Meet the Maloneys
A manically enthusiastic Bill Maloney waxes lyrical about filmmaking, his traumatic upbringing and being a ‘Cockney Irishman'… By Shelley Marsden - 04/07/07
Maloney sounds a little chesty. He says it’s because, at 51, he has taken to swimming every morning in the open air and as a result has a ‘bit of a cough’ on him.
Pretty soon I realise that trying to get a word in with Maloney is equivalent to asking Kate Moss to stop smoking, so I sit back and let the Lewisham born Irishman entertain me with his breathless, machine-gun narrative.
Maloney first started making short films with his daughter Regan, while she studied media and English at university. She asked dad to be in her first film (he hated it then and he hates it now), in the role of an alcoholic Irish father whose wife and daughter end up killing him with a pork pie. Yeah.
I’m thinking about this when we’re jolted back in time and, unprepared, I’m listening to horror stories about Maloney’s childhood. Brought up in institutions, both his parents were alcoholics (his mum left when he was four “to go on the game”). Pete, his elder brother was a heroine addict who took his own life when Maloney was only 13. “I found out because my other brother opened the door one day – Dad was in the pub, as usual – and a policeman said, “Tell your dad your brother’s killed himself and to ring this number.” I think about Philip Larkin’s famous poem about parents: it couldn’t be more apt in Maloney’s case.
Coming from an Irish family, he remembers, too, the racial abuse he put up with on a day-to-day basis. “I was called a Mick Irish, I had it all. One St Patrick’s Day, my dad had this shamrock sent over, but I couldn’t wear it because it would cause trouble. We had bricks coming through our window in Peckham; if they weren’t having a go at the blacks, they were having a go at us!”
Maloney ended up drunk himself, to the point that at aged 35, he found himself in the ‘Bleeder’s Ward’ of a hospital with a duodenal ulcer that nearly killed him. “That was the turning point,” he says emphatically, repeating my name at regular intervals, a trait I warm to. “That night I had a ‘visitation’. Someone put their arm round me, and it wasn’t the black nurse that was in the ward. I had a warm glow come over me, and I knew then I would be alright.”
Everything changed after that. Maloney started writing. “People kept telling me, this is the film you have to do Bill, the film of your life.” He had the raw material, but Maloney soon hit the brick walls of the industry. He sent a script to the BBC which was sent right back as it was seen as ‘too laddish’. “Too laddish? What does that mean? Then I was told most of the commissioners were female, middle-class and ‘didn’t like’ that kind of thing.”
Something that caught my eye when I was reading about the Maloney’s first full-length film, Lunatic, was their brief – No Edits and No Fear. When I ask Bill to elaborate, he says it all began when his wife, Maria came home from work and told him she’d got him an audition at the Rose Bruford Drama College, the same place Gary Oldman learnt the ropes. “She told me this when the first fork of dinner was going in the gob”, laughs Maloney.
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