Irons In The Fire: Oscar-winning Actor JEREMY IRONS Is Back On British TV Screens In Longitude On Channel 4
by Bramhall on the Box, Evening Herald (Plymouth)
January 3, 2000
Time means a lot to Oscar-winning actor Jeremy Irons.
In Channel 4's two-part drama Longitude, he plays a man obsessed with rebuilding an 18th century sea clock, but his own passion is rebuilding a 12th century tower in Ireland.
The building work on the Norman Tower in west Cork was supposed to be finished in time for the actor to host a lavish millennium party. But it is still not finished - so the party has been postponed until January 2001, which is the mathematically correct date for the start of the new millennium.
"I'm planning to have a party there on the real millennium," he laughs. "When I started I pooh-poohed this millennium because I think it's the wrong year; it should be next year. That also allowed me to do the building work in the sort of time scale I knew it would take."
The tower has been derelict since 1603. "It needed someone with more money than sense to look after it," says Irons. "We are bringing it back to life as a domestic building, which it never really was."
But the star of Brideshead Revisited, The French Lieutenant's Woman and Reversal of Fortune - for which he won his Oscar -- admits that he manages to avoid any of the really hard work.
"I am very hands -on when it comes to organising, supplying, planning - and paying. At times there have been up to 40 people working on it and it is my job to keep them occupied. I am what they call the project manager; the buck stops here."
The 51-year-old actor is certainly not short of a buck or two. He has carved out a lucrative Hollywood career, which takes him away from both his beloved tower and his country home near Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire.
His success has also meant long periods of time separated from his family - his wife, actress Sinead Cusack, and sons Sam, 21, and 14-year-old Max.
Longitude, a TV adaptation of Dava Sobel's best-selling story of the invention of the navigational clock, sees Irons reunited with writer and director Charles Sturridge, who directed Brideshead Revisited.
He plays Rupert Gould, a man who had a nervous breakdown after the First World War and then became obsessed by the idea of tracking down and rebuilding the 18th century clocks created by John Harrison.
Gould found the four timepieces in a basement at Greenwich Observatory, dust-covered and in disrepair - despite the fact that they had been responsible for saving thousands of men's lives. "He was a clock addict," says Irons. "He and Harrison were fascinated by the order and accuracy of time - that is the complete opposite of what fascinates me, which is the elasticity of time, the fact that it is not regular. 'But as a sailor I appreciate the work Harrison did. I am always interested in these odd Englishmen who do odd things."