As Rea’s acting career continued to flourish, he still balked at questions about Price or her past. But he did not shy away, in his work, from the subject of the Troubles. In 1992, Rea achieved a new level of international renown when he starred in the film The Crying Game, directed by a close collaborator of his, Neil Jordan. Rea’s character in the film is an IRA gunman, Fergus, who is given the task of guarding a doomed prisoner—a British soldier, played by Forest Whitaker. Over several days, the guard and his captive develop a relationship, to the point that, when the time comes for Fergus to pull the trigger, he finds himself unable to do so. The scenario eerily evoked the dirty work that Dolours Price had done for the Unknowns two decades earlier: crying behind the wheel as she chaperoned he friend Joe Lynskey to his death; taking Kevin McKee to County Monaghan, where his captors grew so fond of him that they refused to shoot him and another team of gunmen had to be summoned from Belfast to do it.
One of the characters in the film, played by Miranda Richardson, is a redheaded IRA woman. “I spent a few days in Belfast soaking up the atmosphere,” Richardson said, years later, when she was asked about the part. “Stephen introduced me to his wife, Dolours Price, who had been a member of the Provisional IRA and a hunger striker, and who was a real heroine there. We went out to a pub, which was an extraordinary experience. She was treated like a film star.”
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