Neil Jordan Filmmaker and novelist, 67, married.
I was born in County Sligo, Ireland. My father, Michael, was a teacher, and when I was four he got a job at a small school. We moved to Clontarf, on the north side of Dublin. It was lovely, as we were two steps from the sea.
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My mother, Angela, was a painter. She made money for the household by painting idealistic Irish oil landscapes that sold to tourists. In them, there was always a little road heading towards a mountain, a little cottage.
She wanted all her five kids to be painters, and would put brushes in our hands to see if we were any good. Eithne, my older sister, was the only one of us who was. She's now a respected expressionist painter who has exhibited internationally.
My mother was deeply uneducated as she left school at 16. She then went to the National College of Art in Dublin for seven years. At that time, it was regarded as a prelude to finding a husband, which she found deeply offensive, as she was serious about her studies. She met my father, married, and then became a housewife, as women in the 1950s did. Her life became conventional, but she remained a free spirit.
Every boy's mother is the most beautiful person in the world. Or they should be. Mine was the biggest influence in my life. I was living with a woman who all she did, was paint.
She lived the life of an artist and made me see it was possible to make a living by writing and making movies – in conservative Ireland in the '50s, '60s and '70s, nobody else would have allowed me to see that.
I asked my mother if I could be a priest, but she forbade it. She was a wise woman in that regard. We weren't a particularly religious family but I was an altar boy up until eight. Leaflets were handed out at my primary school to persuade kids to join religious orders.
Most of my friends were boys until the age of 11. But I hated football and so I befriended girls after that. They didn't form gangs, demand you throw the ball back or punch you in the face. Their company was preferable.
From the age of 13 onwards, I got into really intense relationships with girls. One would begin, another would end – I always had a companion.
I met my first wife, Vivienne Shields, at University College Dublin. I was studying Irish history and English literature and she was studying law. We married when I was 24. I never thought I'd have children, but when they turned up it was an enormous amount of fun.
Vivienne worked as a teacher. I couldn't get a job, so I wrote and was kind of a house husband, a lazy bum, basically. But I had our first daughter, Sarah, to look after, and I had a really great time. Four years later we had Anna. Vivienne and I separated when I was 32, but ours was quite a lovely relationship.
Brenda Rawn came to work as my assistant. She was Canadian, brilliant and very beautiful. I was involved in a tempestuous relationship, but thought if I could hang around with this lovely woman, life might turn out well. That turned out to be the case, as we married in 2004 and have two sons, Daniel and Dashiel. I also have a son Ben, from a relationship in between.
I have written more about women in books than I have in films. But the film Mona Lisa [1986] was specifically about a man who genuinely didn't understand women. Bob Hoskins' character, George, misreads everything about black prostitute Simone, from her sexuality to her goal in life.
Similarly, The Crying Game [1992] was about Fergus, an Irish Republican Army volunteer who sees himself as a saviour of hairdresser Dil. But he, too, deeply misunderstands her.
Julia Roberts really wanted to be in Michael Collins, my 1996 biopic about the Irish revolutionary. She knew the history of the character and convinced me she could do it. She also had this deep engagement with Ireland.
I didn't realise, but when she was the most famous person in the world, she used to come to the west of Ireland to chill out in secret. Julia is a wonderful comedian. The fact she is a huge star obscures how good an actress she is.
In my sixth novel, The Drowned Detective, the narrator muses: "A marriage is never truly a marriage until it has dealt with an infidelity." I think that's probably true. It's easy to fall in love and say, "I'll be with you forever, and never look at somebody else." But one person never really knows another unless they've realised that they could, in some strange way, be dispensable
It's one thing to be in the throes of romantic passion, another, knowing a person in all their contradictions. Everybody has strange desires they don't even understand themselves. And if you don't accept that about another person, you're probably not made for marriage.
Neil Jordan's latest novel Carnivalesque (Bloomsbury) is out now.