The Man In The Irons Mask
by Francis Hardy, Daily Mail (London)
March 21, 1998
On screen Jeremy Irons is the quintessential Englishman - quiet, reserved, impossibly handsome. But as his 26-year devotion to actress Sinead Cusack testifies, he is more than capable of grand passion. As the Oscar-winning actor approaches his half-century, FRANCES HARDY gets a glimpse of the man behind the film star
Jeremy Irons is feeling out of sorts. 'I'm tired. I look bloody awful, but you'll have to accept that,' he remarks tersely to the photographer. 'I've been driving through the night with a car full of kids.' His personal make-up artist Linda hovers brightly with a dab of concealer and a kohl pencil. Jeremy looks grimly into the camera, handsome face locked into an implacable stare. Somehow, you're not expecting to like the great actor.
Then, all at once, he is talking about his schooldays, his marriage (to actress Sinead Cusack) his beloved sons... and the frozen glare has softened into a positive beam of patriarchal delight.
Jeremy Irons is famously mercurial; a volatile mix of temperament and charm. Also, he points out, he doesn't really give a fig if people choose not to like him. 'I do not mind too much whether I am liked in the parts I play or as a person,' he says bluntly. 'I like people to take me as they find me. I would not want to be a person who sought the approbation of others.'
Hence the grouchy, unamiable man who meets you and the eminently engaging man he becomes. He is also - in a manner unusual in actors - blithely unbothered by the image he projects. Lately he has played some oddball, even positively replusive characters, most notably a man infatuated with a 12-year-old girl in the Hollywood remake of Vladimir Nabakov's Lolita. Which is why, he says, he decided it was time to be someone 'relatively normal' in his newest film, The Man In The Iron Mask. (??when is it due out??)
In it he plays retired Musketeer Aramis, who is living a life of blameless aestheticism until he enlists his two old chums Athos (John Malkovich) and Porthos (Gerard Depardieu) to embark on a plot to free the eponymous Bastille prisoner. It is Leonardo DiCaprio who plays the nasty young King Louis. Looking virtually adolescent, he invests everyone around him with an almost geriatric gravitas. You ask what it was like working with Hollywood's hottest young property.
'Oh, it was very depressing,' says Jeremy gaily, 'working with someone so young, so beautiful and so good. Gerard and I spent many hours commiserating with each other.' Yet you detect his Oscar-winning ego wasn't really crumpled a bit.
Jeremy Irons was born in 1948 on the Isle of Wight, the youngest of three children. His father was a chartered accountant; his mother, in the manner of all middle class mums of that era, remained at home. Jeremy boarded from the age of seven and went on to Sherborne public school in Dorset, roughly when his parents divorced. At school he expressed a pompous desire to follow the 'histrionic arts'.
He attended the Bristol Old Vic School and was briefly married to actress Julie Hallam. After rep, odd-jobbing and even an ignominious interval as a presenter in the children's TV programme Playaway ('Do clap along, children!'), Jeremy got his first break as John the Baptist in the rock opera Godspell. Opportunely, Sinead Cusack, she of the great Irish acting dynasty, was working in the theatre opposite. They met and duly fell in love (Jeremy more instantaneously than Sinead). Although they married in 1978, they have been together for 26 years and have two sons Max, 12, and Sam, 19, who is currently teaching English in India.
It was, of course, as Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited and then in The French Lieutenant's Woman, that Irons became a household name. He has, it seems, been shrugging off that image of clench-jawed (??) Englishness ever since. Hollywood has heaped plaudits upon him. In 1991 he won an Oscar for his portrayal of Claus von Bulow - acquitted at a second trial of attempting to murder his wife - in Reversal Of Fortune. And there was the Tony-award winning performance in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing. But Jeremy resisted the lure of America. He said then: 'I don't like the way Americans regard success as so important. I trust English values. And I don't want to bring up my children in America. I am an English actor.'
