Singer Camille O’Sullivan: ‘I had cancer during Covid. I was so scared. It was caught by chance’

Camille O’Sullivan gestures towards the wall of bookshelves on the first-floor landing in her magnificent Georgian Dublin home overlooking the Grand Canal. “Look here,” she beckons with a grin. She catches hold of the bookshelf and gently pushes. A door swings inward on silent hinges to reveal a hidden room filled with Narnia-like snow-covered pine trees and cut-outs from The Wizard of Oz: Dorothy, Tin Man and Scarecrow, and even the Wicked Witch lurking at the back. “Come with me, and you’ll see, a world of pure imagination,” O’Sullivan sings, smiling at The Irish Times photographer’s surprised face. “I bought the cut-outs from abroad. I adore that film.”You don’t need to be schooled in The Wizard of Oz to recognise there’s something magical about O’Sullivan’s home, a labour of love for the singer and actor since she bought the property with her partner, actor Aidan Gillen, in 2015, not long after they became a couple.Resplendent over four storeys, with high ceilings, lavish cornicing and stained glass, the house – which has been renovated over a decade – doubles as an art piece: full of whimsical touches, from the old-fashioned bell-pull at the front door to the row of cocktail glasses lining the kitchen wall (“We have parties,” she confirms) and the jukebox in the basement with Gillen’s handpicked tunes, from Public Enemy to Microdisney.READ MOREI’ve arrived at the house in time for O’Sullivan’s photo shoot for the magazine, which involves a joyful ramble through the many floors as she strikes poses, adapts outfits, suggests perches and tries out the swing in her daughter’s room (Leila is her 13-year-old daughter with her former partner, Waterboys founder Mike Scott). Neither Leila nor Gillen are here today – Gillen, best known for his roles in Game of Thrones, Love/Hate and The Wire, is away filming for Young Sherlock – but their spaniel Bonnie pants happily on the new green sofa in the front room, clutching a furry toy, as Goo Goo the cat stalks past on the kitchen table.It’s a colourful mise-en-scene, and appropriate for the ageless, sprite-like O’Sullivan, a former architect (their home, which she designed in collaboration with Elizabeth Burns Architects, won the 2025 Conservation Award at the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland Awards) and one of Ireland’s most intriguing interpretative artists. O’Sullivan is famed for her chameleon-like ability to tunnel into the heart of a song, whether a lament from Nick Cave, a spicy rocker from Kirsty MacColl or an operatic show-stopper from David Bowie. Today she’s wearing vivid green eyeshadow and a bright green dress. The vibe is half-vamp, half-children’s TV presenter, a commingling of opposites that’s very Camille O’Sullivan.As she offers coffees, teas and dark chocolate, she confesses she’s feeling a bit rattly, not yet “grounded”. She flew in from Luton airport last night. This morning she was frantically cleaning the kitchen before our arrival. She’s talking a lot, which is her way, she explains, of coping with nerves. She and Gillen are both shy, she says, though they display it differently. “He is shy, and I am shy, but I talk like a mad one. We’re very similar, but where I’m emotional, he is more defined in what he does. So it seems to fit well, although I’m sure I drive him mad.” Growing up in Passage West in Cork, the London-born daughter of a French painter mother and a rally-car-driving Irish father, the young Camille was so timid at times she used to squeeze her eyes shut to try to see less, so the world would feel less scary. Camille O’Sullivan: 'The less you think about yourself, the better.' Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill/The Irish Times Her decision to go on stage only came after a serious car crash when she was 25, which led her to ditch her safer career in architecture and start singing cabaret in coffee houses in Dublin. Sometimes she wishes she were more aloof. “I feel ashamed that I talk so much,” she says. “But I’m fighting against myself to be more reserved, and then I go: don’t let that part of your spirit go.”Recently she got an ADHD diagnosis, and it helped explain a lot of her inner tussle, her social anxiety and her struggles with tasks that, to others, may seem effortless. Sometimes opening an email can be hard. “I’ve lost major films because of it,” she says. “I’m a big fan of Gilbert O’Sullivan, I met him once on a train. He emailed and I couldn’t open it for six years. My sister opened it for me. I’m that scared of opening stuff.” She always had little quirks, like staying up late drawing, fixating on new passions or the compulsive need for chatter. But she’d grown used to making light of it. “Cork, where I’m from, when they talk rubbish, I go, ‘That’s me, I talk like that’. When I got the ADHD diagnosis, I thought, ‘Shit, I thought it was just being from Cork, this talking’. My friend Victoria Mary Clarke, Shane’s [MacGowan] wife, said, ‘I could have told you that for free. You didn’t have to pay for it’.”One of the things it makes sense of, she says, is what her father calls her “superpower”: her capacity for raw vulnerability in her live performances. On stage, O’Sullivan channels her intense nervousness with remarkable force, transforming into a different entity, a person even she doesn’t always recognise. She is uninhibited, full-bodied and focused. “When I do a show, I don’t believe in just singing nicely. It’s bringing every aspect of yourself,” she says. “Sometimes I don’t even know what happens on stage until I wake up the next day and go, ‘Jesus