Saoirse is currently at the Irish premiere of her film ‘Brooklyn’. We have updated our photo gallery with the first images from the event, and we’ll add more as they come out.
Public Appearances > 2015 > ‘Brooklyn’ Irish Premiere (October 22)
It’s a mystery to Saoirse Ronan why she’s one of the few Irish actresses to burst onto the world’s stage in the last 50 years or so.
Irish actors are another story: They’ve been coming up in droves. Colin Farrell, Michael Fassbender (who is half German, but was raised in Ireland from the age of 2), Pierce Brosnan, Liam Neeson, Cillian Murphy, Stephen Rea and Gabriel Byrne are just some of the Emerald Isle’s menfolk to find Hollywood success. A few Irish actresses have, too, albeit to a lesser extent — among them Sinead Cusack, Fionnula Flanagan, Fiona Shaw and Brenda Fricker, who won an Academy Award for her role in “My Left Foot” (1989). But at least in the United States, none are exactly household names. The last Irish actress to really make a splash in the United States was Maureen O’Hara, who recently turned 95.
“I think a lot of it comes down to luck; I think a lot of it comes down to timing,” Ms. Ronan, who is 21, said recently over breakfast at the Crosby Street Hotel in SoHo. “I don’t know why some of the male actors moved ahead while we didn’t.”
Ms. Ronan’s might not be a household name quite yet, but that’s partly because Americans remain largely incapable of pronouncing it (it’s “SEER-sha”). She was the young baker with the Mexico-shaped birthmark in “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” the luminous teenage assassin in “Hanna,” the slain girl who narrates the “The Lovely Bones,” and the tweenage aristocrat who set the plot in motion in “Atonement,” a performance that earned Ms. Ronan an Oscar nomination at the age of 13. Continue reading
