Ger Lynch is back in Carrigstown. And so is the wonderful Tina Kellegher. She talks to Donal O'Donoghue about the importance of family, her love of acting and her greatest fan, her late mother.

"It will be three years this August since I left Fair City," says Tina Kellegher on the eve of her return to the RTÉ soap as the nefarious Ger Lynch. As in previous furloughs from acting, she left for family reasons: rearing her two sons, Michael and Brian, with her husband, Gordon, and latterly caring for her mother, Bridget.

"I have no regrets spending time with the boys," she says. "It’s a joy and pleasure and when they come home from school, that is usually when everything comes out in the chat."

But acting taps into part of her that nothing else can reach. Parts like Ger Lynch, who returned to Carrigstown last week, desperately looking to retrieve a mysterious locket at any cost. I get those details from the RTÉ press office. All Tina can say is: "With Ger, I get to be very bould!"

The actor is waiting in a room in RTÉ when I arrive. Her shooting day has already wrapped but she is still sporting some of Ger Lynch’s warpaint. "I’ve got me nails," says Tina, flashing her blood-red tipped fingers. It’s been a month since she returned to filming and from June 8 the Lynch show is back on the road. Fasten your seatbelts for another wild ride.

"While Ger has a softer look with her clothes, maybe from living in a warm climate, she herself has not gone soft. Not. At. All." Kellegher smiles. "But I’m very fond of her. At this stage and age in my career, to get such a jammy, engaging character is a real treat. You’re very often playing the mother of the 30-something son who has his issues and not this strong, feisty character."

There is a Fair City legend that if you leave the show in a taxi bound for Galway, you’re unlikely to ever return. Tina laughs. She hasn’t heard that one. In any case, Ger Lynch vamoosed to sunny Spain when the possibility of being imprisoned if she hung around Carrigstown.

"Sharon threatened to report me to the cops because she believes that I killed Will," says Kellegher, who seems to have slipped back so easily into Ger’s stilettos that the line between actor and character has blurred. "It wasn’t my fault! Well, I send my sons to do a job and to rough Will up, but they went too far. Sharon said that if I didn’t leave, she’d go to the cops. So, I went to Spain. Now that I know about that Galway thing, I won’t be accepting any taxis or trains to there."

Tina Kellegher is a warm, funny, no-nonsense person. Ask her if, during her hiatus from Fair City, her family encouraged her to go back to the show, and she arches an eyebrow. "My two sons? They were very happy I was there to feed them all the time so why would they be trying to get me back to Fair City? But seriously, they knew that if I wanted to go back, I’d set that ball rolling myself. They were very supportive. But I used to talk to my mam about going back to Fair City."

Is her mother a fan of the show? "Well sadly, I lost mam in January, but I don't really want to go into that. She would have talked about the possibilities of me going back. In a way, it’s great that I’m busy with the show now because it helps you through the grief. It’s tough at times, but it comes to us all."

In her time away from Fair City, Kellegher notched up a few acting jobs including the stage play, Isla, a Hallmark thriller (Murder in G Major) and a short film, Forever Hold Your Peace. Now she’s back on the soap treadmill, four scripts a week and then four more and so on. She’s also ready for the revival of the Ger Lynch recognition factor on the street.

"I was sort of used to that after playing Sharon in The Snapper and there are still people who say to me, 'I loved you as Sharon’. I think what people love about Ger is that she says stuff that they would love to say but don’t. She will say what she wants, and she is not afraid of anybody. She’s a person not to be messed with. For Ger, it’s all about surviving, she’s a survivor, a scrapper, and I try to bring complexity to her."

Tina Kellegher always wanted to act. Either that or become a Garda. She laughs. "I’d have been horrendously bad as a Guard," she says now. Didn’t she play a police officer on screen and also in the BBC radio drama, Baldi? "Yes, but I really want to play a high-ranking detective. Wouldn’t I be great as one? Hahaha! I’d be too much of a coward to be a guard on the beat – that’s a tough job. But yes, from my early teens, I wanted to act.

