Fionnula Flanagan brings authority to supporting parts, and can make that certainty look faintly absurd. We value her contribution to an ensemble, though her work creating James Joyce’s Women suggests how narrowly such casting can use her.
Fi1m perspective
In The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023), the Snow family’s money has gone, but Flanagan’s Grandma’am behaves as though it has not. The flat is cold, and her grandson is hiding their poverty. We were amused by her refusal to acknowledge any of it, because she makes the family’s insistence on its own importance look rather ridiculous. This is a useful variation on the authoritative figures she frequently plays: the certainty survives even when the money has run out. Francis Lawrence’s film loses much of its force in the last forty minutes, but the grandmother’s small contribution makes sense.
That casting can obscure the work she has made for herself. Her screen career reaches back to Ulysses (1967), and her long association with Joyce includes writing and performing a one-woman show. For its film adaptation, James Joyce’s Women (1985), she was a writer and producer as well as an actor playing multiple roles. We would keep that work in mind when considering the later supporting parts: being repeatedly asked to provide authority is a narrower assignment than choosing the material yourself.
In The Others (2001), as Mrs Bertha Mills, she helps anchor an ensemble in a film prepared to wait for its effects. Alejandro Amenábar builds fear from the dark house and the strain on Nicole Kidman’s character, a mother struggling to cope. Flanagan’s supporting work suits that patient approach, which gives the company time to make an impression. It is the stronger of our two reviewed films with her, though anyone impatient for a scare may find the pace trying.
Her supporting work also takes in Annie O’Shea in the comedy Waking Ned (1998) and Eileen Boyle in the black comedy The Guard (2011). The risk with an actor so readily cast as an authority figure is that a film asks for the authority and stops there. Grandma’am has a clear function, but we would not pretend the part offers a full account of what Flanagan can do. Start with The Others, provided you are willing to let a ghost story take its time.
Biography
Fionnula Flanagan is an Irish actress. Born in Dublin in 1941, she was educated at the Abbey Theatre School and studied in Switzerland. She began her career on stage and in Irish-language productions before making her film debut as Gerty McDowell in the 1967 adaptation of Ulysses.
Flanagan is known for her work in James Joyce's Women (1985), which she also wrote and produced, as well as films including Waking Ned (1998), The Others (2001), The Guard (2011) and Song of the Sea (2014). On stage she received Tony Award nominations for Ulysses in Nighttown and The Ferryman. She has appeared in television series such as Lost. In 2023 she played Grandma'am in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.
She has received two Primetime Emmy Award nominations, winning one, and a Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress.
