Hollywood Royalty: Inside Glin Castle with Dominic West and Catherine FitzGerald

Eighteen months ago, after an unsuccessful attempt to sell Glin Castle, the couple decided they would keep the property, becoming impromptu hoteliers when they began to market it as an exclusive private rental.

“Acting is so different,” says Dominic. “Meeting people outside of that world, the people that work at Glin... It’s refreshing, so different to anything I’ve done before. I suppose I’ve gotten quite jaded with acting. Long running episodic TV wears you down. It’s boring.

“This has been a brilliant new dimension to my life, and it’s such a part of Catherine’s, its essential to my life too.” This year was their first foray into hospitality — Glin hosted a wedding in August, and already there are bookings for 2019. There are plans to transform the stables into a “party barn” – Dominic is even exploring an on-site distillery. There’s talk of a restaurant, tea rooms.

“We had a naive dream that a person with deep pockets who loved it would come along,” begins Catherine.

“We got plenty of wrong people coming along,” Dominic interjects. Scientologists were among the bidders.

“You’d have been heartbroken,” Catherine says at the prospect of her home falling into the wrong hands.

It was a wonderful place to grow up with her sisters, she recalls, days filled climbing trees in the sprawling gardens. Today, her children share that experience.

“The kids love it,” says Catherine. “They’ve been spending all their holidays here since they were born and they are really attached.” 

Their base is in Bath, England but Ireland is a second home. When the children — 12-year- old Dora, 10-year-old Senan, nine-year- old Francis and five year old Christabel — come down to say a polite hello, their eldest son is wearing a Cúl Camp jersey. Dominic admits a dream to eventually settle in Ireland, spurred on too by the “catastrophic” Brexit.

For now it’s a life of commutes, largely dominated by five-month intense shoot schedules for the hit series The Affair.

It means Dominic is away from the family for long periods.

“He is so lucky to have such a successful job. It’s been brilliant for us in many ways but he has had to work hard and be away from his family and it’s not that easy,” says Catherine.

Filming on the upcoming adaptation of Les Mis was a dream, Dominic admits. The schedule ran Monday to Friday in Brussels so he was back on the Eurostar in time for his son’s football on Saturday mornings. 

He’s a devoted family man, and next year the kids and Catherine will take an extended break from school and work (Catherine has worked on the grounds at Hillsborough Castle — the official residence in Northern Ireland of Queen Elizabeth II) to join him in the US for filming. When it wraps, they have a RV lined up for a road trip in the States.

“It’ll be a sabbatical,” says Dominic. “A very good friend of mine did it — his wife died afterwards but least they had that year.” At the end of it, they’ll “see what happens”. They children might have a school term in Ireland. “We’d love to move here,” he says.

In the mean time Catherine will be “very hands on” when it comes to Glin she says - where possible the couple will be on hand to meet and greet guests, to help with their plans. If they aren’t in the country, Catherine’s mother is there, and Colm, a Glin local, is managing the property on a day to day basis. The community is supportive, Dominic says.

“That sense of community is essential, the relationship between the castle and the village is so symbiotic,” he says.

For the foreseeable future then,
Catherine will be back and forth from the UK to Ireland, determined to make her plans for Glin a success.

“In America people just travel all the time. You do what you have to do. It’s a lot to take on. I’m so happy it can keep going if we can make it self sustaining.

“Dominic has been key the whole thing. He said, ‘Come on, let’s try’ because it’s quite a scary thing to do.”

The castle — 20,000 square feet standing on 380 acres of land overlooking the River Shannon — has been in the family for 700 years. Catherine is the daughter of the last Knight of Glin, Desmond FitzGerald; when he passed away in 2011, the title died with him as he had no male children.

Constant work is essential to maintain the building, and upgrades will be gradual, Catherine admits. Her parents had already laid the groundwork for its transformation to rental property, creating ensuite bathrooms, equipping adequate catering facilities and securing health and safety requirements when it ran as a country house hotel in the past.

One of Dominic’s first priorities was to restore the fireplaces — warm open fires were crucial.

“It was the first thing we needed to bring the house back to life. My mother said you’re crazy, there’s so much work. But Dominic insisted,” says Catherine.

And he was right. It’s a warm August morning when we visit, yet the Morso stove is lit at Glin Castle. There’s one in the hallway, and another in the drawing room, welcoming us, luring us in.

Dominic always had a passion for conservation, Catherine recalls, even when they first met as students in Trinity: “When you lived in Mountjoy Square, at the top of an 18th century building, even in those days you loved the romance of the old rooms and dimensions.”

“I wasn’t quite conscious of it,” says Dominic.

He doesn’t seem aware of the level of his fame either; they aren’t the local celebrity couple. “I go to the local pub just like everyone else,” he says. “The Irish response is friendly, I just came back through Shannon and the guy checking passports said ‘Hi ya Dominic’ and it felt like you were coming home.”

“People are usually quite nice, the balance is fine,” says Catherine.

“I’m happy to chat anyway,” says Dominic, smiling. “Fans of The Wire tend to be interesting people.”

He admits though devotees of The Affair can get a bit invasive, like the time he was asked for a selfie “in the middle of a crazy time, holding my daughter when she was having a pee”.

“I don’t have to do the selfies, they push me out of the way,” Catherine laughs.

The Wire was, Dominic says now, the gift that keeps on giving. Yet at the time he was desperate to escape the series.

“They make you sign for six years —they say it won’t last that long but then it does.

“David Simon had to fight for it every year — no one was watching it. It didn’t really take off until it finished. It took off in Ireland before the UK, it was on TG4 .

“It’s just been digitally remastered which tells you how bloody old it is now. My 19 year old daughter tells me ‘it looks a bit dated dad’,” he says, laughing, ”but everyone else tells me it’s done pretty well. When I was directing an episode and I watched it back and I thought, ‘this is brilliant’.”

He auditioned for the role on video.

“I had no one to read the other part for me. My girlfriend at the time couldn’t stop laughing so I kicked her out of the room. I pretended there was someone there and I reacted to silence. They saw this and thought it was funny so they got me over. All the people they wanted to do it — they wanted Ray Winstone I think — it was difficult persuading people like him to go and live in Baltimore for five years.”

Next up is Les Mis, “which is going to be brilliant,” he says. “I’m exec producer too so I saw rushes. I think it’s good — I don’t really like what I’m doing but that’s normal,” he says, laughing, “but everyone else seems to be great.

“I don’t like looking at myself, most actors don’t,” he elaborates. “I try not to watch back, I can’t bear it. Judy Dench, all these people feel it too.”

His latest movie, with rave reviews at Sundance, is Colette, with Keira Knightley. It’s a role he’s excited about.

He admits his early experiences of the ‘Hollywood machine’ were less positive.

I had romantic parts with all these different leading ladies, and that’s been interesting, seeing them close up and what makes a star.

“With women they have to be really iron willed, not so much the men but with the women it’s so much tougher. They are all starving.” Catherine interjects, afraid perhaps her husband is going too far. He responds with his trademark blunt honesty.

“That’s the truth,” he says, shrugging. “The men — if a man starves himself for a part he gets an Oscar.”

Dominic is good company, charismatic, engaging, his conversation laced with accents and impersonations. Even pouring my tea, there’s an opportunity for a Tommy Cooper send up.

“No milk and sugar? Just like that,” he quips.

Catherine sums up her childhood home, and its current transition best: “Homeliness mixed with beauty and grandness, but it’s not chilly or imposing. It’s cosy. People really have good time in this house.”

With Dominic and Catherine at the helm, there’s no better description. And their home is open for business.