So knowing these well-rehearsed facts about Jeremy you ask about his sons' eminently English schooling, then his own. Swiftly, he retreats into misty-eyed reminiscence.
He has just driven back from a half-term skiing trip to the Alps with Max and his friends. It was that long, wearisome drive that made him tetchy. Now he says: 'The holidays are great. The best times. When I was young you went away to board. It was a class thing. But my missus was dead against it for our boys. I think she's right. It fragments the family. So Sam and Max started at fee-paying day schools and Max is a day boy now. But Sam decided he wanted to make his own life and board, which he did. Sinead insisted it should be a co-ed school, rightly again, because she wanted him to develop alongside the opposite sex.
'Sherborne was single sex when I was there, but there was a girls' school up the road. I remember fumbling meetings with girls behind the dry-cleaning machine in the High Street. The smell of dry-cleaning fluid still has a faintly aphrodisiac effect, even now. It's amazing how efficiently you could hide yourself behind one of those Speedwell cleaning machines.
'I never really mastered it with girls. I played in a rock group at school with a chap called Nick Harris who could pull in the 10-minute interval between sets. I used to admire him tremendously, but I could never emulate him.
'When I first took Sinead out she asked me if I wanted to come up for coffee and I said: 'If I do that I will stay for the rest of my life.' It was a line that just came to me in a moment of madness. She replied: 'For God's sake don't come up then.' It was a constant battle with Sinead, pursuading her to go out with me. She was like a terrified mare skittering around, and it's been like that ever since.
'It was I who brought up the subject of marriage. I said something fumbling like: 'If I were to ask you to marry me, what would you think?' And that went on for a couple of years. It became easier to broach the subject as time went on. I'm a great believer in commitment. You have to commit to whatever you do, whether it be marriage, or writing a letter.
He concedes his parents' divorce may have had had an effect, but does not remember it as a particular trauma. 'I recall being more upset when my dog died. I wept all night. Often in childhood the small things seem more painful.'
The 'enduring marriage' of Jeremy Irons and Sinead Cusack is often cited as a exemplar of steadfastness in the fickle, ephemeral world of acting.
When you point this out, Jeremy laughs mischievously.
'Oh yes, Sinead has to endure life with me. It can be a very tumultuous marriage. It has its good days and bad days. But all marriages are the same: desperately difficult. It's just that some people give up more easily than others. But you should not give up unless you are unhappy, which we aren't.
'It's a completely dysfunctional marriage, but we battle on. I'm a very difficult person; my wife's a very difficult person. People are difficult.
Living together is difficult. But that is precisely what we both need.'
At this, the hapless PR, who has entered the room on the word 'dysfunctional', is almost pleading: 'But Jeremy, you have such a happy marriage.'
Jeremy smiles that disarming smile which crumples his whole face, and continues regardless: 'Sinead used to say: 'If I were a little mouse you would be off in a year' and I think she is absolutely right. We are in each other's thrall. I am constantly amazed and dazzled by her. And she gets more beautiful every year.'
At the end of this forthright admission you are, of course, quite convinced that his marriage is rock solid. More so, indeed, than if he had said glibly: 'We're blissfully in love.'
Today Irons, celebrated for his dandyism, is wearing green corduroy trousers which might well be his gardening ones, and a brown polo-neck sweater. He could be a week-ending solicitor, but for his inordinately red boots. They are exquisitely hand-tooled, but so extraordinarily red you wonder whether he bought them in the dark. He also has on a string vest. I happen to know this because he was pulling on his sweater as he walked into the room, unaware that I was already there. He is going to be 50 this year.
He does not look it, other than, I suppose, to boys of Leonardo's age.
Ungraciously, I point out that he will soon reach his half century.
'Will I?' he says, feigning lack of interest. Then: 'I still feel 20. I'm not at all bothered about getting older, in fact I've always rather enjoyed it. Life gets better. In my 20s I was rushing around madly, discovering everything for the first time; in my 30s my career was beginning to take off, and fame was thrust upon me. In my 40s I took stock, started to know where I was at, sorted out my priorities and values. I now know the people I cherish; my friends. I would love to think I had another half a century left to go.'
