Joan, the script & the wardrobe – the Emmy Award-winning costume designer who dressed David Bowie – Independent.ie

Joan, the script & the wardrobe - the Emmy Award-winning costume designer who dressed David Bowie

Independent.ie

In 1976, in Dublin's Focus Theatre, Joan Bergin abandoned her dream of acting. She was playing Natalya, the lady of the manor, in Turgenev's A Month in the Country. Her co-stars included Gabriel Byrne and Olwen Four and one evening, while watching Four on stage, Bergin came to a sudden and profound decision.

http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/joan-the-script-the-wardrobe-the-emmy-awardwinning-costume-designer-who-dressed-david-bowie-35946202.html

http://www.independent.ie/incoming/article35947637.ece/8b7ba/AUTOCROP/h342/IW%20JOAN%20BE%206.jpg

In 1976, in Dublin's Focus Theatre, Joan Bergin abandoned her dream of acting. She was playing Natalya, the lady of the manor, in Turgenev's A Month in the Country. Her co-stars included Gabriel Byrne and Olwen Four and one evening, while watching Four on stage, Bergin came to a sudden and profound decision.

"I haven't a great speaking voice," she says, "and the big, big thing for me was I'm a butterfly for everything. I was interested in a hundred different things. I realised, to be an actor, you have to be very single-minded."

If Focus Theatre was where she let go of one ambition, it was also where she cultivated another. Deirdre O'Connell, who founded Focus in 1967, had trained in the immersive Stanislavski system in New York and was "such a purist", Bergin says.

"To her it was all about the acting and performance. I was really quite taken aback if people were wearing their mother's cardigans. So one rash day, I said, 'Why don't I do the costumes?'"

"Doing" the costumes proved to be Bergin's calling. With nice circularity, during the course of her award-winning career, she has dressed both Gabriel Byrne and Olwen Four, as well as scores of Hollywood stars.

When Meryl Streep saw the clothes she'd be wearing in the film Dancing at Lughnasa, she gave Bergin a hug. On the set of My Left Foot, Daniel Day-Lewis, in character as Christy Brown, insisted Bergin feed him his lunch. While shooting The Prestige in LA, David Bowie alighted from a carriage, grabbed the lapels of her coat and told her he loved his costumes.

Bergin has a wealth of such stories and, in a caf in the Powerscourt Townhouse Centre, is happy to share them, despite a summer cold. Dressed in black with her trademark cowboy hat, she has a style of her own - a distinctive blend of masculine and feminine. Small details stand out: the shoulder ruffles on her blouse, the Harley-Davidson badge on the front of the hat, her lilac nail polish, long silver necklace and flat hoop earrings.

On the wall opposite us hang entries from the Sightsavers Junior Painter Awards. Along with Laureate na ng PJ Lynch and Director of Arts & Disability Ireland Pdraig Naughton, she was one of this year's judges. Despite being "up to her tonsils", she agreed to adjudicate because she had seen a documentary about Sightsavers' doctors in India stopping off at train stations and performing cataract surgery within 20 minutes.

Bergin was the "non-professional" on the panel and loved being involved with the competition. The theme was Framing the Future. The judges had no difficulty agreeing on the winner: eight-year-old Dylan Williams from Co Clare, whose painting In the Future I Will Live in a Music City is an extraordinary, exuberant feat of visual intelligence that turns musical instruments into buildings.

"I'd forgotten the gift of the imagination in children," Bergin says. When she first saw the entries, she was "blown out of the water".

She doesn't have children but is very involved in the lives of her grandnieces and grandnephews, just as she was with her nieces and nephews when they were growing up. She lives in Ranelagh, Dublin, with her partner, the journalist and writer Kevin O'Connor, and is part of a big, "madly supportive" family that is extremely important to her.

Though she might not have realised it until later, the seeds of her career were planted in her childhood home. She had a "great childhood", she says. The eldest of five - four girls and a boy - she grew up in Cabra.

"Cabra then was a lot of people taken from all over and placed in what was to be the new utopia of houses and schools. There was a tremendous mix of people."

Her mother was from West Cork. Her father, from Dublin, got TB and had to retire from CIE. A socialist, he was "very creative" and, significantly, used to hand-paint evening gowns to earn money.

"It was a house that was always full of books," she says. "My father really thought any one of his daughters could be President of Ireland. And you really resent that as a teenager. All I ever wanted to be was an actress."

