Glen Hansard, From Dublin Street Corners to Broadway

Glen Hansard, the Irish singer who won an Academy Award for the song "Falling Slowly," says he resisted the idea of turning his sleeper-hit film "Once" into a Broadway musical — the show that went on to win eight Tony Awards last year.

"For me, Broadway meant sort of hamming it up," Hansard told CBS News correspondent Anthony Mason. "Of course, you're tempted by the idea of people saying, whispering in your ear, going, 'Do you know if this does well, like, you're gonna be seriously rich?' And going like, 'That was never why we did this.'"

He eventually relented, and said he was won over by the result: "They did treat it with grace. They did treat it with respect. They did get the right people."

The 2007 film, made for about $100,000 in three weeks, cast Hansard as a Dublin busker — close to his own life. He has played on the street since he was 13, when he left school with the blessing of his grade school principal, Frankie Byrne, whom he still meets for a pint in Dublin.

"Yeah, he got permission," Byrne said. "One of my proudest moments in my dereliction of duty."

Hansard formed the band The Frames at 18. During the filming of "Once," he fell in love with his co-star Marketa Irglova, 18 years his junior and his co-writer on "Falling Slowly." They formed The Swell Season and kept touring after their relationship ended.

"If you said to me, you could have all this success or you could just have a great relationship with Mar, I'd have took the relationship," he said.

His first solo album, "Rhythm and Repose," draws on a difficult childhood; he told CBS News he grew up with an alcoholic father, and that the family spent long stretches away from him. He said the song "Bird of Sorrow" is about his mother.

Hansard took his mother to the Academy Awards and gave her the Oscar, which she keeps at her bedside. In recent years he has returned to Dublin at Christmas to busk for charity alongside artists including Sinead O'Connor and Bono.