It has taken nearly 100 years for an Irish woman to win best actress at the Academy Awards. Two years off from the Oscar centenary, Jessie Buckley, raised in Killarney, finally took the prize on Sunday night for her barnstorming performance as Agnes Shakespeare in Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet.
“Don’t go to bed. Keep partying,” she said after the ceremony. “I’m so grateful for the support, and I feel the love. I feel it. I feel it from young people and old people, from women and men.”
Buckley won at a canter. Unbeatable at the preceding televised ceremonies, she arrived as the strongest favourite in that category since Helen Mirren won for The Queen nearly 20 years ago.
This is, first and foremost, a personal triumph for this breathtakingly versatile actor. She has been in the public eye since coming second in the BBC’s I’d do Anything, a talent show aimed at finding the female lead for a West End production of Oliver, as long ago as 2008.
Rather than commit immediately to the audition cycle, Buckley then elected to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.
She has barely rested since graduation: admired in the BBC’s take on War and Peace; Oscar nominated for Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter; and winner of an Olivier Award for a stage production of Cabaret. She came to this season’s gruelling Oscar campaign with the sparky confidence of a veteran.
Arriving just in time for the national holiday, the win, however, also speaks to a wider confidence in Ireland’s creative industries. The first Oscar for a domestic actor came way back in 1944 when Barry Fitzgerald, Abbey Theatre stalwart, grasped the supporting award for Going My Way. It took another 46 years for Brenda Fricker, up for Jim Sheridan’s My Left Foot, to win the nation’s second ever acting Oscar. In the last few years, barely a ceremony has gone by without multiple Irish nominees in various disciplines.
Sheridan’s film was released in 1989. That same year, Jessie Buckley entered the world. A concurrence worth noting.