Irons chosen as 'Millennium voice'
by Adam Helliker, Mandrake Editor, Sunday Telegraph (London)
Sunday, December 13, 1998
JEREMY IRONS, the Oscar-winning actor, has been chosen by Peter Mandelson to be the Voice of the Millennium.
This week it will be announced that Irons, 50, is the man whose voice will be heard over the first television advertisement for the Millennium celebrations and the Dome.
The pounds 250,000 advertisement, made by the M & C Saatchi agency, will be screened on Christmas Day, either before or after the Queen's Speech.
It will be the first in a pounds 30 million campaign commissioned by the Millennium Experience, the company responsible for co-ordinating the public celebrations of the year 2000.
Details of the advertisement are being kept under wraps until the media launch on Wednesday, but a Dome insider told The Sunday Telegraph yesterday: "The aim of the advert is to make people feel good about the Millennium.
"Jeremy will ask viewers to imagine that the last 1,000 years took place in just one day; then he will ask them to imagine what they can do tomorrow.
"It's a very powerful message - his voice makes you tingle with excitement."
Although Irons is said to have been enthusiastic when approached about the project by Saatchis, "he is anxious not to be known as the 'Voice of the Millennium' ", says a friend.
"He does not want to have an image which might interfere with other projects."
Irons courted controversy earlier this year as the star of a sexually explicit Hollywood screen version of Lolita, the Nabokov novel about a paedophile.
The film, which featured sex scenes with a 14-year-old actress, ran into trouble with censors and was rejected by a number of film distributors.
Sherborne-educated, Irons won an Oscar in 1991 for his portrayal of Claus von Bulow in Reversal of Fortune.