Sinéad Cusack Movies
Well respected in the stage world for her frequent work with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal Court Theater, Irish actress Sinéad Cusack has also made quite an impression in the world of cinema. If her Shakespearian past has followed her from stage to screen with such efforts as Twelfth Night, the classically trained actress has also branched out with roles in such diverse features as Hoffman (1970), Waterland (1992), and Stealing Beauty (1996). Though Cusack spent her early years aspiring to sainthood in convent school, her carefree, attention-getting nature instead led her to the spotlight. When Cusack was 11, her father, Cyril, cast his young daughter in an Olympia Theater production of The Trial; although she wasn't thrilled with the prospect of acting early on, she kept gravitating back toward the stage. It was during her college years that Cusack became a fixture of Dublin's Abbey Theater, and a move to London found her covering for a pregnant Judi Dench in a 1975 production of London Assurance. Cusack credits her subsequent stint at the Royal Shakespeare Company with teaching her everything she knows as an actress.In 1960, Cusack made her feature debut in director Clive Donner's Alfred the Great, and though numerous roles were offered to her in the years that followed, the actress chose her film roles carefully, opting to concentrate on her stage work. Shakespearian roles in such Royal Court productions as Macbeth and The Merchant of Venice balanced numerous small-screen efforts including Notorious Woman (1974) and Quiller (1975). In 1984, Cusack cemented her reputation when she made her Broadway debut in Much Ado About Nothing, and she also made quite an impression with her concurrent performance as Roxanne in the Broadway production of Cyrano de Bergerac (the two productions played in repertory at the George Gershwin Theatre); in 1985, a performance of the latter play was taped for television broadcast. A return to London found Cusack taking the stage with her father and sisters Sorcha and Niamh for a production of, appropriately enough, The Three Sisters.
In the late 1980s and early '90s, Cusack became a more familiar face to movie lovers thanks to roles in Waterland (opposite real-life husband Jeremy Irons), Sparrow (1993), and Uncovered (1994). After once again joining husband Irons onscreen with Stealing Beauty, Cusack was directed by him in the 1997 U.K. television drama Mirad. In 2000, Cusack got laughs with her role as a meddlesome mother who enrolls in college to keep an eye on her son in My Mother Frank, and after a role in the quirky drama I Capture the Castle in 2003, she made a trip back to the small screen with the television drama Winter Solstice. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
- 2007
Writer-director Darren Fisher's innuendo-laden romantic comedy Popcorn unfurls entirely within the confines of a British multiplex known as "Moovieworld," where 19-year-old Danny (Jack Ryder) accepts a job with the intention of wooing and winning over usherette Suki (Jodi Albert) - little realizing that it is her last day at the theater. Faced with a very short amount of time in which to act, a desperate Danny cooks up a host of wild schemes designed to catch Suki's attention. He is assisted in his pursuits by fellow worker and consummate movie addict Zak (Luke de Woolfsoon) who vows to teach him the tricks of the trade as illustrated in various romantic movies. Meanwhile, theatrical manager Kris (Andrew-Lee Potts) learns of a "management plant" at the theater making a bundle by reselling old tickets, and decides to reel in the culprit, red-handed. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jack Ryder, Jodi Albert, (more)
A privileged middle-class girl raised in rural southern England gets a rude awakening to the world when a family move forces her to contend with the unseemly inhabitants of a northern mill town in director Brian Percival's adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell's timeless love story. Margaret Hale (Daniela Denby-Ashe) is the daughter of a middle-class parson and a girl accustomed to decidedly refined company. When her family is uprooted and forced to move to the northern mill town of Milton, the prim and proper country girl is notably contemptuous of her new working class neighbors - and especially of charismatic mill owner John Thornton (Richard Armitage. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
- 2000
Babe: Pig in the City (1998) screenwriter Mark Lamprell makes his directorial debut with this understated drama about a middle-aged woman who is looking to reinvent her life. Frances Regina Aileen Nano Kennedy, AKA Frank Ryan (Sinead Cusack) is a devoutly Catholic widow with two grown children and a few grandchildren. She is also bored to tears with her life. Meanwhile, her college-aged son David (Matthew Newton) is utterly smitten with Jenny (Rose Byrne), the beautiful girlfriend of his buddy Mick (Nicholas Bishop). When Frank decides to take art courses at the same university that her son attends, David is unenthusiastic. Moreover, so is her crusty professor Mortlock (Sam Neil), who believes that older students take places from younger ones. This film was screened at the 2000 Berlin Film Festival. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Sinéad Cusack
