Anne Gildea: ‘I’m 58 and had two get-your-affairs-in order moments. Now I feel like a lucky person’

There are many lives of Anne Gildea. “I had two get-your-affairs-in order moments”, says the performer and writer who’s used to picking herself up and starting all over again.
She’d quite like to move out of Dublin city, towards the country or sea, but having gone through cancer, “I was near James’s hospital, I won the lotto with that. It’s such a centre of excellence for breast cancer care.” The lure of a city is not cafes or going out, but the hospitals; she howls laughing. “I don’t want to think that way, but a sense of mortality really kicks in at this age. Confucius says everyone has two lives, and the second begins when you realise you only have one.”
She’s 58, and is at a great place, professionally and personally.
“I was beginning to feel I was just born under an unlucky star. And one amazingly lucky thing after another happened to me, since surviving breast cancer. Now I feel like a lucky person. I’m just amazed how things turned around.”
I’ve known Gildea for years, watching the roller-coaster with admiration. A traumatic childhood move from urban Manchester to poverty in rural Sligo; learning performance while living in a London squat; the highs of stardom with The Nualas musical comedy trio and then the lows as they fell apart; life-shock of breast cancer aged 45, depression and sudden menopause, and managing to parlay that into a successful show; solo adventures then finding love aged 48. Through it all, Gildea is thoughtful and great fun, a grafter, with a riotous laugh, and generosity of spirit.
Her first get-your-affairs-in order moment was cancer. “It was quite advanced and it looked like the chemo wasn’t working for a long time. Months of feeling ‘oh, wow, this could be it’.” Later, it turned out what had looked like metastatic ovarian or uterine cancer was a misdiagnosis. “I had 10 days where I really thought the jig was up.” That was 2019. “Since then, I feel like I was reborn. And Covid was my gift.”
By then a second iteration of The Nualas had dissolved, and she’d run out of money. “I had to pivot, as they say, and I was working as a tour guide. I actually really enjoyed it. Okay, it’s not what I want to be doing, but suck it up and turn it into something great. I really like Americans, their positivity. It connected me to my performing again, spinning a narrative.
“I was turning it into a positive, but I was going, ‘Oh my God, I have really mismanaged my career. I’ve not looked after things’.” The Nualas, with glorious harmonies and wicked, bolshie lyrics, represented “15 years of my best comedy writing, with my heart and soul and so much. We just hit such a level. I’d been around it long enough to know, this is the break. A break in your 20s, it can change the whole trajectory of your life. If we’d followed the potential, life would have looked different. Instead, it was a lot of downs and ups and downs.” What happened was “just so complicated, working in a trio and keeping everybody’s aspirations on the same page – it was kind of heartbreaking”.
She was reflecting on this, wondering how to turn things round. “I was at my lowest. The darkest hours before the dawn. And then Covid came.” And because she’d been working as a tour guide rather than a freelance artist, she qualified for the Pandemic Unemployment Payment (PUP). “All the pressure fell away.”
She’d also just started a cultural and creative entrepreneurship course in Trinity, which “really sharpened my thinking, including the concept of failing forward. Failure is a positive. You move forward.
“When I say it’s a blessing, I fully know Covid was absolutely atrocious for lots of people, but the universe just turned around and offered me something out of a really bleak time and said, there’s a lockdown, just 100 per cent focus on creating something. And here’s money to pay the mortgage. It just took the pressure off in a way it had never been off before.
“I decided to write a show about midlife and this weird wisdom that comes just when it feels society is going ‘yeah, just get out of the way there now’. I do think women in our mum’s generation were sidelined at this age, whereas women I see all around, women in their 50s, are in their full power.
“It was Paul [Farren, her partner] who came up with the title, who went ‘you’ve to write a show about menopause’. I think Paul’s kind of psychic. He always says behind every great woman is a fair-to-middling man!
“I started researching. I knew nothing about menopause but I’d plunged into it after cancer treatment. I had incredibly low mood and no reason to be low: I’d survived cancer and then I’d met Paul, which made my life so much better.”
[ I hadn’t a clue what menopause was when I went to the doctor. Neither had heOpens in new window ]
But she was “so depressed you couldn’t move, a bleakness”. After years on antidepressants she realised it was hormonal. She’s now off antidepressants and on Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT). “I’m in such good form. I’ve never looked back. I definitely have that west-of-Ireland tendency, but an interesting thing is, I’ve never been hit by it again. Maybe part of that’s being on antidepressants for 4½ years. But I think head-meds are a grey area. It’s a very imprecise science, is my experience.”
Menopause was in the zeitgeist. Her show, How to Get The Menopause and Enjoy It, is funny and ribald, allied with information and insight. “. We didn’t expect to tour it for three years. It took off by word of mouth.” After 16 more shows, some returning to venues for the third time, she’s parking it. “We’ll have done nearly 150 performances by our last show in Letterkenny on December 14th.”
On the back of it, she’s touring 35 big UK theatres over eight weeks this autumn, performing comedy segments within Dr Louise Newson’s informational menopause show.
