It wasn’t hard for the females of Ireland to fall for Mossie Sheehan, the inarticulate farmer played by Liam Cunningham in Deirdre Purcell’s 1998 television drama Falling For A Dancer.
Nor for them to despise the utterly despicable Detective Mannix Bone, Cunningham’s character in Sweety Barrett, Stephen Bradley’s skewed morality fable from that same year.
In 2002’s Dog Soldiers, meanwhile, he stuck his tongue firmly in his cheek to play the enigmatic Captain Ryan.
And last year, he fought for Irish independence in The Wind That Shakes the Barley.
When Cunningham appears on our screens tonight as Neil Barry in RTE’s adaptation of Maeve Binchy’s Anner House, viewers will find him reticent, melancholic and broken.
Barry has arrived in Cape Town after the bitter failure of his marriage, and is standing shakily on the other side of a battle with alcohol addiction.
Here, he meets Ruth Maguire (Flora Montgomery), and together they work to transform a Cape Dutch house into a hotel.
The drama is covert, with subtle undercurrents, the pace of life is slow and the backdrop utterly breathtaking.
Liam Cunningham reticent? Inarticulate? Despicable? Enigmatic? Secreted away from the April sunshine in a windowless hotel bar in Dublin, it’s difficult to imagine how Cunningham managed to stay still long enough to play such immutable parts.
Jigging back and forward, his craggy face, beard and cardigan loom near and far, his voice gives a Doppler effect on my tape recorder when I replay the interview later. Cunningham says he’s disorganised, easily bored, enthusiastic, and wonders aloud if he doesn’t have a touch of Asperger’s Syndrome.
"Can I get a coffee, a . . . you know, normal . . . not a cappuccino . . . black coffee? Yes, that’s it, with milk on the side.”
Cunningham might have searched for the words to order a cup of coffee, but in the actor’s lexicon he is singularly precise.
One of Ireland’s most prolific actors, he has travelled to the London stage, to the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-Upon-Avon and to Hollywood and back, in a career that began 20 years ago when he chucked his electrician’s job for acting classes and a part in Dermot Bolger’s critically acclaimed play Lament For Arthur Cleary.
His work in television includes parts in Cracker, Prime Suspect, The Clinic, Showbands and most recently ITV’s Northanger Abbey.
Theatre work includes the Wexford Trilogy in the Bush Theatre in London and A Streetcar Named Desire with Frances McDormand in the Gate Theatre, Dublin.
His film work is equally diverse, with children’s films such asWar Of The Buttons and A Little Princess, Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Neil Jordan’s offbeat Breakfast On Pluto, an upcoming film titled The Escapist with Joseph Fiennes, and Hollywood blockbusters such as First Knight with heavyweights Sean Connery and Richard Gere.
Mention of Cunningham brings a themed response among colleagues in the office; he’s "the rugged sexy one’’, with "dishevelled charm’’, and "handsome in an Irish kind of way’’.
So was he jostling with Connery and Gere for the position of most handsome man on set?
He laughs uproariously. "Nah, the boys are great! Connery is a milkman from Edinburgh - how could you go wrong? And Richard is a Buddhist, so is very calm and content. I’ve no bad stories at all about them, although the film in the end wasn’t great.
"I walked away from all that [Hollywood] because I don’t see my work as a business operation. I wait for the best script, be it film, television or stage.”
The search for the right script has most recently delivered Cunningham to Buenos Aires and "somewhere in China, north of Vietnam’’ where he has been filming an artistic, grown-up version of the Japanese animated Manga movies. The film, titled Blood - The Last Vampire, is akin to the recent cinematic comic book flick, 300, although Cunningham says he is not required to be anywhere near as buff as the Spartan warriors in that CGI extravaganza.
"I know Gerry Butler [who played Spartan king Leonidas in 300] and he spends a lot of time buffing himself up, whereas I need at least five months’ notice if I have to be fit for anything,” Cunningham says.
"In this movie, I am one of two ‘men in black’ who guard this 17year-old Japanese girl against the vampires for the sake of humanity.
The Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon people do all the wire work and effects, but I don’t get involved in any of that; I don’t have a lot of time for green screen.”
The film is likely to gain a cult following and there is already talk of franchising. Cunningham, however, makes it clear that it is a one-off for him - because repeating projects is usually only about cash, and he is not about cash.
