NAME: Jeremy Irons

PERSONAL:
Full name, Jeremy John Irons; born September 19, 1948, in Cowes, Isle of Wight, England; son of Paul Dugan (an accountant) and Barbara Anne (Sharpe) Irons; married actress Julie Hallam, 1971 (divorced, 1971); married actress Sinead Cusack, March, 1978; children: (second marriage) Samuel James, Maximilian Paul.

OCCUPATION: Actor

ADDRESSES:
Home: Oxfordshire, England. Office: c/o Anne Hutton (personal manager), Hutton Management, 200 Fulham Rd., London, England SW1O 9PN.

EDUCATION:
Graduated from the Sherborne School, Dorset, England, 1965. Graduated from the Bristol Old Vic Theater School c. 1968.

CAREER:
Stage, television, and film actor. Stage appearances include: in England, with the Bristol Old Vic Company (c.1968-1971), Hay Fever, What the Butler Saw, The Winter's Tale; on London's West End, Godspell (debut, 1971), Much Ado About Nothing (c. 1973), The Caretaker (1974), The Taming of the Shrew (1975), Wild Oats (1976), The Rear Column (1978); in Stratford-upon-Avon, with the Royal Shakespeare Company (c. 1984-87), Richard II, The Winter's Tale, The Rover; in the U.S., The Real Thing (Broadway debut, 1984). Television appearances include: in England, The Pallisers, Notorious Woman, Love for Lydia, The Voysey Inheritance, Langrishe Go Down (all c. 1971-1980), Brideshead Revisited (1981), All the World's a Stage (1982), The Captain's Doll (1982), Danny, the Champion of the World (c. 1986), The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1990); in the U.S., Brideshead Revisited (1982), Saturday Night Live (1991), and The Barbara Walters Special (1991). Film appearances include: Nijinsky (1980), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), Moonlighting (1982), Betrayal (1982), The Wild Duck (1983), Swann in Love (1984), The Mission (1986), Dead Ringers (1988), A Chorus of Disapproval (1989), Australia (1989), Reversal of Fortune (1990).

AWARDS:
Clarence Derwent Award for best stage actor, 1978, for The Rear Column; Tony Award for best actor, 1984, for The Real Thing; New York Film Critics Circle Award for best actor, 1988, for Dead Ringers; National Society of Film Critics Award, Golden Globe Award, and Academy Award, 1991, all for best actor, for Reversal of Fortune.

SIDELITES:
His darkly handsome features first graced American screens in 1981, when he roamed the English countryside as the doomed Victorian lover obsessed with the mysterious title character in The French Lieutenant's Woman. His brooding, aristocratic presence further caught the fancy of Anglophiles when he starred in PBS-TV's landmark presentation of Brideshead Revisited. His Tony Award-winning portrayal of yet another suffering lover in Broadway's The Real Thing clinched his reputation as the quintessential romantic leading man, prompting Glamour magazine to dub dashing Brit Jeremy Irons "the thinking woman's sex symbol." A decade later, however, the as-ever attractive English actor has cast aside his romantic hero image, and reached the top of his dramatic form by playing demented villains and contemptible cads. Deliciously warping his debonair British charm, he has taken a successful descent into decadence, first earning rave notices as the deranged and sadistic twin gynecologists in Dead Ringers, then winning the 1991 Academy Award for his icy portrayal of Claus von Bulow, the sinister socialite convicted of trying to murder his wife, in Reversal of Fortune.

Always known as an intense performer in roles marked by their difficulty and substance, Irons has---over the course of his career---sharpened his edge by indulging his daring streak and stepping into controversial territory. In Dead Ringers he accepted the technically demanding task of playing the dual roles of identical twin gynecologists who are both psychopathic and repellent. It was a project no other actor would attempt; Robert De Niro and William Hurt were among the notables who turned it down. The extremely unsympathetic role of Claus von Bulow, whom Newsweek termed an "aristocreep," required Irons to ravage his leading man looks by balding and graying his full head of hair and adding three layers of middle-age paunch to his trim athletic frame. "I've always been very careful," Irons said, explaining his process of choosing roles to Mademoiselle, "but at the same time I always try to put my foot somewhere you're not expecting. I like to alter people's perceptions of me. Because I'm an actor."

