Dervla Kirwan - Versatility Personified

In 1994 I accompanied Mum and Dad on the train up to London’s Globe (now Gielgud) Theatre to see a top-notch cast in the Feydeau farce An Absolute Turkey. Griff Rhys Jones and Felicity Kendal topped the bill but amongst the supporting cast stood the diminutive frame and beguiling half-moon eyes of Dervla Kirwan. She was only 22 but was already familiar from TV and would continue to grace our screens right up to the present day.

She has somehow escaped the fate of so many Irish actors doomed for eternity to play IRA terrorists, fiddle-players or downtrodden farm girls struggling to survive the Potato Famine. Instead she has enjoyed a full range of roles across stage and screen. I didn’t see her performance in Troubles but almost certainly did catch a glimpse in a 1990 episode of Casualty. I say glimpse because, like so many young actors in the long-running drama, she spent much of it swathed in bandages, wires and tubes. I forget whether her character survived the emergency tracheotomy! 

She was still a teenager when she achieved a degree of notoriety in Melvyn Bragg’s A Time to Dance in ’92. She played the object of a much older Ronald Pickup’s lust in a series which had the Daily Mail green ink brigade choking in outrage over the sex scenes which they presumably just had to video and replay continuously just to remind themselves how disgusting it was. Dervla was enchanting but it was at times rather uncomfortable viewing. 

Then in 1993 she moved into the mainstream playing Nicholas Lyndhurst’s wartime Cockney sparrow girlfriend in the contrived but engaging Marks and Gran time-transfer sitcom Goodnight Sweetheart. She left after three series, which was a wise move because I felt it had run out of steam. I’m guessing she quit to become a leading character in the Beeb’s new Sunday night drama series Ballykissangel. For all its huge ratings, I was never seduced by all the blarney, beer and probably leaping leprechauns, let alone Kirwan’s burgeoning romance both on and off screen with Stephen Tompkinson. Again she departed after three successful series. 

On the other hand I did catch her in a Minette Walters two-part thriller The Dark Room, and it was a very different Dervla Kirwan on show. With close-shaven head following her character’s brain surgery, the mystery focussed on whether she had murdered her ex-fiance, best friend and former husband to boot. Did she? Can’t remember. But Dervla was utterly credible as a potential killer, a far cry from pulling pints of Guinness in a fictional County Wicklow village. 

In 2000 she joined a fine ensemble cast including Sarah Parish and Damien Lewis for Hearts and Bones. This was a reasonably diverting drama series about a bunch of twenty/thirty-something friends moving to London. Though it had a couple of runs, this was no This Life. 

The Noughties saw Kirwan in several series, plus a few guest appearances. In 2001 she was an extremely alluring mystery woman in Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and four years later she was more than merely flirtatious as Casanova’s mother, abandoning the future David Tennant for a career of sex and singing. From eighteenth century Venice to Victorian London, Dervla was back on period costume in a 2008 Doctor Who Christmas Day story. No sex, of course, but her Miss Hartigan was far too close to the Cybermen than Mr Tennant would tolerate. 

Since then, Dervla Kirwan has featured in numerous thrillers, not all of which I have seen. ITV’s Injustice was stripped across a whole week, demanding a commitment I couldn’t fulfil at the time, and only last year The Stranger proved a Netflix lockdown serial too far. However, I know she was very good in 2010’s The Silence, protecting a deaf girl who has witnessed a crime while trying to keep her own family going, and with Christopher Eccleston and Andrew Scott in 2012’s claustrophobic slice of noir, Blackout. Her role in the 2018 Hong Kong-set Strangers was short on screen time, given that she was apparently killed in a car crash right at the start, but crucial to the story. Her fair-haired character in a 2019 Silent Witness two-parter was also on a hiding to nothing: a pathologist brought in to challenge findings made by the saintly Nikki. 

However one of my favourite Dervla Kirwan parts came in another crime-related series, 55 Degrees North. She played a no-nonsense but grounded CPS lawyer crossing swords and emotions with Don Gilet’s London cop exiled to Newcastle night shifts. I enjoyed the series but we’ll never know if they got it together because it was axed after only two runs. At least that enabled the viewing public to see the Dubliner in a broader range of roles to keep us entertained.