WHILE many people still view retirement as an opportunity to put the feet up and relax with a pipe and slippers, that old cliché could not be further from reality for a former Park Centre Dunnes Store manager who has thrown himself into an acting career and has starred in several films over the past year. Eugene 'Houdi' McCabe was a branch manager for Dunnes for 42 years, and worked on the Donegall Road when Dunnes first opened in the Park Centre in 1985, where he remained for the next ten years. He married his wife Carole while working in West Belfast and would later move to the store’s Crumlin Road branch. However, now that Houdi has retired he can pursue his dream of working in the arts and last month his latest film The Pale Man – which was written and directed by Andrew Dornan – premiered at the Foyle Film Festival in Derry. A native of Clones, Co Monaghan, the 63-year-old says he always wanted to be an actor, but work and a career got in the way and it was only on retirement last year that he was able to explore new possibilities. “My daughter bought me acting lessons for retirement for the Crescent Arts Centre and I got the bug then,” he said. “I’m a confident sort of guy anyway and I would have hosted the Dunnes conference in Dublin. After the lessons I joined a theatre group in Belfast called Bright Umbrella in East Belfast.” The Pale Man also stars West Belfast actor Anthony McKenna. It’s about an embittered old man who awakes in the middle of the night to find a strange pale intruder eerily sitting in his living room who threatens to kill the old man if he doesn’t answer his questions. “The conversation goes on for 23 minutes,” says Houdi. “But before that I had another role as a detective in Petyr which is a 52-minute film and that was made by a local fella called Olcan McSparron. That got into the Belfast Film Festival, and I have a supporting role in that. And then there is another film that has just been finished and hasn’t got to any festivals yet because it hasn’t been circulated yet. It's by a fella called Kieron Magee and most of it was shot in the Glenowen on the Glen Road. I play a barman called Lorcan McGann who has a very mysterious past. It's called The Lockdown Room and this is a feature. It’s an hour-and-a-half long."