Christ, I can’t believe I did that’.” In the early years, people sometimes confused her act with burlesque (“My mom would say, ‘Did you wear the fishnets? That’s why they think you’re a stripper’,” she says, mimicking her French accent). In truth, O’Sullivan’s performances resist easy definitions. She might be wearing fishnet tights and red lipstick, but she’s as likely to casually riff between songs about midlife weight gain or late-night internet purchases as to kick her heels in the air and play the coquette. “It’s shape-shifting,” she says. “You can become all these different things. You have an excuse to be angry, to be fierce.” Beloved by Graham Norton (“She’s astonishing”, he has said), she has performed everywhere from the Sydney Opera House to the Royal Albert Hall. She was named one of the best 25 acts to ever appear on Jools Holland by The Telegraph in 2018, although her innate self-deprecation means she struggles to believe praise. Camille O’Sullivan at home in Dublin. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill/The Irish Times She expects a lot of herself, off stage and on. “It can be like selling your soul to the devil sometimes because that much feeling on stage can hurt you,” she says. “It costs too much. It hurts too much.”Five years ago, O’Sullivan considered giving up the stage, in part because she didn’t know if she was physically or mentally able any more. In a routine health check, something was found. She hasn’t really talked about it before. “I had cancer during Covid,” she says. “I was so scared. It was caught by chance. The doctors had to ring my parents because I wasn’t answering [the phone]. Then I had another five months I had to wait, so within that time you’re going, ‘How bad is this?’ When you’re a mum, you’re like, ‘Please, Lord’.” [ Living with breast cancer: ‘I’ve possibly had one of the best years of my life. I’ve got rid of anything that didn’t matter’Opens in new window ]After a diagnosis of womb cancer, she had an operation and a full hysterectomy, and her body was hit hard. “I got long Covid. I got shingles in my eye and post-herpetic neuralgia.” The fatigue drained her. “I would sometimes have to sleep for three or four days. It was terrible as a performer. Steroids got me on stage.” For her critically acclaimed take on Edith Piaf at the Gate Theatre in Dublin in 2022, the effects of her treatment meant she struggled to learn her lines. “I couldn’t concentrate because I had nausea. If I was in bed, I’d have to ring Aidan and say, ‘Could you bring me my medication?’ because I couldn’t get up.”It’s a mark of O’Sullivan’s resilience as a person and performer that even when talking about those times, she’s able to locate the dark humour in some of the situations she found herself in. For Piaf, she found a remedy to help with the headaches she was experiencing daily: Botox. The nerve blocker stopped the pain, but came with side effects. “My eyebrow went up because your woman wasn’t great at the f**king Botox,” she laughs. “For the whole of Covid I had a raised eyebrow. You look quizzical. I’d two stone weight on, I looked like shit. I used to cry every night looking at myself on stage. It was a raised eyebrow for three months. People were like, ‘What happened to her?’ Aidan was like, ‘What do you want?’ I was like, ‘I don’t want anything!’ But I was desperate. I would have taken anything.” Cancer free since her treatment, she wants young women to know her story so they keep a watchful eye on themselves. “If you’re getting irregular periods or no blood, you’ve got to get checked. You have to go further than a smear test. I would tell every girl that.”Camille O’Sullivan: 'The show is about embracing the madness of life. It will be hymnal, spiritual.' Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill/The Irish Times O’Sullivan’s home contains few mirrors or pictures of herself. “Neither of us like to have images in the house,” she says. “As you get older, you’re like, ‘Take them down, take them down’. The less you think about yourself, the better. The old pictures remind you you don’t look like that. The new ones, you’re, like, horrified. Ageing is really hard for women.”After her hysterectomy, she went into immediate menopause, an experience that was shocking and disorientating. “The anger thing happens. The crying thing happens. The f**king ‘I don’t know what my name is’ thing happens. And what the f**k’s going on with my stomach? Everything changed overnight. I was distressed and depressed. My friends were like, ‘Christ, we’ve lost her’.”She decided to take HRT against medical advice. “I am scared, but I get checked twice a year,” she says. “I went back to my doctors and said, ‘I’ve got to come clean, I’m on HRT ’, and one of them said, ‘Camille, I know this is my speciality, and I’m not supposed to prescribe this, but [with] you, if you don’t take it, you’re going to have these issues which are worse’.” Now she finds ways to poke fun at her stage in life. “I give the finger to menopause ads and send pictures to my friends,” she says. “We have to grow old disgracefully and laugh at ourselves. Because if we don’t laugh, we are going to go down the rabbit hole. The Irish are good at laughing at bad situations. And if we want to have sparkly pants and pink hair, let’s do it.”Pink hair may or may not feature in her new show, bracingly titled The Art of Falling Apart, which she will perform at the Olympia in November. “It’s a totally new creation,” she says. “It’s still being created. I’ve thought of coming on with white hair, like an old woman, and then rolling into rock ‘n’ roll. The show is about embracing the madness of life. It will be hymnal, spiritual. Singing to people we’ve lost, singing to the people we want to become. To dance like nobody’s watching, to laugh out loud, to cry, to do the things you’re scared of. There will be Jacques Brel, Nick Cave; there will definitely be David Bowie.”Camille O’Sullivan: 'I love singing the songs. I’m petrified of the gigs coming, but it is joyful, even if I’m scared.' Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill/The Irish Times It’s a show that will serve, she says, as a cousin of her recent show Loveletter, in which O’Sullivan celebrated many of the friends and icons that the arts world has lost in recent years, including Shane MacGowan and Sinéad O’Connor. “These incredible chieftains,” she says. “Shane, Sinéad, Christy [Dignam], Moya [Brennan] and Glen [Hansard]. I can’t believe Glen. With Glen, he’s so alive and present and of our age. You’d think he’s around the corner.[ Glen Hansard music to feature in new stage production of Waking Ned DevineOpens in new window ]“Sinéad sang so authentically – she sang as if her life depended on it – but she was the most fragile. I used to run away from Shane because I was scared he’d tell me that was shit what we did [she performed with a tribute with others at MacGowan’s 60th birthday concert in 2018]. I loved their realness. They were so different offstage, like little kids. They always say performers are people who are children who haven’t grown up.”Last summer, O’Sullivan was one of the final guests to be interviewed by Seán Rocks, just days before the RTÉ Arena broadcaster died. She and her childhood friend, the playwright and mother and baby home survivor Noelle Brown, had been invited on to Arena to discuss In Plain Sight, a theatre piece which tackled the subject of Ireland’s mother and baby homes at Roscrea, Castlepollard and Bessborough through an on-site performance at the Sacred Heart of Mary Convent in Roscrea. “You couldn’t even explain it to a young person now, that a mother and child would be separated from each other,” she says. Rocks asked skilful, knowledgeable questions of the pair, as was his way. “I’d known him all through the years. So clever. He always knew what to ask. Another chieftain. And such a great actor too.” She went to Rocks’ funeral in Monaghan with Gillen. At Glen Hansard’s funeral more recently, she recalls looking around and thinking: “Who’s next?”The great losses the arts community has suffered in recent years are a reminder to live brightly while you can, a mantra O’Sullivan took to heart after the car crash in 1999 and again after her recent health battles. “Live your life like every day matters,” she says. “Everybody has a shyness, and everybody has a thing. So you become a little more Buddhist. As you get older, you get wiser in the sense that you realise, ‘Oh God, nobody’s thinking about me’. They were always thinking about themselves, wondering what people were thinking about them. “Through the most painful things, the thought that stayed with me is, ‘Aren’t we so lucky, even if we get fat and we don’t look good, that we still are alive, and we can get a dog and learn how to hula hoop or be childlike’.”No matter how afraid O’Sullivan might be of the stage, she understands that performing is a vocation and a gift. “I was talking to someone recently for therapy. She said, ‘Why do you put yourself down? You are blessed. In your lifetime you have found something. Many people never know what they want.’ I love singing the songs. I’m petrified of the gigs coming, but it is joyful, even if I’m scared.”She takes inspiration from one of her heroes, Jacques Brel. “I got great confidence from him because he gave up performing live because he was so scared. He used to vomit before every show. And he was the best singer.” His example has shown O’Sullivan that nerves are no indicator of quality. And she can wield her nerves, worries and troubles to channel her best performances. Pain can even be a boon. “When your life is painful is when you sing best,” she says. “You’re in the eye of the storm.”O’Sullivan’s pain is not the sum of her; far from it. She has many different sides to her, and it feels appropriate that by the time the afternoon light has started to fade, O’Sullivan is offering – with a mischievous glint in her eye – a margarita to replace my herbal tea. Whether she and Aidan are boating on the Shannon, hosting Halloween parties or cheering on Leila for her school musical (“She sings better than me”), vivacity is part of her lifeblood. She has a favourite phrase from Brel: “Let’s laugh, let’s dance, let’s drink until they put me in a hole in the ground.” Tiny Wizard of Oz figurines on the front room windowsill face out on to the street where the couple’s vintage Jaguars are parked. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill/The Irish Times Leaving the house, I pass a set of tiny Wizard of Oz figurines on the front room windowsill, which face out on to the street where the couple’s vintage Jaguars are parked. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy lives her life in grey in Kansas until she steps into technicolour. O’Sullivan’s life seems a little like that – sometimes there are grey shades and hard times, but she will find a way to bring back the brightness and the fun. She will insist on it. As a line she loves from Leonard Cohen runs: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”Camille O’Sullivan’s new show The Art of Falling Apart is at the 3Olympia Theatre on Saturday, November 21st. The special guest is David Bowie’s guitarist Earl Slick. Loveletter is at Monroes, Galway, Oct 8th, and St. Luke’s, Cork, Oct 10th.