Though they valued books and the arts, Bergin's parents were "scared stiff" of their eldest daughter's acting ambitions, which to them "would have seemed like a huge indulgence". But Bergin's creativity was also fostered in school. At the Dominican Convent in Cabra, she had a young teacher called Sister Mary Jude who would go on to work in the Louisiana State Penitentiary - the prison featured in the film Dead Man Walking.

During the week the pupils spoke Irish. On Saturdays they studied English literature and music. Sister Mary Jude inspired them "by stealth", says Bergin. "Ever since, I have a lot of time for the nuns."

It was a very political household, and she still keeps a close eye on politics and current affairs. O'Connor is a former radio producer and Bergin listens to a lot of radio, which she thinks "keeps you very grounded and focused". She also describes herself as "like a cobbler's son". In her downtime, one of her favourite things to do is go to the theatre. "I'm as interested as ever," she says.

She may have decided that the stage wasn't for her, but her acting background has undoubtedly given her work an edge, deepening her understanding of scripts and characters. Even when dressing private clients such as Sabina Higgins - another acting graduate of Focus Theatre - or architect Peter Marino, known for his tattooed biker look, she can tap into the potential symbolism of an outfit.

"I think you get to understand the fields. I often say to people, at this stage of my career, where I'm working beyond my allotted span, that what you do is you harness everything you have learned and then you deploy it to whatever the situation is."

Bergin stayed with Focus Theatre as in-house designer through the rest of the 1970s and into the 1980s, developing her interest in costume as she trawled through Dublin's vintage shops.

Noel Pearson was an early mentor. She designed several of his productions and began collaborating with Jim Sheridan, a professional relationship which led to her working on My Left Foot, The Field and In the Name of the Father, and which continues today.

Self-taught, Bergin learned on the job, her achievements - along with those of fellow designer Consolata Boyle - paving the way for younger Irish costume designers. But though the 1990s and early 2000s were extremely successful for her, including as they did several Jim Sheridan films, Brian Friel's Translations and Riverdance on Broadway, she was always "a little wary" of men's clothes. It took her until the film Veronica Guerin in 2003 to "really enter into the psychology of how men define themselves through their clothes".

"It clicked on Veronica Guerin, where I decided that even though they were Dublin crims, lots of them had very interesting backgrounds," she says. "I decided for an international audience that I should show their aspirations, so I dressed them in Louis Copeland," she says.

Over the past four decades, Bergin has worked on numerous high-profile theatre productions. Given that theatre is her first love, it would be understandable if her preference was to design for the stage, but it's film rather than theatre - or television - that seems to excite her most.

"It's very fashionable now to say television is where it's at," she says, "and, yes, television has changed beyond recognition - some of the best stories are there - but maybe because I'm old-school and, having started with Jim Sheridan on independent feature films, nothing beats the buzz of film."

Nevertheless, it's her work for television that has brought her the most acclaim. From 2006 to 2009, Bergin was costume designer on The Tudors, the lavish Showtime drama starting Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Henry VIII.

Filmed in Ardmore Studios, The Tudors was a massive opportunity and challenge, for which Bergin won three Emmys, beating Mad Men twice.

With characteristic thoroughness, she became something of a Tudor historian, immersing herself in the era so she could reinterpret its clothes for a contemporary audience. Over the course of four series, she and her team made thousands of costumes.

"We made everything, right down to the shoes people wore. I don't want to claim too much for it but it did start a big interest in embroidery and jewellery making."

She's very conscious of crediting her colleagues on The Tudors, as well as other projects.

"I know it's a clich but the costume designer is as good as the crew, as the workshop and the assistants working with them," she says. "You're a fiefdom within the piece of work you're on - you have to keep it like that."

Winning the Emmys was "wonderful"; she keeps them on her kitchen mantelpiece but The Tudors began an intense, work-heavy decade of episodic television from which she eventually needed to emerge.

"I came back from LA [on a Friday] and started on The Tudors, somewhat behind, on the Monday and there was no let-up. I remember Kevin asking me, 'Which of us is bringing the cat to the vet?' And for one awful moment, I thought, 'Do we have a cat?' It was so, so demanding."

After The Tudors came Camelot, an Irish-Canadian co-production starring Joseph Fiennes, and four seasons of Vikings, a History Channel series filmed at Ashford Studios in Co Wicklow, which she left in 2016. Then she worked on The Dawn, a pilot for Amazon about a group of Neanderthals. It was the first time she'd been involved with a project that didn't get picked up.

Bergin wasn't sure what direction her career would take beyond the world of television.

"I thought I'd perhaps left it too late."

She took some months off supposedly to extend her kitchen - the drawings are currently yellowing - and also to look at what she wanted to do.

