THE reason I've chosen the author John Irving as my hero is because I think he is such an amazing writer, and I just love his work. I have every single one of his books, and I actually find them to be good company . . . they're so well-written and entertaining, and the characters become complete for you while you're reading them, so it's no surprise to me that all of his books have became bestsellers.

The first book that I read of John's was The World According To Garp, and I really felt that he had such a talent for writing about people as they are, in a really honest way. I love the way you actually fall in love with his characters, such as Garp, who was such an amazing character. I first came across him after I had just dropped out of college, and was over in New York visiting my dad. I went out shopping one day, and when I got back a production company had been on the phone looking to talk to me about a part in Ros Na Run. I couldn't call them straight back with the time difference, so it meant getting up really early the next morning to see what they wanted. I became so engrossed in reading Garp, that I stayed up all night with it and, even though the call was really, really important to me, I waited an extra 40 minutes before I called the production company back, just so I could get the book finished!

John was born in 1942 in New Hampshire, and he studied at the University of Pittsburgh and University of New Hampshire. He also attended the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, and went on to work as Assistant Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. While he was teaching, he wrote his first three novels, Setting Free The Bears, The Water-Method Man, and The 158-Pound Marriage. He wasn't happy with the marketing of these books, so he changed publisher for his fourth novel, The World According to Garp, which went on to become a huge bestseller and won him awards, including the National Book Award in 1980.

All of John's subsequent books became best-sellers, including The Hotel New Hampshire, The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany, and he was able to become a full-time writer, and only taught occasionally. In his private life, he married a fellow student, and they had three boys, the first when he was only 23. They later got divorced, and he married to his agent, Janet Turnbull, and they are based in Toronto.

I'm very interested in John's life because I read The Imaginary Girlfriend, which is an autobiography, and I also heard him speak on Rattlebag on RTE Radio One. What struck me about him was how he has achieved such balance in This life for such a well-known writer. I think this is very important and very hard to achieve when you work in the arts, because we're all a bit odd, and our jobs can become an obsession for us. John is very much involved in wrestling and is an honorary member of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Oklahoma, and he also worked as an assistant coach on his sons' high school wrestling teams.

While I'm not into the actual sport of wrestling, I think it's really admirable that he has this other great passion in his life.

It's amazing to have such a body of literary work, while being so involved in a sport as well, and it inspires me to keep up other things that I love outside of acting, like horse-riding.

Another thing that I admire about John is that he struggled with dyslexia, but he still managed to produce such a fine body of work, which must have been challenging for him at times. Another of my favourite books is The Cider House Rules, and he was involved in making the film of it, and it ended up taking almost 10 years to make, because he wanted it to be exactly right. The film was nominated for several Academy awards, and he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.

One thing that struck me when I heard him being interviewed is that he is really secure in his work, and has a real sense of humour about the fact that other people come along and turn his books into films, and occasionally they don't do it too successfully. He was confident enough to say that he didn't think a bad film was going to lose him any readers, because the two things were quite separate.