Jeremy's father died at 69, a year after suffering a stroke. As a boy, he was distant from him, what with going away to board and then the divorce. He recalls with some tenderness: 'I got to know my father late on because he worked so terribly hard and when he got back from work I was in bed. Then, of course, I went to boarding school when I was seven and when I was 15 he had moved out.
'It was not really until I was 21, when I went to London and lived with him and his second wife, that I grew close to him. For the next ten years I came to know him very well and got to know myself better, too.
'At drama school I 'unlearned' a lot of the things that had been instilled into me at boarding school. One of the things I discovered was how to be tactile. I hugged my dad for the first time when I was 21. He was embarrassed and awkward at first. Then he grew to love it and he started to hug me back. It was a huge pleasure, getting to know this lovely man. He died relatively young. He had a stroke and almost lost the power of speech, but he was saved for a year, and during that year - I knew we only had a limited time - I went to Oxfordshire every week to see him. It was a wonderful time.
'Mother is still alive and we see her very often, but we do not have the same affinity because she is a woman. We are very close and always have been, but it is a slightly different relationship. I think I was similar to my father; I feel I still am.'
It is moving to hear Jeremy Irons talk with such affecting simplicity about his father; there seem to be the start of tears in his eyes, but it may just be the tiredness.
Having mentioned his 50th birthday, you broach another significant milestone - his 20th wedding anniversary - half expecting some glib riposte.
On cue it comes:
'Is it? I really didn't know. We never celebrate it. It seems so much longer than 20 years. I think it is on March 23, now you mention it. That date seems to be seared into my memory. The last time we celebrated, Sinead was doing a play in Stratford and I was doing Brideshead. I joined her for dinner at the Dirty Duck and pressed something into her hand, some jewellery, I think. I said: 'Happy anniversary' and she said: 'What anniversary?' And we have never celebrated it since.'
So there we seem to have it: the formula for an enduring marriage, Irons style. Battle relentlessly, be endlessly difficult and forget anniversaries.
You assume he will continue in this brittle, flippant vein, but suddenly he is quite serious again.
'Sinead is really coming into her own again, professionally. She's in a new play at the National. (??which one??) When we first met it was she who was more well-known; then I became the well-known one. She found it difficult. She is an actress. We are all competitive. It's a pig for women.
When she was raising the children she was, of necessity, more tied to the hearth and home. Like all working mothers, she had a constant battle between career and family.
'It saddens me that women are placed in this impossible position. We have this great youth thing where careers are supposed to take off early, then you have children and unless you try to run the two alongside and be superwoman, your career suffers. Then, when the children leave home, you have such difficultly starting again in a profession.
'Wouldn't it be wonderful if women could raise children and then have a career? But we expect them to be everything.'
You note that underpinning this diatribe is the assumption that mothers' careers will, of necessity, be subservient to males'; that mothers will, of course, be the ones who stay at home and juggle. It must be those old boyhood values asserting themselves again. Jeremy Irons is still solidly middle class and in some ways quite reactionary.
Home is a Regency farmhouse in Oxfordshire and Jeremy enjoys distancing himself from work when he is not acting: 'I do not like living over the shop when it is not open. I like to do what I like. My wife says I like gardening, but it is not really true. I don't like it very much. I like my garden. I also like riding, sailing, skiing, buildings.'
Recently the Irons bought Kilcoe Caste, a ruined 15th-century tower house in County Cork. Jeremy will tackle much of the restoration himself. He doesn't mind a bit of grafting. Enjoys it, in fact.
'I like the effort. I am a bit of a Puritan like that. I have to earn my pleasures. That is why I would never be a gambler. I hate losing and I like making an effort. I like the journey and the climb is the bit I enjoy; more even than the view from the top.'