As one of Hollywood’s most private couples, Cillian Murphy’s wife, Yvonne McGuinness, has managed to lay incredibly low throughout their two-decade marriage.
McGuinness been by Murphy’s side throughout the 2024 award season as he continues to reap the rewards of his incredible performance in Oppenheimer. When the Irish actor won his first Golden Globe award in January 2024, he proudly sported his wife’s kiss on his face as he accepted the award.
“First question, do I have lipstick all over my nose?” he asked in his speech. “I’m just going to leave it.”
Murphy also shouted McGuinness out a week earlier while accepting the Desert Palm Achievement Award at the Palm Springs International Film Awards, thanking his wife and their sons on stage.
“Two-thirds of them are sitting down there. We had to leave one of them at home doing exams,” he said during his speech. “But just thanks for putting up with me — putting up with the half me and the shadow me and the absent me, the remains of me when I’m doing a film like this or work in general. You’re always there. I love you for it. So thanks, guys.”
Who is Cillian Murphy’s wife, Yvonne McGuinness?
Murphy’s wife is an accomplished artist originally from Kilkenny, Ireland. She the mother of his two sons and has served a key role in her husband’s career for decades, so let’s get to know the woman behind the scenes.
McGuinness is a Dublin-based artist.
McGuinness received a BFA from Crawford College of Art, Cork in 1997 and an MFA from Royal College of Art, London in 2003.
According to her website, “Her work encompasses film, performance, sculptural and textile elements, sound and writing. She has an interest in embodied experience of place and belonging by staging live, public, interventions and performances which create surreal and dynamic moments of interaction and connection to place, time and communities.” Her recent work includes a 2018 live public performance, titled The Well, inspired by the 19th-century murder of Irishwoman Bridget Cleary. At the end of 2023, she launched a solo exhibition in Dublin titled Rehearsals, a work of film and textile art that explores with her family’s legacy of political and civic engagement in Kilkenny.
Murphy and McGuinness met in the late 1990s.
Murphy met his now-wife while touring his 1996 play, Disco Pigs, his first acting gig that was later adapted into a 2001 film in which he starred.
In a 2016 interview with The Guardian, Murphy reflected on the breakout role, touring the play internationally and meeting his wife, saying, “It was like being in a band again. Except that people actually came to the shows.”
“That time, making Disco Pigs, was kind of the most important period of my life. The people I met there remain my closest friends. Enda Walsh. Pat Kiernan [the director]. Eileen Walsh [his costar]. They shaped me in terms of my tastes, in terms of what I wanted to do with my life.”
He added, “And it was around the same time I met my wife. She came on tour with us. It was so exciting, 20 years ago or whatever it was—we were all just kids, trying to find our way—but such a special, special time.”
Murphy and McGuinness got married in 2004.
Murphy and McGuinness got married in 2004. Unconfirmed reports say the pair married at a vineyard in France owned by McGuinness’s family. Their wedding took place between a string of Murphy’s early hits including 2003’s Girl With A Pearl Earring, in which he plays Scarlett Johansson’s love interest and 2005’s Red Eye, playing Rachel McAdams’s creepy suitor.
During their first year of marriage, Murphy filmed his BAFTA-nominated hit, Irish war of independence movie, The Wind ThatShakes The Barley. The couple were based in Murphy’s home county, Cork, while McGuinness was expecting their first child.
As Murphy recounted in a 2006 interview with The Guardian, “I was living at home with my folks; my wife was pregnant with our son; and we were running around the hills of west Cork shooting up Black and Tans. Fantastic!”
Murphy and McGuinness have two sons.
The couple are parents to Malachy, born in 2005, and Aran, born in 2007.
Aran is due to follow in his father’s footsteps after reportedly signing to the same Hollywood agency as Will Smith and Ryan Gosling in March, 2024. He made his onscreen debut in a small part in 2022’s Lola, per his IMDB, and will next star in Taika Waititi’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel Klara and the Sun, alongside Jenna Ortega and Amy Adams.
“They’re really good boys. We have a laugh,” he told Rolling Stone UK in 2023, adding that his kids do watch some of his work. “We don’t do ‘Dad’s Movie Night’, but they like some of my films. They say all my films are really intense.”
The family live in Dublin.
In his 2016 interview with The Guardian, Murphy confirmed that the family had relocated to Dublin a year earlier after living in London for most of his marriage. He stated that he wanted his sons to be closer to their grandparents.
“I loved living in London in my 20s and 30s, but after a while you kind of go, ‘Right, is this it? Is this it for the rest of my days? Or is there some other possibility?’” He added: “We wanted them to be Irish, I suppose. It’s amazing how quickly their accents have adapted. Even within a year of moving back, they are fading into this rakish west Brit kind of thing.”
McGuinness cares for their sons while Murphy is away filming.
In several rare interviews, Murphy has credited his wife with taking control of their family life while he travels for work.
“That work-life balance thing is hard,” he told GQ in 2019. “I have an amazing wife and I couldn’t do this without her and her understanding.” The Oppenheimer star continued, “But it is a struggle. I think it is for any dad whose work takes him away, which it generally does, and which consumes him, which my work does.”
He also told The Guardian that, while filming his hit show Peaky Blinders, he lived alone in Liverpool while McGuinness and their children stay in Dublin.
“It’s cancelled life,” he explained. “You go home to your tiny apartment at the end of the day and you feed yourself for sustenance and you learn the lines for the next day and you try to get as much sleep as you possibly can. Which isn’t much. And then you get up and do it again.”
Murphy says it is also difficult to transition out of his character, Tommy Shelby, and back into family life. “It takes time. My wife can see it happening. ‘OK. Tommy’s gradually leaving. I’m getting Cillian back,’ ” he said.
His appreciation for McGuinness’s role in keeping him grounded goes back decades as he also shouted her out in a 2005 interview with People, praising her for helping him stay down-to-earth. “It’s very important to have somebody like that,” he said. “My life hasn’t changed in any way, really. I still have the same friends and we go to the same places.”
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