HUSSAR — it’s Simon
WITH terrific enthusiasm, 28-year-old Simon MacCorkindale is pouring all his energy into work. I met him in London while he was having a week’s break. He’d flown in from Ireland, where he had been filming The Manions Of America.
He describes it as being, “A sweeping saga of love and romance set in the Irish famine of 1847”. It is a TV movie starring David Soul and Kate Mulgrew (alias Mrs. Columbo) to be screened in three one-hour episodes. Simon plays the part of Lieutenant David Clement. “I’m a Royal Hussar on detachment to Ireland,” he explains, “policing it like our current troops are doing in Northern Ireland at the moment. My family inherit an estate in Ireland so we are all reunited there.”
To cut a long story short, his sister (Kate Mulgrew) falls in love with an Irish boy who is a member of an IRA-type organisation, the Young Irelanders, and Simon falls in love with the boy’s sister. The two parallel love stories continue as the boy is forced to flee to America and Kate Mulgrew follows.
The story could have been a little touchy, considering the situation in Northern Ireland at the moment, but Simon feels that the subject is handled fairly.
“It doesn’t belabour the point about the IRA,” he says. “Although the English are made to look heavy-handed it’s shot in such a way that the Irish do look like they’re being very provocative at the same time. Hopefully, it looks like neither side is right or wrong.”
We should shortly be seeing Simon in his first American film Cabo Blanco. He starred with Charles Bronson as an MIS agent. The film had just opened in America.
Cabo Blanco was made in Mexico, not too far from Los Angeles, in particular, Hollywood, where Simon has been working lately. He’s not too keen on the money spinning tinsel town itself, but he doesn’t turn his nose up at the work and money it’s offered him.