But right now, she’s moving beyond menopause, literally, but still centred on women’s experience. She and Farren have written a new show, Further Adventures in Womaning. Its first airing is all next week in Clontarf’s Viking Theatre in Dublin, with an Irish tour planned for 2025.
It explores notions of womanhood from TV and culture: mammy, twerky dancer, Housewife of The Year, “from Angel Delight to Ozempic and back to the Chiffon Scarf Test”. The 18-hour-girdle and Cross-Your-Heart bra advertisements bombarded her as a child, “and how I live my life is a total rejection. It’s a reflection on that, how things have shifted.
“It’s kind of inspired by my mum. She played everything to perfection in what life told her it should be.Her faith was really strong. She’s a very generous, kind woman. She was a very supportive wife, a wonderful mum, great cook. She ticked every box. That’s why I rejected all those things, because at the end of the day, it didn’t work out and she ended up alone in her 50s, penniless, scrabbling around to build her life again. She had a really, really hard time. That generation wasn’t taught, what are your needs? They were educated to just give and give and give. They were second-class citizens, legally chattels”, with no protection of the family home, their domicile automatically their husband’s. “You’d hear about women, ‘oh, he gave her a very hard life’. It was almost luck of the draw when you got married.”
Gildea was “very singular in my life about what I wanted. And either someone will come on the journey with me or not, but I need to plough into the world and find my own way forward. And coming from a broken home, I was wary about having to fit into the monolith of someone’s family thing.”
Then at 48 she found happiness with Farren, a film-maker and screenwriter. “We met at a barbecue on summer solstice. It just goes to show, as long as there’s a breath in your body, it’s never too late. He has transformed my life. I really willed him into being. I really, really wanted a partner. He kind of answers all my prayers, because he’s also really neat and tidy, and I am chaos!
“Not only does he co-write, direct and produce the show, take care of everything. We tour together, and when we arrive in a theatre, I like to be quiet before a show, so he’ll go and chat to everybody. He fronts everything, builds nice relationships. He’s super talented. I love what he brings to the comedy writing. It’s maybe an anxiety from stand-up, I’m all the time cutting to the chase, where’s the gag? And he goes, where’s the heart, where’s the point of view? Set the scene.
“It didn’t feel like [meeting a partner] was going to be automatic for me. It’s no coincidence it was when I was older, well past the whole thing of, will you have kids or not? Paul has three grown-up children. He married quite young.”
Gildea was born in Manchester, and the family moved back to Co Sligo when she and her equally creative siblings, comedian-writer Kevin and artist Una, were children. “I grew up on a little farm. We saved cocks of hay and footed turf. We’d work all summer on the bog.” Idyllic? “It was absolutely horrible. I look back and it was solid misery, but I go, come on, what were the good things? I feel privileged I experienced that kind of work. I have that work ethic. And I was interested in the arts.” She laughs. “When I was a little kid, I was obsessed, all I wanted to do was ballet. There was no corps de ballet in Tubbercurry!”
They escaped Sligo to college. Their parents split up, “and we were just on our own. So wherever I laid my hat was home from then on”. After college she escaped to London. Aged 21, “I did everything: theatre-in-education, street theatre, kids’ theatre, a million workshops, eventually got an acting scholarship for ALRA (the now closed Academy of Live and Recorded Arts) in London.” She lived in a squat off the Old Kent Road, and to survive did “every shitty cash-in-hand work London had to offer, from being a wench in a medieval restaurant by Tower Bridge to cleaning building sites to cigarette girl flogging smokes in newsagents. I got to know London’s grungy side. I was thin because I could barely afford to eat. I had to learn to be performer. My whole instinct was to be in front of an audience.” Along the way comedy became the main thing, performing on the London circuit, and back in Dublin, in the early 1990s.
Landing a job as Gerry Ryan’s TV sidekick in 1995, she moved back to Ireland, then met Sue Collins and Tara Flynn and they formed The Nualas. “Not only did The Nualas just fly”, touring London, the Edinburgh Fringe, New York, Australia, Asia, “but it was the most brilliant time to come back to Ireland. There was such a wave of creative and economic positivity after [the] 1980s’ utter bleakness.”
Gildea recalls watching Opportunity Knocks as a kid, “being so jealous of [child singer] Lena Zavaroni. She’d have been around my age. I wanted to be an international singer, rather than stuck on the bog in Sligo! Poor Lena, apparently she’d a tough life. I was better off footing the turf.”
She was inspired seeing Sandra Bernhard’s Giving Til It Hurts in London in the early 1990s: “God, I want to be able to do a show like that. Over 30 years later, I feel I’m finally there. It’s that thing, as long as you’ve breath in your body, you’ve skin in the game. It’s about not giving up. I’m happy to just work and the show, that it lands. At this age, you’re not: where can I go? As long as you wake up and you go, I’m still alive. Woo-hoo!”
“I love showbiz. I’m not in comedy, I’m in showbiz, and I still get a kick out of it, because I grew up in another time and milieu and it’s just so unlikely I would be doing this for a living. I am as enthusiastic about it now as I was when I was 22.”
Further Adventures in Womaning runs from August 26th-31st in Viking Theatre, Clontarf. annegildea.com