Cathy Belton has long been a vivid presence on stage and screen, from Ibsen to Red Rock and all stations between, but she is unlikely to ever lose the run of herself. Donal O'Donoghue meets her on the eve of the return of crime drama, Hidden Assets.
"Mum is my truth-teller," says celebrated actor, Cathy Belton. "She is straight as a die and will tell me when she doesn’t like something. So not everything Cathy does is brilliant. But you must have people like that in your life. You can’t go around thinking you’re the best thing ever all the time."
I don’t believe for a second that Cathy Belton, from Renmore, County Galway, ever believed she was the best thing since sliced bread. Even with her impressive acting pedigree, on stage and screen, including a scene-stealing nun in Philomena, a teak-tough matriarch in Red Rock and meticulous Criminal Assets Bureau accountant, Norah Dillon, in the RTÉ crime drama, Hidden Assets, she doesn’t buy the hype or the hoopla.
"My mother, Anna, also says that every office needs a Norah" she says of her alter-ego. "She’s a grafter." You could also say that every show needs someone gifted and grounded like Cathy Belton.
We meet in a photo studio in Dublin. Belton, sporting a denim top, face scrubbed ahead of the shoot, is vivid and vital. What can she tell me about season two of Hidden Assets? She looks towards the publicist at the other end of the room.
I give her what I have from the press notes: it’s nine months after the events of season one; there’s a new CAB sheriff in town (Nora-Jane Noone replacing Angeline Ball); and the Detective Sergeant’s first major challenge is a co-ordinated cyber-attack on CAB and the Belgian Counter Terrorist Unit, who just happen to have a mole in their ranks. Whew!
"It’s very exciting, with the officers in danger of losing their anonymity" says Cathy, who filmed her scenes before and after her appearance in Ibsen’s Ghosts at the Abbey Theatre. "I finished in the Abbey on Saturday, flew to Belgium on Sunday, and woke up Monday morning in the middle of Antwerp’s diamond district. I opened the apartment window, and it was like being on a movie set. On the street below, groups of Hasidic Jews were cycling to work."
Cathy Belton describes herself as an accidental actress, having briefly considered a career as a national schoolteacher before stepping onto the thespian tightrope. "So many people give you the courage to take the risks," she says. "Mike (Diskin, who ran the Town Hall Theatre, Galway) was one of them, with Eclipsed, Patricia Burke Brogan’s stage play about the Magdalene laundries scandal. I remember him telling me that I should take the part’".
Did he not in fact say something like 'What are you doing here?’ She laughs. "Oh yes. ‘What are you doing here in the CAO office?’ and I’m thinking, well I’m looking for a proper job with regular wages and a life! But even before that, there were other people. I had a great drama teacher called Rebecca Bartlett who saw something in me. She convinced me to audition for the National Youth Theatre’s production of The Crucible, directed by Ben Barnes. Many of that cast – Catherine Walsh, David Parnell – went into the business."
As did Belton, but sometimes the path only becomes apparent in retrospect. "I went to drama classes because my parents thought that I was too shy," she says, "and I was too shy. But I felt safe acting, I was playing somebody else." Her parents were not artists but loved the arts; her father, Liam, an avid cinema-goer, taking his two daughters (Cathy and younger sibling, Orina) to shows like The Godfather and Ryan's Daughter.
"Dad was a great amateur photographer, and he adored the cinema. Film was huge in the house. He was showing me The Godfather when I was probably too young to watch it and North Sea Hijack, which was partly filmed in Galway. So even though my parents weren’t in the business, it was a home where the arts were cherished. My Mum loved country and western music, and regularly went to the Druid Theatre. I now realise that we were steeped in showbiz."
A few years back, Cathy discovered a cache of VHS video tapes in the attic of the family home, recordings of special occasions alongside short dramas labelled with titles like ‘Cathy's Communion’, ‘The Car Crash’ and so on.
"They are priceless," she says now. "Dad would spend his Saturdays and Sundays filming ‘the car crash’ where my sister would be on the ground, and I’d pretend to run over her and then call out ‘Omigod! Are you OK?’ Neighbours’ kids also ended up on camera. It was just playing of course. I directed, wrote and acted, Dad was the very patient DOP (Director of Photography) and my poor sister usually got run over by a car. Watching them again, years later, was so beautiful. At times, you can hear Dad’s giggle off camera, while Mum was the caterer and set dresser."
Her father is now long gone, but the memories live on. "He was just a glorious person, full of curiosity, positivity and possibility."
Both parents championed Cathy’s acting ambitions, but it was her long-running role as Lucy Reilly, the vet in RTÉ’s rural soap opera, Glenroe, that convinced her it could be a career.
"It was such a great part," she says now. "I got to come in and buy Dick Moran’s house in my very first scene!" It was also the foundation of all to follow on stage and screen, from Shakespeare to Ibsen to Marina Carr and dodgy diamond dealings between Dublin and Antwerp.
Does she now have a natural confidence as an actor?
"No, I don’t think anybody does. If you start thinking like that, you’ll never learn anything. You must keep challenging yourself and that’s what I love and why I go between film and TV. If you do too much of one, you might lose on the other. Sometimes people ask me, ‘Which do you love more, stage or film?’ but it’s almost impossible to answer. They are two different beasts. With stage, every performance is different, and you don’t know if it’s going to work or not. Of course, theatre is where I started out and you always like to plug back in now and again."
Cathy Belton lives in Dublin with her husband, Brian, and their dog Daisy. The couple first met (facilitated by matchmaker friends) when she was playing arguably her best-known role of Ma Hennessy in Red Rock.
Brian, who works in the legal world, didn’t have a clue about her showbiz lineage. "He just thought it was hilarious that I was getting recognised," she says.
They married in France in 2018 and now spend time between Dublin and her old family home in Renmore, where Cathy’s mother still lives. "Mum was at Ghosts and loved it just as she loves Hidden Assets, even though she knows nothing about season two and I won’t tell her. We are, after all, storytellers, and it’s all about the power of the story, so why give the details in advance?"
And while she never did work as a teacher, she acknowledges a certain similarity between both professions. "Well, you have your captive audience," she says and smiles.
Earlier this summer she was at the Galway Film Fleadh for the world premiere of Trish McAdam’s film, Songs of Blood and Destiny, adapted from Marina Carr’s theatre art piece, iGirl, with Eileen Walsh, Brian Gleeson and Belton the close-up faces interrogating history. But following Ghosts and Hidden Assets, things have been quiet.
Right now, with the ongoing writers’ and actors’ strikes in the US, there’s a lot of uncertainty. "It’s scary," she says of how Artificial Intelligence is impacting the industry. "It had to come to these strikes in the US. And there is the issue of AI voiceovers with no live actors any more and that’s bread-and-butter for so many of us. So, I have no idea what’s next but that’s OK sometimes too."
As for right now, in a photography studio in Dublin, there’s the immediate matter of a cover shoot. "Photos," says Cathy with the look of someone about to face the guillotine.