For a man so dedicated to the craft of acting in public, Irons had quite an austere upbringing---certainly not the kind usually attributed to a budding thespian. The son of an accountant, Irons was born in the yachting resort town of Cowes on the Isle of Wight, an island off the southern coast of England. When he was just a boy of seven, he was shipped off to the first of a series of strict English boarding schools, eventually graduating from the rigid Sherborne School in Dorset when he was 17.

Irons explained that the seemingly cruel practice of sending so young a child away to school was simply traditional for upper-middle-class English lads of his generation. There he received training more appropriate for a future banker---learning to be a materialistic, emotionally repressed, stiff-upper-lipped English gentleman. It did help him years later, however, when he was cast as the snooty and distant Charles Ryder of Brideshead Revisited. "When I read Brideshead, I understood Ryder completely," he told the New York Times. "He was a man who kept his emotions deeply hidden and didn't give very much, who certainly didn't give any of his real self....I really think Ryder is the man I was educated to be. He is everything an actor isn't or shouldn't be."

Actually, acting was not Irons's first, or even second, career choice. His love of animals and country life fueled his desire to become a veterinarian, but his poor academic performance in the physical sciences forced him to consider other options. After his graduation from the Sherborne School in 1965, he exchanged his upper-middle-class surroundings for a tough neighborhood in South London, where he became a social worker. Running a club for impoverished inner city youths "opened my eyes to the real world after a very privileged education, a life in a delightful Dorset town, a structured society," Irons told New York. "Suddenly I was thrown into this hoodlum land and had to make an evening at a youth club work when there were gangs coming in and trying to break the place up. There were guys selling drugs; there were girls on the game." After spending a frustrating six months getting beaten up one too many times by youth gangs, Irons thought he should seek a more pleasant way to interact with people.

It was when he started to supplement his social worker's salary by moonlighting as a busker---British slang for "street entertainer"---that he found his true calling. Singing and playing his guitar for the lines of movie- and theatergoers on the sidewalks of London's Leicester Square uncovered a latent exhibitionistic streak in Irons, and he was quickly seduced by the promise of a romantic life in the theater. Following his new resolve, he answered a newspaper ad and landed a position as an assistant stage manager with a theater repertory company in Canterbury. Within a year he gained acceptance into the Bristol Old Vic Theater School, where he underwent two years of rigorous classical training. He performed so well that he was one of only five students asked to join the Old Vic's touring repertory company, a prestigious troupe whose alumni include Peter O'Toole, Albert Finney, and later, Daniel Day-Lewis.

For three years Irons honed his craft with the Old Vic, progressing from bit butler parts to leading roles in plays ranging from Shakespeare to Noel Coward. In 1971, at age 23, however, he decided to pack his bags and head for the bright lights of London's West End. During that time Irons began and ended a very brief marriage to Julie Hallam, an actress with the Bristol Old Vic, and, while waiting for his commercial big break, he survived by doing odd jobs as a bricklayer, house cleaner, and gardener.

The break arrived later in 1971 in a rather unexpected form: the man who confessed to New York that "I sing like an actor and dance like a duck" was cast as John the Baptist in the rock musical Godspell. A successful long run in Godspell brought Irons a plentiful supply of London stage and television work from then on. He distinguished himself on stage in classical roles with both the New and Royal Shakespeare Companies, and continued to display his versatility in contemporary works like Harold Pinter's The Caretaker and Simon Gray's The Rear Column. In the latter play, under Harold Pinter's direction---the playwright-director-actor who, Irons told Film Comment, "has done more to help my career than anyone else"---Irons gave a riveting performance that earned him London's Clarence Derwent Award for best stage actor of 1978. His work in such BBC television series as Notorious Woman, Love for Lydia, and The Pallisers made him a familiar figure across England.

Irons's career reached a major turning point in 1981. That was when two big-budget, long-awaited projects were unveiled in both England and America, making the actor an instant celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic. One was the eleven-part television adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's lush novel Brideshead Revisited; the other was the much-anticipated film version of John Fowles's 1969 best-selling Victorian romance, The French Lieutenant's Woman.

Brideshead Revisited chronicled the decline of a fabulously wealthy British family during the golden years between the two World Wars. The series was a historic television event; it was both the most expensive British television production and the all-time highest-rated series on America's PBS-TV to that date. More than holding his own among dramatic titans Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, and Claire Bloom, Irons portrayed the hero-narrator Charles Ryder, a gentleman-painter bedazzled by and drawn into the decadent world of the aristocratic Marchmain family. Newsweek, which pronounced Brideshead "the most engrossing event of [the] television season," hailed Irons as "brilliant in the central role as a melancholy, obsessive snob."

