Actress, author and producer Roma Downey accepted the Sarasota Film Festival Lifetime Achievement Award at the Sarasota Opera House Sunday afternoon, before a presentation of her latest film as a producer, the fact-based On a Wing and a Prayer. (Other festival awards, including a special mention for the Sarasota-produced Bridge to the Other Side, were also announced at the event; for complete details go to sarasotafilmfestival.com).

But the day prior to the awards ceremony, Downey also sat down for an intimate chat and interview at the Bijou Garden Café downtown, where she spoke about the movie, her career, and her latest book, Be an Angel, which she said she wrote while on lockdown during the pandemic.

Downey told her audience she “had a nudge in my heart to write the book” while engaging with social media during the lockdown. “I was struck by how mean” people were being to each other, she said. “So I decided to write a book  about kindness and being kind to each other.”

Fans of Downey will undoubtedly connect her most immediately with the television show Touched by an Angel, which ran for nine seasons, and Downey said when she first read the script for the show, “I loved that it had two female characters who were kind to each other,” while admitting that though she was moved by the story, “I was hanging out for a job,” after uprooting herself from her home in Northern Ireland to come to the United States.

Downey’s childhood was affected by the “troubles” in Northern Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s, and she recalled growing up surrounded by sandbags, tanks, and violence and its aftermath. Raised Catholic, she said that she always had a religious faith, which she called upon to help her when her mother died when Downey was just 10 years old. “I don’t know how I would have endured that loss if it weren’t for faith and the promise of heaven,” she said. “And my faith has deepened over the years.”

That’s certainly the motive steering many of Downey’s film or TV projects, from the series The Bible to a remake of Ben-Hur, produced by her company LightWorkers, the faith and family division of MGM/Amazon. But, starting out in her career, Downey also played some more secular roles, including unexpected ones like “being the Queen of the Amazons” in the 1994 TV movie Hercules and the Amazon Women, shot in New Zealand. Downey’s only 5’ 4,’’ so playing an Amazon was something of a stretch, and she recalls wearing some ridiculous leather armor for the role. “The lesson of that story is, ‘Don’t take a job just because you get to go to New Zealand.”

Downey also shared anecdotes from starring as Jackie Kennedy in A Woman Named Jackie, where a man dubbed “the brogue basher” helped her to rein in her Irish accent, and another man—“the smallest man in the world”—had to crouch on the floor of a car to help her “drive,” since she didn’t know how to at the time. Another moviemaking memory: avoiding snakes and scorpions while filming the crucifixion scene of The Bible in Morocco. “We had a man whose job was to catch them, and that day he had 40 snakes in his bag,” she said.

Moved to create stories “that uplift and inspire,” Downey frequently speaks of her gratitude to America and the opportunities it has provided her. When she was first working in New York City, she said, “I was checking coats in a very fancy restaurant called Memphis. When I didn’t have a customer, I read or tried on mink coats [from the checkroom]. One of the first celebrities I ever met there was [TV talk show host] Regis Philbin [who told her he was Irish, too]. Now, most of the time customers would give me 50 cents or something like that, but he left me $20. Four or five years later, when I was starring on Touched by an Angel, I was invited to be on his show. Only in America.”

During a brief audience Q&A, Downey spoke fondly of her Angel costar, Della Reese, who was like a mother to her, she said. “And during the years the show was on, Della’s only daughter died. Della took me in her arms and said, ‘I knew God brought you into my life because you need a mother. I just didn’t know I was going to need a baby girl. I am your mama.'”

And she told one questioner that keeping her faith in Hollywood was never hard for her, “but I’m sure to some the faith element wasn’t cool, and there were parties I was excluded from.” Keeping her spirit calm, throughout anything, comes because “I pray, I meditate, and I’ve learned to hit the pause button, to know there is a space between stimulus and response, and that is space for grace.”

Downey’s movie, starring Dennis Quaid, will stream on Amazon, starting Easter weekend.