"Even now I’m at my happiest when I’m doing a bit of acting as well as being a mum and a wife. I’m an all-or-nothing person and actors can be like that: all consumed in their work with the character and lines going round in your head all the time. But I’m like that too when I’m a being mammy to my boys or when I was looking after my mother."

She grew up in Cavan town, one of six children of Bridget and John Kellegher. No acting lineage but from early on, Tina had a grá – and a talent – for stand-up comedy and mimicry. "I did my first straight play in Loreto in Cavan, which was written by one of my teachers," she says. "It was an eye-opener because before that I just did stand-up and comedies."

She was 17 when the family moved to just outside Mullingar, where they lived on and managed 500-acre estate at the Hill of Uisneach. Was that cool? "No," she says. "It was hard work. Up the Hill of Uisneach after 500 head of cattle, scrubbing floors and the rest. We went from living in town to being totally immersed in country living. It was a whole new way of life I can tell you!"

In Mullingar, she joined the local drama group, starred in a production of West Side Story but getting an apprenticeship with Druid Theatre company changed everything. "What a charmed start," she says. "I went to Galway; gave it socks and was offered an apprenticeship. I felt that I was brought into the bosom of Druid and nurtured with Garry [Hynes, artistic director] telling me: ‘You’ve got red raw talent’.

"Garry also wrote a lovely letter to my parents, explaining what was going to happen and that I would be paid. Daddy was terrified about the insecurity, and I had already started a secretarial course, thinking I’ve that in the back pocket. I remember Maureen Hughes (casting director) laughing when I told her that I’d now have to get a job in a pub. "‘Tina, this is a professional job, you’ll be getting paid!’"

When I first met Tina Kellegher on the set of the hit BBC drama Ballykissangel in the mid-1990s, she had already earned her spurs on stage. Following her Druid debut, a bit part in The Hostage directed by Jim Sheridan, her next part was a topper. "Garry called me into the office and said, ‘Would you like to go to Australia?’ And I got to play Sara Tansey in The Playboy of the Western World in Sydney in my second professional job."

By the mid-’90s, she was famous as Sharon Curley in The Snapper and the stage and screen roles started to rack up: The Steward of Christendom (alongside Donal McCann) and for the small screen, The Hanging Gale, No Tears and Sinners. "I was busy back then but that was all before I had kids," she says.

She met her husband, Gordon Wycherley, when she acted alongside his brother, Don, in Gerry Stembridge's rip-roaring Country & Western reworking of A Comedy of Errors at the Abbey theatre. "Do you remember Mikel Murfi throwing himself about the place and myself and Pauline McLynn played sisters, hahaha! It was class, that show."

Much has changed since in the business, not least the rise of the self-tape. "It’s good in that you can audition from anywhere in the world …" At this point the lights go out in the room. "Cutbacks" quips Tina before continuing. "…But self-tapes feel like a bit of a lottery. You send it off and you’ll only hear back if you get the part. I prefer the old way where you could sit in a room, have a conversation and show them the different ways of playing the part."

For now, Tina Kellegher is back doing what she was born to do. "I’d miss that part of myself if I wasn’t acting," she says. Did she ever dip a toe into writing for stage or screen? "I don’t have the confidence that I have something to say that people want to hear," she says. "I can act, I think, and I’m good with scripts, and that’s it."

And that’s more than enough. She recalls how her mother loved Fair City: the devilment of Ger, the craic of it all. "There’s an awful void now that mammy’s gone because I would have spent a lot of time with her," she says. "But I’ll be busier, and my lads are at a stage now where, erm, they can all paddle their own canoe." She laughs. "Ah no, they’re good lads."

And I imagine, when Ger Lynch rides back into Fair City next week, somebody up there will be watching.

Source: RTE.ie.