"It’s too easy to make a quick mill’’ in Hollywood, he barks. And there’s no reason to disbelieve him - this is the man who turned down a part in James Cameron’s Titanic. "I was at the Royal Shakespeare Company and earning next to nothing and my agent called and said the Titanic people wanted to buy me out of my theatre contract,” Cunningham says.
"I’d worked with Kate Winslet before, and when [Titanic director] James Cameron asked her about me she said ‘get him, get him’. So I said, ‘okay, if you’re going to break my contract you’d better send me the script’.
"When I got it, it had four legal disclaimers to sign that said I would not divulge what happens in the script. Like what? The Titanic doesn’t sink? The budget was $135 million at the time and it went to over $200 million.
"I could have been sitting in Mexico in a five-star hotel for nine months and only worked for a month and made a shitload of money, instead of sitting in a little flat in Stratford.
Well, the film has been voted the worst movie ever made, and when I read the script, I figured it would top that list sometime soon, so I turned it down.”
A proliferation of offers of film and television work should mean that Cunningham is now comfortable enough to pick and choose his parts.
However, working with Michael Colgan in the Gate a few years ago, he says he "re-mortgaged the gaff’’ to do it.
And although he is incredibly choosy about his scripts, he says: "I’m not a trustafarian - if I don’t work, my kids don’t eat.” Cunningham was born in the East Wall in inner city Dublin in 1961. The son of a docker, he grew up in a "small’’ family with four siblings.
He has said of his father that he was "the Marlon Brando character in On The Waterfront’’ - working in the shipyards from the age of 14 after his own father broke his back in a fall in the hull of a ship. Cunningham himself worked for the ESB as an electrician for 11 years.
He married his girlfriend Colette in the early 1980s and took a job training electricity workers in Zimbabwe. The couple spent more than three years in Africa, where Cunningham was in charge of the power supply for Hurungwe National Park - an area he says was the size of Belgium and home to 16,000 wild animals. When his contract finished, he was offered another one, but he chose to return to Ireland because Zimbabwe was beginning to feel too much like home and he "didn’t want two homes’’.
"Two weeks after I got home, I thought, what the hell am I doing? I didn’t want to go back to Africa but I wanted to do something else. "I had a grand secure financial job at a time when Dublin wasn’t a good place to be. I joined the Oscar Wilde acting school as a distraction. After a few weeks, I didn’t want to do anything else, so I finished the course and jacked the job.
"I had to cash in my pension and live off that. I was on £43 a week and trying to get an acting career off the ground when you essentially have to work for nothing. My first part was a take-over job; I wasn’t castoriginally because I didn’t have any experience.”
Six months after he left the ESB, Cunningham was offered a part in a two-hander on the main stage in the Royal Court Theatre in London. He says he was "never more fearful in my life’’.
"If someone had handed me my toolbox, I’d have run back to my little van right then. But you just have to have a chat with yourself - say to yourself: ‘jack it in, or find a way around the stage fright’.”
More than 20 years since his time on the Hurungwe reserve, Cunningham found himself back in Africa last year filming Anner House; but it brought back few of his African memories.
"You can’t really call Cape Town Africa; it’s amazing, but it’s a city. It’s like an extraordinarily cheap Spain.” Cunningham says he puts a two-week time limit on work abroad, unless his family can travel with him. "I don’t consider myself an actor in between ‘action’ and ‘cut’. My family is what defines me. ‘I need me things about me’ - isn’t that what Maureen O’Hara said in The Quiet Man?”
In another actor’s mouth these words might be the surface self-effacement of celebrity, but Cunningham embodies another cliche of sorts - that of the driven working class man who’s achieved his wildest dreams without being allowed to get above himself in the process. In acting, he says, hard work and talent do not count for much. Luck, on the other hand, is everything. "It was tortuous trying to get into movies; I kept getting lucky and then getting kicked in the nuts. But I kept trying because I loved it.
"It wasn’t about money or fame; or because there’s anything particularly extraordinary about me. I’m married 23 years, I’ve three kids, I’m reasonably comfortable in my own skin. I’d be happy doing Shakespeare monologues to the back wall in my garden.
"That’s about it. But maybe I made it because I was a lot more selfish than the boys that were doing it for the money and the fame. I was doing it for myself.”
The actors he admires don’t talk about themselves, only the script. In that case, I wonder if I shouldn’t leave a blank page in the interview space? "No!” he laughs. "Because that’ll make me look enigmatic and I don’t want that either.” Anner House is on RTE One at 9.40pm tonight.