Universal Charmer

Andrea Roche opens up to Julia Molony about her parents' split, being married and her distrust of good-looking men.

Andrea Roche seems tense. When I arrive to meet her in the bijou Dylan Hotel in Dublin 4, she has already settled in; she's all business-like and engrossed in some kind of paperwork. She has the unmistakable gilded patina of serious affluence that complements so perfectly the design concept of the hotel bar, it makes you think they should pay her to sit there.

With perfect nails, glossy hair, and extravagant curves richly upholstered by her clothes, her look matches exactly the artfully contrived elegance of the place. It's an image that can only be achieved through incessant grooming and expensive accessorising.

We find a cosy corner and begin to talk. In photographs, her precise features sometimes have a hard-bitten look, but in person, she possesses a much softer kind of beauty. I'm dying to launch into a chat about how her year-old marriage is going and to get the truth behind what appears, on the outside, to be an amusing pastiche of the hackneyed beauty-queen-meets-millionaire fairytale (more of which later), but as she seems nervous, I decide to start with something lighter.

So, we talk about her long-standing involvement in Miss Ireland -- in 10 years, she has gone from wearing the crown to becoming the owner and, indeed, the very embodiment of the competition. Her latest coup was acquiring the Irish franchise rights to the Miss Universe pageant.

She speaks slowly, in a husky drawl that is much less bogger-harsh than everyone would have you believe, although her deep tones do fairly boom through the refined hush of the room. There are one or two other lone customers scattered around, but no one else is speaking and you can tell being overheard is making Andrea uncomfortable. She is self-conscious and it shows. So, after a brief kerfuffle, we relocate to the hotel's private library.

In seclusion, Andrea instantly relaxes. The timorous manner melts rapidly into a kind of voluble, jocose banter that is the special talent of pretty, chatty girls from rural towns, who are raised to be able to verbally lampoon their brothers over the racket in the local family bar.

If Dublin high society apes an aristocratic hierarchy of wealth and prestige, then the Miss Ireland pageant is the equivalent of a Swiss finishing school, furnishing girls with the right manners and connections to make it to the top echelons of the social scene. And with Miss Ireland's transformative influence now many years behind her, it's a long time since Andrea has been stuck making wise cracks in country pubs.

This year (appropriately, the one she turns 30) represents a professional coming of age for Andrea. Her business partner of several years, Mags Humphries from the Assets modelling agency, is off to live in Australia, so Andrea is single-handedly taking over the helm of Miss Ireland. And with the Irish franchise of Miss Universe now added to her portfolio, she has already expanded this inherited empire.

It's an important time that marks her graduation from professional model to modelling professional -- a proper, stand-alone entrepreneur. It doesn't stop there. Next on her to-do list is the fulfilment of a long-standing aim to head her own agency.

As queen bee of the Irish modelling set Andrea presides serenely over a merry carnival of inconsequence. Her world is populated by pretty girls in bikinis who pose on Grafton Street and try, by buffness alone, to confer attention onto whatever product (mobile phones, ice creams, bananas) they've been hired to plug. It's a lifestyle defined by velvet-rope values and Brown Thomas tastes but, for all her famous bottle, Andrea is quite happy within its confines.

"I always knew my limits," she says, reflecting on what she has achieved so far. "I always knew that I was lucky to be a big fish in a small pond here in Ireland and that I should make the most of that. I never dreamed of going to New York or Milan and trying to compete against the most beautiful women in the world. I do admire girls who do that, but luckily, I've never had those kinds of ambitions."

This, as I'm to learn over the next couple of hours, is classic Andrea: relentless pragmatism, an unsparing self-knowledge that exposes her insecurities, and an awareness of her strengths and how to use them.

She was born and raised in Clonmel, the eldest of five children in a normal, happy household. Her siblings now all lead lives that are markedly different from hers and she admits that they all have strongly contrasting personalities. One of her sisters is a social care worker; the other is studying hotel management. Her youngest brother is about to start a computer science degree in Waterford and the older brother works in a factory in Kilkenny.

