Corr's Main Frame

That was then, this is now. How is she today, about her mother? “I’m fine, I suppose I’m fortunate that I have a very strong Christian faith. I believe in God and I believe she’s in a better place and I believe it’s for some reason that we don’t know. I know she was a vital woman who loved life far too much to have it by half-measure, as a sick woman, with the clock ticking on it – five years, if she’d had a lung transplant, if it had ever gotten that far.

“That’s not what Mammy was about, to live in fear of something cutting her time off. To be sick, not to have a full life, wouldn’t be for her.”

She recalls how her mother didn’t smile as much after she got sick. “If she smiled, it was really for us. I think she really knew that this rare disease was going to kill her.” Losing her mother suddenly turned Andrea into an adult, which she found weird.

“The ground you walk on is different, the way you look at everything completely changes. But she’s included in my daily life, you can’t help but always think, ‘she’d love this, if she saw this.’ Or, ‘how would she do this?’ All these different things . . .”

While her mother was a strong woman, Andrea says she was not a formidable presence. “She was very loving, and very fun-loving.” Her father Gerry isn’t ‘formidable’ either, she laughs, suggesting a gentle soul. How is he? “Daddy’s great, he’s an independent man and he has his faith which is very important to him.”

Andrea’s sister, Caroline, now has two children, two-year-old Jake and Georgina, who is four months. She would like to be a mother herself, “but I don’t think I’m ready for it, for a couple of years yet”. Could children be a curb on her career? “As you give your career everything, I’d want to give my kids everything. I’d want to give them what my mother and father gave me, and us. I wouldn’t be torn then. When I talk about it with Caroline, she says the most important thing you do in your life is to have children, and I understand that. But you do have to be ready. I would want to feel fully fulfilled by the time I do it.”

While still a bit nervous about interviews, Andrea is no longer manically driven by the sordid business of getting well known. I remember a phone call to Tokyo once when she was in the middle of all this frenzy. I think she was speaking to me from a bathroom, which can’t have helped. “We are ambitious people, but we never thought we’d do as big as this at the same time. Having said that I suppose your goal-posts move all the time and get higher. You set out just to make music and you hope to fulfil yourself. Of course, if you think you’ve written something good you do want the world to respond accordingly.

She recently won Best Actress award at the Colorado Film Festival for her role in The Boys From County Clare. She won’t be attending the ceremony, but she will attend the film’s premiere in New York in March. She is interested in further acting roles, which will presumably come her way in time. Wasn’t she voted the Most Attractive Woman of 2004 by Hello magazine? “Yes, I think so,” she replies. She also won Best Singer in Hot Press. The Best Singer and Best Actress awards were “really big deals,” she says.

Turning 30, on the other hand, was no big deal. “I think life gets better, you get more able to cope with whatever it throws at you.” More wisdom? “Hopefully, you don’t lose your fun as you gain wisdom,” she says. She casts a sceptical look upon the very magazines that are emblazoned with images such as hers. “These relentless articles on being slimmer, that focus is not really healthy for women and teenage girls who can be vulnerable, and it’s moving into men now, I suppose.”

Just like any girl, she worried more about her appearance when she was in her late teens and early twenties. “Now, if you have a day that you don’t feel really great, you know that day will go. I felt really insecure with my looks when I was younger, I feel a bit okay with them now. Although maybe I looked better then, that’s the irony of it.” Oh come on, Andrea.

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