"The work is rolling in. My agent says I'm like someone who has been hidden under a stone." She quotes Wordsworth: "A violet by a mossy stone. Half-hidden from the eye."

Earlier this year, she spent four months in Prague and Boston as costume designer for The Catcher Was a Spy, a thriller set during World War II. The project was "terrific" and she immersed herself in the 1930s and 1940s.

"But I was delighted to get home," she says. "I fell in love with Dublin. I was beaming at the place when I came back. I would hesitate now to go away again unless it was Scorsese."

At this point, she can pick and choose projects. The previous night, she turned down a "huge" movie in Argentina. "They wanted me there two weeks from today."

Pragmatic about her place in the pecking order of costume designers, she's very lucky, she says, to be in a pool of half a dozen. "Not the top six, the Sandy Powells, the Colleen Atwoods - the great American designers who would be first choice." But a group of "good creative people that directors have worked with".

From her point of view, the big thing is the script. "It's of little satisfaction at the end of the day, however nice it is, when someone says, 'Why are the costumes so great but the movie is awful?'"

She's about to start work on Jim Sheridan's film H-Block - starring Cillian Murphy, Pierce Brosnan and Jamie Dornan - and is very much looking forward to the shoot.

"Jim's back at what he's terrific at," she says, "that ambiguity of a moral dilemma."

Bergin is still ambitious, still reaching for the best from herself, but these days she enjoys the simpler things too: hanging clothes out on the line, for example. She smiles at herself. "Kevin will have a good laugh and say, 'When do you hang clothes out on the line?'"

Home is where she wants to be, but to really get your bearings, "you need to get out there", to travel, she says. "It's a great way of examining where you're at."

One of her favourite places is New York, less so LA, where she spent five months in 2006. At 7pm when shooting finished, "everyone got in their car and went home. Same on a Friday."

"I've made some great friends in the business, of course I have, but you learn to be quite savvy about your time."

Alan Rickman, who died in 2016, was one such friend. He was a "most generous, wonderful man. And as interested in my career as he was in his, and would complain if I didn't go after a particular job."

You need people to believe in you, she says, but it doesn't mean you've to turn into a "pain in the whatever". Sometimes she comes upon young people and "reels a bit at their self-belief... it's tilted a bit the other way. On the whole, I think the world is full of fairly decent people."

Amid the unhealthy egos and excesses of the industries she works in, she seems to have maintained perspective. She talks about having "your own moral compass".

"It's terribly important to make a decision about what you want from life and how you want to treat people, apart from how you want to be treated."

Scorsese may call yet but, even if he doesn't, it's clear that Joan Bergin will continue "doing" the costumes for as long as she can - as happy to look forwards as backwards.

"I used to be shy of saying I've had a remarkable life, not least because I probably thought it made me sound too old," she says, "but I have been incredibly lucky."

The 15 finalist paintings from the Sightsavers Junior Painter Awards will be displayed in Powerscourt Townhouse Centre until August 5

COSTUME DRAMA

Joan Bergin's five favourites from her repertoire

Daniel Day-Lewis's Afghan coat in In the Name of the Father

When Gerry Conlon, played by Daniel Day- Lewis, "finds" some money, he buys himself a pair of hand-painted shoes and a long, white Afghan coat. Bergin brought the skin in from Afghanistan and had it made up in Dublin.

The Spanish dancer's dress in Riverdance

Bergin did not design the costumes for the original Riverdance but took over when the show went to Broadway in 2000. As part of her research, she studied Jim Fitzpatrick's work and looked at how the Celts used to make dye from berries. The Spanish dancer's dress for the production was "quite, quite something", she says.

Jane Seymour's wedding dress in The Tudors

Jane Seymour's wedding to Henry VIII took place during season three of The Tudors. For the occasion, Bergin dressed Annabelle Wallis (who played Seymour) in an extravagant gown with quilting and intricate embroidery - including on the bodice and sleeves. A tiara held down the veil.

All of Scarlett Johansson's clothes in The Prestige

Johansson plays the assistant and lover of magician Robert Angier in the neo-Victorian mystery thriller set in the early 1900s. David Bowie makes a cameo appearance as real- life inventor Nikola Tesla.

Lagertha's clothes in Vikings

Played by Katheryn Winnick, the legendary figure of Lagertha fights alongside the men in shield walls. "The embroidery and Irish tweeds" on her costumes "were a nice fusion between Celtic and Viking", says Bergin.

Photos: Steve Humphreys

Weekend Magazine

Read the original:

Joan, the script & the wardrobe - the Emmy Award-winning costume designer who dressed David Bowie - Independent.ie