nne Enright is the Irish author of six novels, including the Booker-winning The Gathering and The Green Road. Those excellent novels were about large, troubled families; Enright’s seventh, Actress, is about a small, troubled family. Norah, an author, is the daughter of Katherine O’Dell, once famous as an actress, now famous as an actress who went mad and shot a producer in the foot. Years after her mother’s death, Norah retraces Katherine’s life – or, rather, her stories of her life – from a dramatic birth in Herne Hill (“Katherine, the most Irish actress in the world, was technically British”) to Hollywood fame, before slow decline: playing women in their sixties when she’s in her forties, being haunted by the catchphrase from a butter advert, and, finally, insanity....