backdrop for the actor’s portrait. Bartley is resting his dodgy leg. A few people amble past. ‘Howiya Jim’, they say. He nods in reply, an actor on his home turf. For 20 years, the Dubliner has played Bela Doyle on 'Fair City' and some 27 years before that, he played Seán Nolan in the seminal Irish soap, 'Tolka Row'. "I have spent most of my life on the grounds of this television station", he says of RTÉ. "It’s like my second home."
Over his years at Carrigstown, Bartley’s mop of black hair has lightened from black to silver and, following a football accident some years back, he walks with a limp. His shattered femur had to be eventually replaced with a metal rod. "When I die I won’t be buried, I’ll be sold for scrap", he quips but this boy is made of stern stuff – and we’re not just talking titanium. Every morning, before the cameras roll on 'Fair City', JB completes the Crosaire crossword in the Irish Times ("I do the Simplex as a warm up") and his mind is razor sharp. Recalling his primary school days, he names the lad who sat beside him, and flipping through his showbiz life, from the ’60s of 'Borstal Boy' and 'Z Cars' through to 'Coronation Street' and 'The Irish RM', he smartly conjures up places, faces and anecdotes.
But Bela Doyle, the tragedy-battered rogue from Fair City, is the part that has defined Jim Bartley (the photographer didn’t find that suitable backdrop, reckoning that the man himself is the most distinctive part of the show’s furniture). The actor describes Doyle as an Everyman, someone who has reaped what he has sown but has emerged bloodied but unbowed from the wreckage. "A lot of what Bela went through, Jim Bartley also went through in some ways", he says. "There was the death of a baby he had from an affair with Linda. Years later when that news came out, Rita threw him out. Then his eldest daughter died in a car crash. You know from experience how you feel when you hear that news."
The tragedy that still sears Bartley’s life is the death of his son, Emmet in 1987, following an asthma attack. It was just a month before Emmet’s ninth birthday. That loss – he and his former wife, Barbara Brennan, have one other child, Eva – hit Bartley hard. "I remember waking up at home, alone, and I’d roar in despair. I’d roar because of the emptiness. I’d roar because the energy that was Emmet was gone forever. I’d just let out this cry of despair which I believe was good for me because if you hold it in, God knows how you’ll end up. I hit the bottle. It wasn’t so bad that I needed to be put into the Rutland Centre but I was drinking too much. Then in 1989, Fair City came along and in 1990 Niall Matthews [producer] rang to ask whether I’d like to play this character called Bela. As soon as I hear the name and what he was like – a rogue who likes a bit of skirt – I said that I’d do it."
Jim Bartley was born in Drimnagh in Dublin in 1945. He was named after his father who had been named after his father. "I’m James Frederick the Third", he jokes. James Bartley Snr worked as a foreman plumber at Jacob’s factory and every Friday evening his kids would wait for him to arrive home with two bags of broken biscuits on the back of his bicycle. His mother, an inner city woman called Maisie Egan, had a beautiful voice and a love of showbiz, and once told Jim that he was a distant relation of the Hollywood actress, Ann Blyth. But it was his gregarious father – "a gymnast, a mad Dubs GAA supporter and an armchair Republican" – who was to determine young Jim’s career.
A passionate Gaeilgeoir, Bartley’s dad packed young Jim off to the all-Irish Coláiste Mhuire in Parnell Square. It was a school of hard knocks run by the Christian Brothers but it left him with two life-long passions: a love of Irish and acting. When the school competed in Féile Drámai Gaeilge at the Gate Theatre, Bartley was in the vanguard and by the age of 13, he 'starred' alongside Larry Gogan and Gay Byrne in a production of The Remarkable Mr Pennypacker at the Olympia Theatre. "Larry played the juvenile lead and Gay played the eldest illegitimate son. At one point Gay’s character stood up and said, ‘Hooray, I’m a bastard!’ That was the line I remember."
Bartley’s knack for acting was spotted by the Abbey Theatre’s Tomás Mac Anna, who directed the occasional religious pageant at the school. Mac Anna convinced the head brother (it didn’t take much convincing apparently) that young Bartley’s future lay in acting. RTÉ was already calling and by 1963, the 18-year-old was one of the most famous young men in the country, playing pin-up Seán Nolan in Tolka Row.
Cashing in on this popularity, he fronted the showband, Seán Nolan and the Raindrops. In his Ford Anglia (later swapped for a trendy Corsair), Bartley toured the country’s dancehalls. Were the women falling at his teenage feet? "I was still quite innocent at that stage", he says. "There were a lot of women but there was none of this groupie stuff or that. You left the dancehall at two in the morning and headed back to Dublin to do 'Tolka Row'."
In 1973, he married the actress Barbara Brennan, who had also acted in 'Tolka Row'. But the pressures of showbiz and a hectic working itinerary, took its toll on the relationship and by 1984 the marriage was over. "Eleven years", says Bartley, with a shake of his head. "Not a very long time really. I think the business had a lot to do with it when you’re travelling and on tour and all of that. You were drifting but you had to go where the money was. That was a part of life and a learning thing as well."
"Emmet’s tragic passing made us look at life again and agree that there could be no bitterness, no bickering, because we lost a precious life in our lives", he says. "So all those arguments were not on the agenda after that. We wanted to make sure that Eva grew up strong and happy, which she did, thank God. That tragedy also relieved me of the shadow of death. If your son has gone before you, why should you be afraid? It’s not that you don’t have any respect for life any more. You just have respect for people because you don’t know what has happened in their lives. You just have to be more tolerant because there’s a story behind everyone you come across every day."
For a few months in 1973, Bartley played Mike, a rag and bone merchant, on Coronation Street. When his philandering Paddy proved a hit, the actor was offered a contract with the hit Granada show, but he turned it down. He was already committed to a production in the Gaiety Theatre and just wasn’t prepared to up sticks and leave Dublin. "I’m very much a home bird, I love this country and I love Dublin", he says. "I was very much by myself over there in Manchester and it was a lonely time. I like a bit of banter in the pub with the lads." Years later, following his appearance opposite Pierce Brosnan in Taffin, there were other offers from the bright lights of London, but the death of Emmet changed everything. "There was no way I could leave then", he says.
Jim Bartley never remarried but for the past 21 years or so he has lived with his partner, Helen Cahill. He still thinks of his boy every day. "There’s a little photograph of him on the wall at home and when I pass by it I just give him a wink", he says. "But it took years for me to let go of the grave. I went there every day, regardless of the weather, up to that hill at Bohernabreena and I sat by Emmet’s grave for an hour. Letting go of his clothes, his school uniform and other stuff, was the hardest thing. Eventually I had to let go, to say that there was someone else there. That Eva was there. Eva was the meaning for my life then." Eva now works as an actress (she was in the Abbey Theatre’s 2009 production, The Last Days of a Reluctant Tyrant) and also teaches drama. "She has a very steady head on her and she’s a good friend", says her father.
Emmet was an Arsenal fan. His dad supports Yeovil Town. Yeovil Town? "Oh I started following them about ten years ago, watched them come up through the Conference League", says Bartley. "I wasn’t going to be totally predictable and follow Manchester United." His spare time he spends with his mates having a couple of pints in the local or putting a few bob on the nags. He still plays snooker but with his dodgy leg takes a while to get around the table. The old dancehall sweetheart can still hold a note: his party piece is Frank Sinatra and when he sang an Old Blue Eyes number at Suzanne’s wedding on Fair City there was no stunt double.
Next May, Jim Bartley will be 66. Retirement? He shakes his head. "Actors never retire", he says with smile. "They just fade away or die."
Donal O’Donoghue