- 1998
Pierce Brosnan produced and co-stars in this Irish family drama, directed by Eugene Brady and set on the island of Inis Dara. Since farmer Tony Egan (Donal McCann) has had no contact with his sister over two decades, he's startled to find she married a black New Yorker and managed a Hell's Kitchen grocery, facts he learns when her son, artist Chad Egan-Washington (Hill Harper of Spike Lee films) arrives on the island to scatter her ashes. A romance between Chad and Aislin (Aislin McGuckin) disturbs her father, bartender Joe Brady (Brosnan), not for racial reasons, but because Joe once had an ill-fated love affair with Chad's mother. Chad's questions dig up other long-buried family secrets and tensions. Shown in the market section at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Bhob Stewart, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Hill Harper, Aislin McGuckin, (more)
Julia (Kate Beckinsale) has been busy about her job, doing painstaking restoration work on a fifteenth-century painting. As good restoration work is at least as much about doing good research and detective work as it is about the physical process of restoration, when her cleanup of the Flemish painting reveals a hitherto undiscovered Latin phrase which translates as "Who killed the knight?" she goes to the art authorities she knows to find out what it might mean. Oddly, at the same time a series of murders begin to rock her small world of art experts, patrons and restorers, and she finds that the mystery of the painting is interwoven with the mystery of the deaths around her. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- John Wood, Sinéad Cusack, (more)
- 1993
It is the 19th century in Italy, and Maria (Angela Bettis) has joined a convent in order to explore her strong feeling that she has a calling to become a nun. She has adapted to live at the convent quite nicely, and is relatively untroubled, but a cholera outbreak sends her back to be with her family for a while, near the steaming peak of Mount Etna. She enjoys her freedom to move around the countryside, and is wooed (unsuccessfully, it seems) by a charming young man named Nico, but returns to the convent when the danger is past. There, she is troubled by the thought that she truly loved Nico, and that her calling may not be as firm as she thought. When she learns that Nico has married her sister, she nearly goes mad with self-recrimination, but eventually weathers the storm. All the dialog in this Italian-made film by Franco Zeffirelli is in English. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Angela Bettis, Johnathon Schaech, (more)
- 1989
Produced for Scottish television, Venus Peter was financed by the Orkney Islands Council. The title character is transformed into a "sea child" when he is baptized with salt water. Though his family tries hard to accustom him to life on land, Peter (Gordon R. Strachan) yearns to go to sea -- or, at the very least, to escape his cloistered community. He finds a kindred spirit in Princess Paloma (Juliet Cadzow), the village "looney," who, alas, is eventually carted away to an institution. Briefly fascinated by poetry and music, thanks to his lovely teacher Miss Balsibie (Sinead Cusack), Peter is disillusioned when he finds his teacher in the arms of her lover (and out of her clothing). The final blow to Peter's idealism comes when his grandfather's ship is repossessed. Despite the bleakness of his surroundings and his seemingly dead-end existence, however, Peter never completely lets go of his dreams, and the film ends on a positive note. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Gordon R. Strachan, Ray McAnally, (more)
- 1985
Anthony Burgess translated and adapted this staging of Edmond Rostand's 19th century theatrical classic. Derek Jacobi (of I Claudius) fame stars as Cyrano de Bergerac, the ski-nosed poet, philosopher and swordsman. Believing that the beautiful Roxanne will shrink from his ugliness, Cyrano woos her by proxy, feeding the handsome but empty-headed Christian the honey'd words of love that will win the lady's heart. Jacobi is given powerhouse support by the Royal Shakespeare Company, including the exquisite Sinead Cusack as Roxanne. Videotaped for British television, Cyrano de Bergerac was telecast in America on selected PBS and cable-TV outlets. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Derek Jacobi, Sinéad Cusack, (more)
- 1980
Part of the TV series entitled "The Shakespeare Plays," this is one of the subtlest and most enjoyable of the Shakespearian plays. Portraying the different types of love, it is set in a country house of aristocrats and there are practical jokes, poetry and songs that make this a most entertaining view. ~ Tana Hobart, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Alec McCowen, Trevor Peacock, (more)
- 1975