Even when she was very young that characteristic instinct for self-reliance, for mastering her surroundings, quickly became apparent. On her first day of school, she calmly told her mother to let go of her hand, walking straight inside without even looking back.

At 18, she went off to Carlow to study business. She wasn't even halfway through when she won Miss Ireland and left for good -- a decision that, for obvious reasons, she has never had cause to regret.

Thus began the giant leap from Carlow tech to Miss World stage. It was a baptism of fire for a small-town girl who had barely been out of Ireland. At the Miss Universe competition all the other contestants were decked out in designer clothes and bankrolled by rich boyfriends, but she had to borrow an evening dress from Miss India as she had brought only one gown to last her six weeks. Despite these, and other almost- cliched, gauche Irish disadvantages, she did well, coming in at fourth place.

"I was very innocent and naive when I won and learnt a lot in that year," she says.

Andrea has, in the past, described herself as a very committed person, which sounds like one of those vapid, meaningless little statements until you examine the manner in which she built her career. Her association with Newbridge began over eight years ago. She's gone from simply modelling the jewellery to becoming synonymous with the brand. Demonstrating a shrewdness so brazen it becomes almost charming, she never misses an opportunity to drop the company name. She's been equally tenacious, of course, in her approach to taking over Miss Ireland.

It didn't take Andrea long to figure out that CityWest (where she and her husband now live out the Celtic Tiger dream in all its gated-mansion glory) would not be conquered by modelling alone. Especially considering, as she has said herself in the past, it's so hard to make any real money from it.

"The best earners are the well-known girls," she says of her role in the evolution of Irish Models from mere clothes horses to schlock celebrities and household names. Making an actual living as a model in Ireland is a gruelling ascent, achieved by clinging, tooth and nail, to any opportunity, no matter how humiliating, to build up a profile. Andrea has managed the impressive feat of achieving this with dignity, relatively speaking, intact.

This is due, for the most part, to an impressive cop-on when playing the media game and an understanding of how to engage with the press. "If somebody rings you, and you've got a little story that you think would be worthwhile, you know, something positive about yourself, there's no harm in giving that," she says.

She's so media aware, in fact, that she has developed the rather odd habit of seeming to exercise her own editorial judgment as she's being interviewed. Several times during our conversation, she wonders aloud: "What else will I say?" making explicit an acute consciousness of her audience, which she knows she must nourish assiduously.

As well as that, she protects her brand by following some simple rules: she's never photographed drunk, or even with a drink in her hand. She doesn't go to launches unless she's getting paid. "I don't want my picture at the back of a magazine at the opening of an envelope." She never does anything too provocative. "I'd like people to have respect for me, and I've too much respect for my parents and PJ and myself."

She was already well established in her new life in Dublin when her parents separated eight years ago. She says it was the hardest thing that she has ever had to deal with. She's never talked about this publicly before and, in doing so, chooses her words carefully, anxious not to say anything that might hurt them. "If your parents break up when you are an adult, it's harder. You realise how human they are, that they can be just as lost as any other person," she says.

"I think my parents' break-up affected me a lot. Just the fact that there is nothing you can do about it really, except be there for them. You see somebody in a rawer state when they are hurting. I saw some of the strength I've got in my mother when it happened. I think often women cope a lot better."

She is close to both her parents and mentions particularly that, as the first-born girl, she's always been her father's pet. She talks to him on the phone for an hour every day. You get the impression, though, that this is not because she's a needy daddy's girl, but rather is an indication of how conscientiously she bears her responsibility towards her family since its nucleus collapsed.

Perhaps as a refuge from the upheaval back home, Andrea threw herself into carving a path in Dublin's fashion and media circles. She embarked on a romance with the then high-flying Jim Corr. She had just come out of a long-standing affair with an unknown DJ when they met, but in becoming Jim's girlfriend, she was firmly established as half of one of the city's celebrity power couples.

