Atreyee Poddar
Everyone’s been drooling over Cillian Murphy’s eyes since forever, but behind those ocean-blue eyes is a woman who could out-art him any day. Yvonne McGuinness isn’t just Mrs. Cillian Murphy, but she’s the quiet storm that keeps the Murphy myth grounded in something real. Yvonne isn’t the shadow behind Cillian Murphy, she’s the pulse.
She’s not just an artist; she’s the kind of artist who builds worlds. Yvonne doesn’t dabble, she creates. With a Master’s from the Royal College of Art, her work leaps from film to sculpture to site-specific installations that make you feel things you didn’t sign up for. She once turned a field into a sensory experience about memory and belonging.
She met Cillian before the fame hit and stayed through all the noise. Back in the late ’90s, Cillian was still that intense Irish theatre kid performing Disco Pigs. She joined the tour, sparks flew, and the rest is history. They married in 2004, had two kids, one in 2005 and another in 2005 and have somehow managed to stay scandal-free—an endangered species in celebrityland.
She chose roots over red carpets. When Cillian’s fame exploded, they didn’t go mansion-shopping in LA. Nope. They moved back to Ireland so their sons could grow up Irish, not “Peaky Blinders’ kids.” Yvonne’s the anchor and Cillian has said flat out that he couldn’t do it without her. She’s the calm while he broods for a living.
Together, they’re quietly building culture. Last year, the couple bought the century-old Phoenix Cinema in Dingle (open since 1919), the same one Cillian Murphy went to as a kid. They paraded no PR circus, no press tour. Yvonne and Cillian are just two artists making sure film still has a heartbeat in small-town Ireland. That’s power, not fame.