THE EVENING STANDARD
19 January 2007

Elaine Cassidy terrified Nicole Kidman in The Others, and destroyed Iain Glenn in The Crucible. What is it that attracts the Irish actress to the dark side, asks Lydia Slater.

Elaine Cassidy is perched on the back of a sofa, wearing a green chiffon dress that barely covers her knickers, high heels and very little else. The wind is howling around the studio, rain lashes the window panes and her legs are mottled with cold. But every time the camera focuses on her, her face assumes an appearance of intense enjoyment. Hey, this girl can act.

Emerging from the changing room in baggy jeans, trainers and a stripey jumper, she perches on a chair, tips mountains of sugar into her cappuccino with a wooden kitchen spoon, then stirs it busily. I am suddenly struck with the realisation that I may be conducting an interview with a pixie, she is so tiny, so perky and, at times, a wee bit weird.

Despite her childlike demeanour and appearance - close-up she looks 15, although she's 27 - Cassidy has built a reputation taking on roles that are dark, twisted and frequently murderous. She made her breakthrough at 20 with Felicia's Journey, in which she played a naìve, pregnant teenager who falls in with a serial killer, played by Bob Hoskins. It was critically acclaimed, with Hoskins judged to have turned in his best performance ever, and Cassidy tipped as a possible Oscar nominee.

That was followed up with Disco Pigs, a violent indie thriller about obsessive teenage love; The Others, the well received horror film starring Nicole Kidman, in which Cassidy played a creepy mute servant; Uncle Adolf (a TV film in which she took the role of Hitler's neice and lover, who commits suicide); and the BBC's lavish production of Sarah Water's novel Fingersmith, in which she played Maud Lilly, a sexually abused and mentally unbalanced lesbian heiress at the centre of a plot to rob and incarcerate her. She also appeared in Coldplay's video for the single 'The Scientist' last year.

And she spent much of 2006 playing the teenage agent provocateur Abigail in the RSC's production of The Crucible, 'Sometimes a character can suffocate you and you want to get rid of them,' she says in her soft Dublin brogue, miming driving a stake through a resistent heart with her tiny fist. 'The Crucible was the hardest job I've ever done. In between scenes, I'd lie down to sleep, and I'd find my bones spasming. Abigail tried to take every ounce of energy from me; we'd all go a bit doolally by the end of the week. Filming is like a holiday compared with it. You work your ass off in the theatre.

She kicks off 2007 at the Almeida with the premiere of There Came a Gypsy Riding, a new play by Frank McGuinness about bereavement and secrets. Cassidy is starring with grandes dames Eileen Atkins and Imelda Staunton, her co-star in Fingersmith.

'I'm not nervous,' she says. 'The stage is my playground. I do it because I love it. I went to see a play at the Almeida the other week, and I was sitting in the audience, getting excited, thinking, "Now it's our turn, you'll have to get off the stage."' She twinkles gleefully.

One wonders what it can be that draws her to these difficult roles. Has she ever, I wonder delicately, seen a shrink? She says she's been reading up on psychology recently, to play her role of a young woman struggling to cope with the death of her brother in the Almeida play. 'And Freud said a really good therapy is role-play. I thought, "Bloody hell, I must be one of the healthiest people,"' she says eagerly.
In fact, she says, she prefers to play dark and difficult roles because her own background is 'very happy and mundane. Because things are so balanced, to play parts that are not balanced work for me.'

Cassidy was bought up in Kilcoole, a village just outside of Dublin, with her two elder sisters Gillian, now 30, a furniture and stained-glass designer, and Edelle, 33, owner of a bridal shop in Dublin. Her father Dermot, despite working in the Civil Service, was an artistic type who wrote poetry and joined the amateur dramatics society. Her mother Phyllis was a housewife, now turned hairdresser. They separated after 24 years together when Cassidy was 15, but she insists, 'It was fine. I wasn't heartbroken. I understood everything that went on.' It is not a topic she's keen to discuss, but you wonder if her life is less happy than she's painted it.

The way Cassidy tells it, she never had any doubts about her future career. 'Ever since I knew what the word meant, I wanted to be an actor,' she says. 'I always loved playing dress-up.' Kilcoole was the location for the filming of Glenroe (in which she subsequently appeared, in six episodes), a rural soap on the Irish television channel RTE, so Cassidy was forever encountering actors and cameras, although she denies this was a factor in her choice of future. 'Oh no, it was all about tractors,' she giggles.