It was to be a long-term but not life-time liaison. When, after three-and-a-half years, they eventually broke up, she moved on, this time stepping out on the arm of the heir to one of Ireland's most powerful business dynasties, PJ Mansfield, son of property tycoon, Jim Mansfield.

Their marriage, which took place this time last year in Saggart, Dublin, was the society wedding of the year. The pictures were splashed across the pages of VIP and with every name worth dropping in deferential, courtly attendance, it might as well have been a coronation.

On the surface, they seem an unlikely couple; the beauty queen socialite and the rather more retiring Mansfield. The couple are rarely pictured out together and they keep their private lives away from the glare of the media that Roche is so adept at courting in her professional life.

Andrea, in her pragmatic way, considers that her marriage to Mansfield was dictated by the circumstances of what was already a rather unusual lifestyle.

"I didn't really get asked out a whole lot. Guys would think 'Oh, she'd have no interest in me'. The only guys that might have the confidence to chat to you would be people who were relatively successful."

Initially, it was PJ's nonchalance that she liked. "He didn't make much of an effort with me. I found that a bit attractive because he wasn't into the scene. He didn't care about whether I was a model or worked in a shop and he was just very normal. I'm from a small town and I can get a little bit intimidated at times by really, really sophisticated people. With time, you do realise it's really just smoke and screens. There's not a whole lot behind it."

She tackles, elegantly, tacitly, the fact that her husband, who looks sweet and pleasant, is no Colin Farrell. "A lot of the half good-looking guys I know would be womanisers around the place," she says. "You meet a lot of chancers over the years. You see a lot of people having affairs and any of the really good-looking fellas playing the field. I'm not saying I settled for . . . "

There is a pause, as she considers how to make this rather delicate point, before concluding rather vaguely, "But you'd just be glad for someone just normal." As with her career, in affairs of the heart, it seems she's happier to stick with safe, known quantities, rather than to indulge in adventurism for its own sake. I suspect she is someone who always likes to feel on top of things, always in control.

"Trust is a major thing for me," she offers as an insight into the judgement she exercised in choosing PJ for a husband. "I have a good few male friends and I know what they get up to when they go on holidays. I have so much freedom with PJ. I could say to him, 'I'm going on holidays for two weeks, you don't mind, do you?' and he'd let me. Not that I do that very often, but it's great to be myself. He's not ringing me all the time. If I'm away with friends, he's not ringing me to see where I am or who I'm talking to."

But how do they maintain a chemistry having been together so long and, especially, now that they are married?

"Both of us make an effort with our appearances," she says. "We still like to have romantic meals out and stuff. We have time to ourselves, so we are not getting too complacent."

I ask her what kind of things they fight about and she considers for a moment before saying, " He bottles up. I can't imagine how a person can't get angry at things."

Of course, this is spoken by a woman

who is well known for unleashing her furious temper -- once to spectacular effect when she was stopped for speeding (an indiscretion that earned her a further fine for verbally abusing a garda).

"I'm not a bit psycho and I'm not a moody person. But if someone does something wrong to me, then I'm not afraid to say it."

PJ, on the other hand, is much more laid- back. Andrea shrugs off the suggestion that people might have them pegged as having a stereotypically transactional relationship, where material wealth is staked in exchange for the ownership of physical beauty.

"I think people think that he's a serious, big flasho Johnny big notes -- but he's not," she says. "He works six days a week, and it's his father who's very wealthy. We have a great life and he's on a good wage, but he's not what people think."

And for those, like me, who wonder about the domestic details of their life, she kindly provides the odd bit of info that he's a bit of a DIY wizard. Could "practically build a house from scratch", apparently. Which comes as a bit of a surprise, because he doesn't look like the type you could imagine sporting a tool belt.

Andrea Roche's professional career thus far has shown her to be a consummate opportunist, but you could never call her lazy.

"I'd hate to sit at home and have to put my hand out at the end of the week. I'd hate to depend on someone else materially," she says. And since her ferocious drive so clearly stems from a pressing desire to constantly assert her independence, no one could really argue with that.

Source: Independent