What many people don’t know is that Maria Doyle Kennedy is a singer first and foremost. Her new album, Sing, is a beautiful collection of songs co-written with her husband, Kieran, and she has an amazing, soulful voice.
She seems self-conscious, yet the roles that we’ve most known her for are assertive women who are not in the least self-effacing. ‘Usually I don’t play the part of bitches, but when I do I really enjoy it,’ she says with a savouring smile. In the case of Mrs Bates she presented her as the ultimate vengeful woman.
Her character was pretty vile. ‘It was fantastic to play someone so awful. You could never be like that in real life. It was made all the more brilliant because of the period. You don’t march around being nasty. You say dreadful things in the same way as you say: “Isn’t the tea lovely?” ‘I really don’t behave like that in real life. I am not a devious person, anyway.
And I can lose control of my temper. I’m not that buttoned up.’ I assume Julian Fellowes, who wrote Downton, must have taken a special liking to her to cast her in Titanic.‘No. Originally they had cast Emily Watson in my role but there was a slight delay in filming and she became unavailable.’
The voice you hear on her album has a nurturing, earth-mother quality. ‘Singing is the thing apart from my family that gives me the most joy in the world. I don’t ever spend a day without singing.’ She is 47 and has four boys, the last of whom ‘will probably forever call himself mother’s little surprise’.
When she played Catherine of Aragon, the first wife of Henry VIII in the first series of BBC2’s The Tudors, the irony was not lost on her that she was playing a woman who would have remained Queen had she been able to deliver a son, while Maria herself has only delivered boys.
READ MORE:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2135911/Maria-Doyle-Kennedy-Downton-character-Mrs-Bates.html?ito=feeds-newsxml
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