Evelyn Doyle's father made Irish legal history when his wife abandoned the family and his children were taken into care.

Now Bond star Pierce Brosnan is bringing her story to the big screen, she tells Steve Pratt.

WHEN the voice on the other end of the telephone announced himself as Pierce Brosnan, Evelyn Doyle thought it was a friend winding her up. "I just wanted to watch Star Trek, and said, 'go away'," she recalls.

Eventually, the caller with the Irish lilt in his voice convinced her that he really was the actor and current holder of the licence to play James Bond on the big screen. Then he told Evelyn he wanted to play her father in a film based on her book.

This true story tells how Desmond Doyle took on the power of the Government, the church and the courts in 1950s Ireland in a bid to reunite his family. After his wife abandoned him, his children were taken away and put in orphanages. The law forbade him to look after them himself as a single father. Evelyn herself was called to give evidence in the case, which made Irish legal history.

After Brosnan's phone call, she flew over to Ireland to meet him. Now, 18 months later, the film Evelyn is being released in cinemas with the Bond actor as her father and Sophie Vavasseur, a ten-year-old from Dublin, playing young Evelyn herself.

She first wrote a synopsis of the story 15 years ago after her father's death. "My intention was that my father's story should be out there because, just before he died, he said he hadn't done anything with his life. I thought it would be a nice memorial to him," she explains.

She took the idea to the BBC as she thought it would make a good play or TV film. Eventually writer Paul Pender took over the project. Every couple of years Evelyn would get a call telling her someone was interested. Gabriel Byrne and Liam Neeson were among the names mentioned. It wasn't until Brosnan and his production company, Irish Dream Time, took up the project that the film got the green light.

At that point Evelyn decided it was the right time to write her book about her father's legal battles to keep his children. The novel was published last year. "I wasn't involved in the film script at all," she says.

"The only input was that Pierce phoned me a few times to ask my advice about certain traits of my father. The script is different to my book because obviously it's a very long story and takes place over two years. They've had to condense and fictionalise some of it, such as reducing my family from five brothers to two."

Both book and film have been emotional experiences for her. Her first attempts to watch Brosnan and Vavasseur on screen reduced her to tears. "I had to watch the film in private because of the crying. I had to leave the cinema in Toronto because it was very hard for me to watch," she says.

"I went over the second or third week of filming and met Sophie. It was like looking at a clone of me. When I saw her, I thought they'd picked the right one. She was a feisty little thing, and cheeky as well. It was very surreal - they had about 150 little girls running around in the uniforms of the day."

The original synopsis too was written in "a very emotional state" at a time she was divorced with a small son and feeling very low. "I told my story to a Dictaphone. Some parts I thought I'd moved on from, but writing it I had to go back down there again. Some was very difficult. It took me four-and-a-half hours to write the last paragraph of the book. I just sat and cried," she says.

Naturally enough, she was worried about her father being portrayed on screen, but is pleased with Brosnan's portrayal. "I was concerned. I didn't want him as an Irish caricature. My father was very explosive, a volatile man. Pierce took all that on board. He seems to have got everything about my father, including the rage behind the eyes," she says.

"When I saw Sophie as me with my mother at home, the actress playing my mother was so like her, and seeing the reaction between the two made it difficult to watch. Some of the incidents, especially when I was writing my book, felt like yesterday because they're imprinted on my mind. When you've suffered a trauma, it never goes away. You don't realise how deeply it's affected you until afterwards."

Despite her young age, Evelyn knew that "something big" was going on in the family and that "daddy was fighting the Government" but the implications weren't immediately apparent. "When I heard him talking with his legal team, I thought it was about a game, a football game or something," she recalls.

"I went to a convent school where girls who lived at home brought in press cuttings. I was very confident my daddy was going to take them on and win. I was aware it was a big thing, especially when I was to go in front of the justices in chambers and had to make them believe I wanted to go home to live with my daddy."

Evelyn met her mother again when she was 21 and says things didn't work out between them. "Too much had happened and I blamed her. I was an angry young woman. I was annoyed she had another family. I had imagined she was waiting for me somewhere. You have these romantic ideas in your head," she says.

Together with her father and brothers, Evelyn moved to England shortly after their victory in the courts. She was brought up in Manchester and now lives in Scotland with her partner. "Six months after it was all over my father sent me for his evening paper. I ran over to the shop and there was my picture on the front page," she remembers.

"They weren't going to leave us alone. The press wanted to know what happened to us, naturally enough as they'd backed us to the hilt. My father was a very private man and it hurt him to be in the public eye so much. He thought it had all gone away. Then I took the paper home and we were in England within months."

Evelyn (PG) opens in cinemas on March 21. Evelyn Doyle's book, Evelyn, is published by Orion.