At eight, she signed up for speech and drama classes, and subsequently joined a Dublin drama group, Gladys Sheenan's. By 12, Cassidy had already taken her first role, in a short film, The Stranger Within Me, directed by Geraldine Creed. Two years later, Creed cast her in the feature film, The Sun, the Moon and the Stars, alongside Angie Dickinson and Jason Donovan. But it was Felicia's Journey that made her name. 'As soon as I read the script, I knew she was mine,' she says passionately, 'but they put me through agony for it.'

Extraordinarily; despite all the fanfare that surrounds any successful film, she then went straight back to her job as a data processor in a Dublin telephone company. 'There was no point in me going home and sitting around all day,' she says. 'I had flexible hours there. I could say, "I've got to take tomorrow off for an audition."'

'I think I'm very good at evaluating things for what they are. I've never wanted to be famous. I want to do good work and get better as an actress. I'm always going to go back to being me. You can't believe in it,' she says seriously, 'or you'd end up in rehab with no friends. One night I was wearing a £30,000 Chanel dress and walking up the red carpet at Cannes, and the next I was in my own Primark dress which cost £10. I thought it was funny.' So unstarry was her behaviour that, having been issued with cash for her day-to-day Cannes expenses, she attempted to return the unspent wad to the film's astonished distrubutors. And although most young actresses would prefer to continue living the high life, Cassidy is not one of them.

In a similar vein, she insisted for years that she would remain in Dublin, but the commuting to London finally became too onerous. Three years ago, she bought herself a Victorian cottage in Greenwich which she now shares with her finacé, the dashing, dark, mainly TV actor Stephen Lord (some way below her on the career ladder since his biggest film so far has been Judge Dredd, in which he played a squatter).

They met two years ago filming The Truth, a poorly received British black comedy about a murder in a therapy centre, that's out on DVD. According to her, that was that. In the past, she's been rather off-puttingly realistic about relationships: 'The way I see relationships is that you go through life's journey with someone- you're two little travellers on the same path - but then all relationships come to an end. Either one person dies, goes off with someone else, or the paths veer off in different directions, and that's just the way it is. Nothing lasts forever.'

But now she seems much more starry-eyed. 'Oh, he's lovely,' she sighs, twiddling her discreet diamond engagement ring and refusin todiscuss the wedding date (here's betting she gets her dress from Edelle's shop, though). 'You know, Irish girls and their weddings,' she says. 'It's something you plan for years.' Children are not currently on their horizon - 'I'd love some eventually,' she says, 'but at the moment, I can't because I might be sent anywhere. We don't even have a cat.' So far, though, she's enjoying domestic bliss with Lord. 'We've been very lucky because when I've been working he hasn't, and when he's been working I haven't, so we've not had to be separated,' she says. How does he cope when she takes her dark roles home with her, I wonder? 'Oh, I'm good at snapping out of them, ' she says. 'I think we both have a very healthy attitude towards our work.'

There is a thread of steel running through this self-controlled young actress which is, I suspect, the reason she enjoys playing characters who let themselves go with disasterous consequences. Even her down-time is self-improving. She recently set herself the challenge of seeing a play a week, only stopping once rehearsals started for There Came a Gypsy Riding. She is cooking her way, page by page, through an Italian cookery book and is also learning DIY. And when she shops, it's for books and music - 'because someone's been creative so you're contributing to that,' but not clothes, 'I feel really greedy and selfish,' she confesses.

It seems a shame she gets little enjoyment from the fringe benefits of her profession. Indeed, the prospect of fame seems to frighten her. 'It's such a scary business. It's playing with fire and I know better not to,' she says. 'When you become big, you are disengaged from real life, and that's what your work is based on. On the other hand, you lose out on parts to bigger names. It's a tricky balance.' Meanwhile, the realities of her reputation are, you sense, quite hard enough for her to cope with. 'You get autograph hunters and they've got photographs of me I've never seen before. They know more about me than I do.' As for her online fan sites, she says they are 'very sweet but you do think, why? I find it baffling. I just want to be known for my work.' And with that she heads off to Greenwich, to carry on cooking from page 62.

There Came a Gypsy Riding is at the Almeida until 3 March (020 7359 -4404)