The second half of the double bill introducing Irons to American audiences was the period romance The French Lieutenant's Woman, which Newsweek's David Ansen termed "one of the most civilized and provocative movies of the year." In his first major film, Irons---who was recommended for the leading role by the movie's screenwriter, his friend and mentor Harold Pinter---played a proper Victorian gentleman who gives up his fiancee, career, and respectable position in society for a tainted woman, played by Meryl Streep, who seduces and ultimately abandons him. His ardent performance reminded many critics of the young Laurence Olivier of Wuthering Heights, and the New York Times review of the film singled out Irons as "one of the few actors today who could be so completely convincing as the Victorian lover who thinks he's ahead of his time, being a follower of Darwin and a socially enlightened member of his privileged class, but who finds, ultimately, that he still has a long way to go."

After his initial film success, Irons turned down several lucrative offers which he considered "rubbish." "If you go for money and lose your integrity, you're lost," he told Newsweek. He chose instead a succession of high-minded movie projects that were confined to art-houses and little seen in the U.S.: the political Moonlighting saw him as a Polish laborer; Harold Pinter's cerebral Betrayal cast him in a deceitful love triangle; The Wild Duck, an adaptation of the Ibsen play, teamed him with Liv Ullmann; and he played another aristocrat obsessed with a scandalous woman in Marcel Proust's Swann in Love.

It was Irons's return to the stage that catapulted him back into the spotlight. His American stage debut---on Broadway no less---netted him the 1984 Tony Award for best actor. Irons's starring vehicle, Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, which the New York Times called "the most bracing play that anyone has written about love and marriage in years," also won the Tony for best play and yielded best actress honors for Irons's co-star, Glenn Close. In Stoppard's highly articulate script, Irons has a passionate affair with his best friend's wife, marries her, then is in turn cheated on by his new spouse.

"It's a wonderful role, because it allows one to play a great range, from flippant comedy to deeply felt pain," Irons told the Times. The actor was more than equal to its demands. Critics hailed him as a master of nuance and emotional depth, and Newsweek predicted that his "strong and stylish performance will make him a big star." "The role of Henry, a brilliant, arrogant playwright of dazzling wit and verbal facility, has given Mr. Irons a tour-de-force part to mark a major milestone in his career," the New York Times wrote. The Real Thing, which became the biggest box-office hit of the 1984 Broadway season, elevated Irons to matinee idol status; countless magazines touted him as the new sex symbol, swooning over his exquisitely chiseled cheekbones, melancholy soft brown eyes, and seductive British accent, or as Vogue put it, his "luxuriant Shakespearean rumble."

Instead of capitalizing on his new-found Broadway stardom with more commercial ventures, Irons departed for England after The Real Thing's run, returning to his classical roots for a two-year stint with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He subsequently filmed a few more scholarly projects for British television, as well as another classy, little-seen movie called The Mission, which costarred Robert De Niro and saw Irons as a Jesuit priest in the jungles of Brazil. These highbrow pursuits made his next move all the more shocking.

When he first read the bizarre plot to the psychological thriller Dead Ringers, Irons was "appalled," and he "couldn't find one woman who liked the script. Not one," he told Mademoiselle. "My wife read it and felt squeamish." Eventually the actor succumbed to the dramatic challenge of playing opposite himself in the lurid tale inspired by the real-life case of identical twin brothers Drs. Stewart and Cyril Marcus, two respected gynecologists whose partially nude and decomposed bodies were found among a clutter of garbage and barbituates in their posh New York City apartment in 1975. As interpreted by avant-garde director-writer David Cronenberg---whose past films include the sci-fi horror of Videodrome and The Fly---the brothers came to the gynecological profession with an underlying fear and hatred of females, and enjoyed humiliating their patients with psychological and physical abuse as the women lay helplessly suspended in stirrups on the examining table. The twins are both played by Irons; one is a suave swine, the other a paranoid introvert. They are pathologically dependent on one another, living together and enjoying the macabre game of substituting for each other in the examining room and in the bedroom, without their patients' or lovers' knowledge. In a frighteningly gripping performance, Irons takes the viewer on a harrowing journey that is at once repulsive, yet perversely fascinating, right up to the twins' demise by drug addiction, insanity, and a grisly suicide-murder pact.

