Saoirse Ronan has told RTÉ Entertainment that a big disappointment early in her acting career has stood her in good stead and made her realise "it might not go my way".
The three-time Oscar nominee was in Dublin's Cineworld at the weekend for a special screening of her acclaimed coming-of-age story Lady Bird as part of the Cinemagic film and television festival for young people.
Ronan, a longtime patron of Cinemagic, also took part in a Q&A session with the audience and afterwards told RTÉ Entertainment how she learned to deal with setbacks in her working life at a very young age.
"One of the first big auditions that I ever went to, I didn't get it," she recounted.
"It was for this American film and I think I had maybe done a couple of callbacks [auditions] for it. When you're young you just think, 'Oh God, what if it does happen?' And that doesn't go away. That still doesn't go away for me or for anyone else - no matter how long you've been doing it for.
"But I remember I was on a school trip and my mam came over to me during the school trip - we were in Clara Lara!" the Brooklyn star continued. "So we were in a waterpark and I was drenched and she came over and said, 'I got news. You didn't get it. It doesn't matter. It's not a big deal'.
"I remember being really disappointed about it and was so sad for the rest of the night."
But Ronan said the experience then turned out to be "the best thing that could've happened to me".
"Any auditions I ever went to after that, I went into with more of a realistic approach," she explained. "And I always had that thing in the back of my head, 'It might not go my way'.
"In a way I'd always sort of expect the worst, and I still do that, because then if you get it, it's a pleasant surprise. It's very Irish, and sometimes I don't know how helpful it is, but it's definitely helped for me to be quite realistic about the uncertainty of it all."
When asked what advice she would give to young people in terms of achieving their ambitions, Ronan replied: "I think in a way you've already done the hard work by figuring out what it is you want to do, and what it is you're good at. Once you have that knowledge, I think it's something that can kind of get you through almost anything.
"When you know that you really love something - if it's in filmmaking or if it's in something else entirely - I'm sure it's going to be incredibly uncertain from one point to the next - and then hopefully very successful for you!
"But if you're willing to go through those ups and downs with whatever you do, then that's all you can do. You've just got to stick with it."
Ronan's new film, the romantic drama on Chesil Beach, opens in cinemas on Friday May 25.
Based on Ian McEwan's Booker-shortlisted novel of the same name, On Chesil Beach tells the story of Florence (Ronan) and Edward (Billy Howle), a couple who spend their honeymoon in a small hotel on the Dorset seashore, Chesil Beach, in 1962.
Ronan received her first Oscar nomination in 2008 for her performance in Atonement, another adaptation of a McEwan book.