In this detective film, a British agent gets more than he bargained for when, while investigating a friend's death, he uncovers a plot to take over the German government. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- 1974
A close-knit group of blind British college students inadvertently overhear an assassination plot. The authorities are skeptical, but the assassins are well aware that the students are privy to their plans. Seemingly helpless, the students combine their cognitive, sensory and olfactory skills to halt the killing and to prevent their own elimination. The Eyes Have It was taped in Britain, then telecast in the US as part of the ABC anthology Wide World Mystery. The leading lady is Sinead Cusack, daughter of actor Cyril Cusack and the future host of the 1991 TV cartoon series The World of Peter Rabbit and Friends. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
This dark drama unfolds in an unnamed community outside of London, where a beleaguered and grief-stricken tavern owner named Jim Radford (James Booth copes with the rape and murder of his young daughter. The remainder of his family shares his distress, and in time, it begins to rip the clan apart. When the young man who is being tried for the crime is let off thanks to paltry connecting evidence, Jim grows desperate and teams up a buddy of his named Harry (Ray Barrett) whose daughter suffered from a like fate - presumably, though not definitively, at the hands of the same killer. The two hone in on the young man who they believe is responsible, kidnap him and torture him in a number of ways. Unfortunately, the youth will not talk and ends up dead. Moreover, in time it becomes apparent that this might not have been the correct individual. ~ Iotis Erlewine, All Movie Guide
This lackluster 1970 version of Charles Dickens' classic novel, David Copperfield (made as a film twice before) turns Dickens' picaresque tale into an extended flashback, with David Copperfield (Robin Phillips) as a young man, brooding on a deserted beach, recalling his youth. The characters are all trotted out in choppy flashbacks as David remembers his life as a young orphan, brought to London and passed around from relatives, to guardians, to boarding school. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Richard Attenborough, Cyril Cusack, (more)
Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl, and Vincent Cassel star in this David Cronenberg's thriller concerning a London midwife who unwittingly stumbles into a clandestine Russian sex trafficking ring. An unidentified Russian teen has been rushed to a London hospital after going into labor. Though midwife Anna Khitrova (Watts) does manage to deliver a healthy baby girl, the newborn's mother dies tragically during delivery. But the deceased mother's secrets did not die with her, because she has left behind a diary. Determined to ensure the newborn is placed with her rightful family, Anna attempts to read the diary and discovers a business card for a local restaurant therein. Upon visiting the restaurant Anna is greeted by kindly owner Semyon (Mueller-Stahl), who generously offers to translate it for her. But Semyon is not what he appears to be, and before long Anna begins to fear that the child could be in great danger. Semyon admits to Anna that the diary contains information about his son Kirill (Cassell) that could land the volatile offspring in jail despite the fact that Kirill is at heart a good person. As the truth begins to unfold and Anna begins to believe that Kirill and his driver Nikolai (Mortensen) - an ambitious driver seeking to ascent the ranks of the notorious Russian mafia - mean the baby harm, an underworld storm begins to brew that could consume all involved. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Watts, (more)
Based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore, V for Vendetta takes place in an alternate vision of Britain in which a corrupt and abusive totalitarian government has risen to complete power. During a threatening run in with the secret police, an unassuming young woman named Evey (Natalie Portman) is rescued by a vigilante named V (Hugo Weaving) -- a caped figure both articulate and skilled in combat. V embodies the principles of rebellion from an authoritarian state, donning a mask of vilified would-be terrorist of British history Guy Fawkes and leading a revolution sparked by assassination and destruction. Evey becomes his unlikely ally, newly aware of the cruelty of her own society and her role in it. ~ Cammila Albertson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Natalie Portman, Hugo Weaving, (more)