"Irons is spectacular in his dual role, both haunted and haunting," declared People, while the New York Times pronounced his performance "seamless...a schizophrenic marvel." Citing his technically brilliant creation of two subtly distinct but eerily similar characters, coupled with the uncanny ease with which he played intensely emotional scenes with himself, many critics thought Irons's virtuosity merited an Academy Award. The horrific subject matter of the non-mainstream film, however, was thought to have alienated many conservative voters. Nevertheless, his superb work in Dead Ringers prompted the New York Film Critics Circle to name Irons best actor of 1988.

It was Irons's portrayal of another real-life unsavory character that earned him the prestigious Oscar. The 1990 film Reversal of Fortune, which chronicled the two most sensationalized criminal trials of the 1980s, starred Irons as Claus von Bulow, the arrogant, mistress-juggling socialite who was convicted, but later acquitted, of twice attempting to murder his $75 million-rich heiress wife with lethal injections of insulin. The movie teamed Irons with his good friend and Real Thing co-star, Glenn Close, who played the ill-fated wife, Sunny---the real Sunny von Bulow has remained in a coma since 1980.

Alan Dershowitz, the attorney who got von Bulow acquitted and wrote the book on which the film is based, was amazed at Irons's ability to transform himself into his infamous client. "Jeremy Irons," Dershowitz remarked to Gentleman's Quarterly, "is a better Claus von Bulow than Claus von Bulow." In preparing for his role, Irons could have arranged to meet the real von Bulow, but decided against it. "When you're playing a character, you are that character. And it isn't very helpful to meet someone who says they are also that character. It stultifies the imagination," Irons explained to Interview. "I watched Claus on video. I met a lot of people who knew him well, some not so well. I researched him very much as a fictional character so that I would be able to play him with freedom, without any feeling of trying to impersonate him."

The actor's method served him well: His finely-crafted characterization, complete with subtle body language and an upper-crusty accent dripping with sarcastic charm, won the superlative praise of critics. "Alternately sincere and sinister, droll and decadent, Irons makes an ambiguous figure vividly real and disturbing. It's a tricky, triumphant portrayal," declared Rolling Stone. The New York Times effused that "Claus von Bulow [is] played by Jeremy Irons within an inch of his professional life. It's a fine, devastating performance, affected, mannered, edgy, though seemingly ever in complete control. Mr. Irons comes very close to being too good to be true."

The man who so effortlessly embraces evil and menaces women on camera is quite the loving gentleman offscreen. Declaring himself a true family man with old-fashioned values, Irons is devoted to his wife of thirteen years, Irish actress Sinead Cusack---whom he met while performing in Godspell---and dotes on his two sons, Sam and Max. Reveling in the simple pleasures of country life, he resides in a 200-year-old Georgian farmhouse nestled on the banks of the Thames River in Oxfordshire, England, where he unwinds by boating, horseback riding, and romping with his dogs.

Often found dressed like the traditional English squire in an ascot, tweeds, and knee-high riding boots, Irons's views, particularly those on women, are decidedly unstuffy and enlightened. Declaring a general preference for female companionship, Irons expressed these thoughts to Film Comment: "Clearly, women are often badly done by, unfairly, but in so many ways that they are trying to overcome, they are superior beings. They're patient. They have less arrogance, less ego, more stamina and self-control, generally speaking. And nearly everyone admits that women are more interesting, and that's what really counts, not power." Irons's wife, an acclaimed stage actress best known for her work with the Royal Shakespeare Company, is often gone for long periods of time performing on tour. Proud of his talented wife, Irons accepts the sacrifice: "I want her to be fulfilled," he told People. "I think I would be bored by any woman fulfilled by doing dishes." Irons's cool and distant screen persona is further dispelled by the warmth he exhibits toward friends. Once when Glenn Close was mugged, Irons pursued the thief and pinned him to the wall until police arrived. "If I were in trouble," theater producer Emanuel Azenberg told Gentleman's Quarterly, "I wouldn't be ashamed to call him, and he would show up. I'm lying under a truck, he'll fly in from England and lift it off me." Azenberg further recounted Irons's charitable work for an AIDS benefit, when the actor single-handedly raised over $100,000: "A lot of people give money. That's easy. He hustled, worked the phones. That's classy. And it wasn't for publicity. The cameras weren't rolling." Perhaps Jeremy Irons is best summed up by a remark he once made to Vogue: "As an actor, I am ballsy and slightly evil. But as a man, I am charm personified---and very soft."

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