It was a slightly bruised peach of a project: a bio-pic of the life of the uber-Dubliner, the icon of sloshed, roustabout, Irish creativity, Brendan Behan.
The brother of Jim Sheridan, the distinguished director of My Left Foot and In the Name of the Father (who appears in the memoir as an irritating mummy's boy), Peter was about to direct his own debut feature film in 1996, after years of working in the theatre. Entitled simply 44, after the number of his house, it's a thickly textured family portrait with a gamey whiff of hyper-realism about the parental rows, the sexual abuse, the sadism of teacher-priests and his friend's abscondment, en travestie, from a horrible Industrial School - written in rapt, neo-Joycean close-ups.īut it only got written because of a terrible disappointment. Sheridan's book has zoomed straight to the top of the Irish bestseller charts and has just been launched over here. Nothing could be further from the charming, bespectacled (and alas, no longer curly-haired) sophisticate I ran into in a Charlotte Street restaurant last week. THE ENDPAPERS of Peter Sheridan's memoir of growing up in Dublin show a seaside snap from the late Fifties of an angelic little boy with a Little Lord Fauntleroy-ish mass of blond curls, looking in amazement at the crab he is holding as he paddles, short-trousered, on the beach at Skerries, north County Dublin.
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