Deliverance and Tailor of Panama director John Boorman returns to the director's chair for this tale of a hawkish businessman who slowly finds his life being taken over by the twin brother he never knew he had. Liam O'Leary (Brendan Gleeson) is a no-nonsense real-estate developer who isn't above greasing the politician's wheels a bit to get the permits he needs. His 20-year marriage to Jane (Kim Cattrall) has been stale for over a decade, and his adolescent son, Connor (Brian Gleeson), has most recently taken to communism as a means of showcasing his rebellious streak. Though Liam still dotes on his aging mother (Moira Deady), it's plain to see that his sister, Oona (Sinéad Cusack), is the favored child in the family. One day, stuck in traffic on the way home from work and frustrated at his inability to obtain planning permission for a multi-million pound stadium, Liam is shocked to see his spitting image approach his car and begin cleaning the windshield while begging for change. Now, after discovering that he was not only adopted but has an identical twin as well, Liam finds his life rapidly being taken over by a cunning doppelganger who has had enough of life on the streets, and has finally found a means of turning his luck around by simply stepping into the shoes of his more successful counterpart. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Brendan Gleeson, Kim Cattrall, (more)
Based on the novel by Dodie Smith (101 Dalmatians), director Tim Fywell's comic romance follows 17-year-old Cassandra Mortmain (Romola Garai) and her quirky family as they attempt to make the best of their meager existence in a crumbling English castle. While her father (Bill Nighy) has been struggling for over a decade to repeat the success of his debut novel, her beautiful sister Rose (Rose Byrne) frequently voices her displeasure with their current situation, and nudist stepmother Topaz (Tara Fitzgerald) proves little help at much of anything. The arrival of American landlord Simon Cotton (Henry Thomas) and his brother Neil (Marc Blucas) provides a glimmer of hope as the initially repelled Rose soon takes a liking to Simon and the two arrange to marry. Lost in the chaotic shuffle of marriage plans and increasingly complicated relationships, the hapless Cassandra soon begins to blossom into womanhood as she experiences aspects of life that were heretofore unknown to her. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Romola Garai, Rose Byrne, (more)
This beautiful if ponderous soufflé of a film from director Bernardo Bertolucci serves more as an Italian travelogue than a drama. Liv Tyler stars as Lucy Harmon, an American teenager arriving in the lush Tuscan countryside to visit family friends residing there. Lucy visited four years earlier and exchanged a kiss with a handsome boy with whom she hopes to become reacquainted. Lucy's mother has committed suicide since then, and the teenager also hopes to discover the identity of her father, whom her mother hinted was a resident of the villa. Once she arrives, Lucy meets a variety of eccentric visitors, including a dying gay playwright (Jeremy Irons), a sculptor (Donal McCann), an entertainment lawyer (D.W. Moffet), and several others. Lucy has decided to lose her virginity and becomes an object of intense interest to the men of the household, but the suitor she finally selects is not the initial object of her affection. Stealing Beauty boasted an intriguing parallel between actress Tyler's role and her real life. The daughter of a famed rock and roll star, she was brought up believing that her father was someone else, a fact that Bertolucci may have had in mind when writing the story. ~ Karl Williams, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Liv Tyler, Sinéad Cusack, (more)
Based on the novel by Graham Swift, this drama follows the past and present crises of schoolteacher Tom Crick (Jeremy Irons), who attempts to resolve the problems in his own life and the apathy of his students by relating stories of his troubled childhood in the English Fens (a marshy region in Britain). ~ Iotis Erlewine, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jeremy Irons, Ethan Hawke, (more)
- 1992
- R
An Irish married couple (Stephen Rea and Sinead Cusack) tend to define their lives according to the opinions of others. When little crises regarding his job and her parenting skills begin to develop, Rea and Cusack are devastated. When their friends and business acquaintances begin turning sour, they are debilitated. And when the planned renovation of their bathroom goes awry, they are utterly destroyed. The improvisational banter between the two stars was achieved by director Les Blair after extensive, laissez-faire rehearsals. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Stephen Rea, Sinéad Cusack, (more)
Demi Moore stars in this unusual psychological drama about two women caught between reality and imagination. Marie (Moore) is an American widow trying to raise two children under difficult circumstances in a small town in France. Marty (also played by Moore) is a successful businesswoman in New York City who wants to leave her busy life and lead a quieter existence in Europe. But Marty is just a product of Marie's imagination -- or at least that's what Marie thinks. Marty, on the other hand, is convinced that Marie is just someone she dreamed up. Who is right? Or are both of them wrong? And where does it leave the men in their lives (Stellan Skarsgard and William Fichtner)? Passion of Mind was the first English-language film from French director Alain Berliner, best known for the arthouse success Ma Vie en Rose. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Demi Moore, Stellan Skarsgård, (more)
