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Even Ed Burns has encountered the curse of the Irish

A movie star at 25, the husband of a supermodel, the actor- writer-director is still (happily) chasing success

Who suffers more than the Irish?

The potato famine, the British occupation, discrimination in the New World, the sorry decline of the Boston Celtics. And that’s without mentioning Mickey Rourke’s career or Bono’s choice of eyewear. Even the estimable Irish storytelling tradition has been down on its luck a bit, traversing from Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw in the 19th century to the Gaelic bards of today, Bill O’Reilly and Regis Philbin. It’s enough to drive a man to drink.

Eddie Burns suffers too…in his way. True, the 39-year-old actor-writer-director has a full head of hair, a wife who is one of the world’s great beauties, homes in Manhattan and the Hamptons, and movie roles alongside Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman. And yes, he has two beautiful young children, a supportive extended family, and as an auteur, a series of films that playfully investigate the lives of Hibernia’s suburban heirs. But in his efforts to carry on the storytelling tradition, even Burns has encountered the curse of the Irish.

In April, for instance, he threw a premiere party in New York City for his eighth film, Purple Violets, which this month will be the first feature film to be released and distributed exclusively by iTunes. But on that spring night, limo gridlock, blinding flashbulbs, and paparazzi were not a problem; Spider-Man 3 premiered uptown the same evening, and well, there you have it. “The eight films I’ve made have grossed a combined total of three cents,” Burns joked to one of the few reporters haunting the red carpet.

That’s a slight exaggeration: Burns’s first film, the indie classic The Brothers McMullen, was made for $27,000, largely raised from his family and friends. It made Burns a genuine movie star and grossed $10 million. “My dad still gets residual checks,” he says proudly.

We’re talking over a late-night dinner at a French restaurant near his Tribeca apartment. A $150 ­bottle of 2003 Quintessa sits before us as Burns, a scholar of Irish-American history and a former high school basketball player with strong shoulders and solid arms, begins to untangle the tale of those intervening years. He is a good storyteller in person as well—charming, modest, “the easiest guy in the world to hang out with,” says Debra Messing, who costars with him in Purple Violets.

He has not, however, turned out to be Woody O’Allen nor Spike McLee, as seemed likely in 1995, when he wrote, directed, and starred in The Brothers McMullen, the story of three Catholic-school graduates in working-class Long Island who are coping with guilt, sin, and lust in the unknowable form of women. A novice working off moxie and a love of low-budget cinema, Burns took top honors at the Sundance Film Festival. “Brash and photogenic, charmingly cavalier, Mr. Burns could have had a movie career without bothering to write or direct,” wrote a smitten Janet Maslin in The New York Times, while calling McMullen “enormously likable.”