No more Mr Charming Interview - Jeremy Irons
by Helena de Bertodano, Sunday Telegraph
August 18, 1996
He has done villains and weirdos, but still he is remembered for Brideshead. Now he has played Lolita's seducer, will Jeremy Irons finally be allowed to grow up?
JEREMY IRONS casts a worried glance at himself in the mirror and announces that he is "looking like s---". As this is not a description of him that would spring to many people's minds, I ask him what he means. "I haven't washed my hair, I haven't shaved and I've got a spot," he replies. In fact, he has two spots. He is clearly shattered, having just spent four days travelling across Europe on his motorbike with his wife, the actress Sinead Cusack, riding pillion. When I meet him, he is on his way to catch a ferry to Ireland for a holiday with Cusack and their two teenage sons. From what I had heard about Irons, I was expecting someone aloof, even arrogant. In fact, he seems, if anything, rather coy. He is lolling around in a dilapidated velvet armchair in the Groucho Club in Soho, flinging out his legs and twisting his greyhound-thin body like a restless child. Occasionally he sits bolt upright to take a sip of his kir royale, but soon slouches back down again, rubbing his eyes hard and adjusting the sleeves of his green corduroy shirt. His expression is normally so severe in photographs that when he smiles - as he does often - he is almost unrecognisable: "When I'm tense, I tend to seem cold and arrogant. And if you're tall and sound like I do, with a proper English voice, it doesn't help." During his brief stopover in England, Irons has found his name splashed over the newspapers at the centre of two controversies.
First there is the story that he is going to "black up" to play the lead in a film about the late Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, an idea that enrages Britain's non-white acting community. "More noise than fact," says Irons, shrugging dismissively. "I have not even read the script and I certainly haven't agreed to anything yet."
The second story stands on firmer ground - Irons is playing Humbert Humbert in Lolita, a contentious remake of the film based on Vladimir Nabokov's novel about the obsessive relationship between a middle-aged man - Humbert - and a 12-year-old girl (aged 14 in the film). Although it was completed six months ago, at a cost of $50 million, it has yet to find a distributor in the United States, where it has caused an outrage due to its political incorrectness. Only slight resistance to the graphic sex and nudity is expected from European censors, but the American market is crucial to the film's success. Irons is not bothered by the fuss - in fact, he seems to be enjoying it. "There's nothing worse than doing a nice piece of work that no one ever hears about."
When Lolita finally hits the screen, it will undoubtedly eradicate the last vestiges of the "creamy English charm" - as he puts it - that has characterised Irons's image since his days as Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited, the television serialisation of Evelyn Waugh's novel that was the making of him.
He has been trying to escape the inevitable typecasting ever since, and has taken on a series of increasingly weird and unsavoury characters. Dead Ringers, in which he won a Best Actor NY Critics Award for his portrayal of twins who destroy each other, started the process. Since then he has played Claus von Bulow in Reversal of Fortune, and the politician father who runs off with his son's fiancee in Damage. Last year he bleached his hair blond and played the villain in Die Hard With A Vengeance.
So Humbert, in some ways, is the last nail in the Ryder coffin. "More people have seen Brideshead than all my films put together," he sighs. Still, at least in the acting world, he is known for his ability to turn his hand to anything. Harold Pinter says that one of the keys to Irons's success is that he is refreshingly unbothered by the image he projects. "Most actors want to be liked, but Irons doesn't mind being unlikeable." Irons nods enthusiastically when I repeat this to him. "That's certainly true." But surely accepting the role of Humbert is taking things a bit far - after all, even Nabokov described him as "a vain and cruel wretch, a hateful person". Irons looks pensive.
He usually pauses for up to a minute before delivering his answers and perhaps affects deeper thought than the questions sometimes warrant. "I think Nabokov is really writing about himself," he says, finally. Did you anticipate the furore? "Yes, I resisted doing it for a long time because I just felt that it would bring so much s--- around my ears. What subject is more sensitive than the relationship between a man in his mid-Forties and a 14-year-old girl?"
He says that the enthusiasm of Adrian Lyne, the film's director, and "his passion for me to play Humbert" finally persuaded him. "It's so rare that you get someone who really wants to confront such a difficult story." Although he can understand the sensitivity surrounding the film - "it is spitting in the eye of everybody," he states with some relish - he thinks that in real life political correctness has gone mad.
He recounts a recent experience at a village fete when he put his hand on the shoulder of a young girl who came up to talk to him. Afterwards her teacher told him he should not have touched her. "It's extraordinary. We talk about the English being not very good at dealing with their emotions and sensuality, and yet we're bringing up this generation who cannot be touched by adults, either in anger or in love." Nevertheless he admits that he felt "uncomfortable" shooting some of the sex scenes with Dominique Swain, a 14-year-old Malibu schoolgirl. "But I just tried to become obsessed by her." Tried to? "All right, I did become obsessed by her."
Although Lolita dominates the conversation, we have ostensibly met to talk about his role in Stealing Beauty, a Bernardo Bertolucci film opening at the end of this month, unassisted by the whiff of controversy. Irons plays Alex, a writer dying of leukaemia among a group of friends in Tuscany. His acting, as ever, is flawless, but it is unlikely to become one of his best-remembered roles - partly because the film itself is so insubstantial. "What did you think of it?" he asks. The plot was fairly banal, I say. He does not look surprised. "It's a pencil sketch, and I think people who expected an oil painting and discovered a lesser work resented that." The only real thread concerns the 19-year-old female protagonist, played superbly by Liv Tyler, who is trying to pick a suitable candidate to whom to lose her virginity. In fact, the last line of the film - "It was my first time, too" - tells you all you need to know about the plot.
Irons's wife is also in the film. They have acted together on several occasions, most notably in Waterland, where they played husband and wife. "She is having a wonderful rebirth as an actress," he says proudly. "And she's getting more beautiful as she gets older." He was offered the role of her husband in Stealing Beauty, but decided that he would prefer to play Alex - a more interesting, albeit bleaker, role. "I try to unbleak him as much as possible. In fact he is not dissimilar to me - an outsider, someone who has never committed."
All his life, he says, he has kept away from groups. "I've never been very gregarious and I don't fit well into groups. Acting is wonderful because you are completely alone when you play a character. It sounds very romantic but it's not unlike being a travelling gypsy. You move in for a while, do your thing and then move on to another place."
This may be his attitude towards his professional life, but on a personal level he is capable of deep commitment. He and Sinead have been together for 24 years. He was briefly married to the actress Julie Hallam when he was 20, but she left him because, he says, he was very dull - "always talking about saving money, buying a house, having a family". Now he divides his time between Oxfordshire and Ireland, where he has renovated a house on the bank of a river in west Cork.
Although Sinead comes from an Irish acting dynasty - her father was Cyril Cusack - Irons's family has no such history. His father was a chartered accountant, a reserved man who was not close to his three children. Jeremy, the youngest, was born in 1948 in the Isle of Wight, where he spent most of his early childhood. His parents divorced when he was 13, the same year that he was sent away to boarding school - Sherborne, in Dorset. He failed his A-levels and became a social worker in London while trying to find a way into acting. Eventually, after a year or two odd-jobbing at the Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury, he won a place at the Bristol Old Vic. Tim Pigott-Smith, who was there at the same time and who has remained a close friend, says that Irons was not exceptional in those days. "If anything, the feeling was that he wouldn't make it. But he had wonderful chutzpah and good looks. There was a great sense of danger about him." Pigott-Smith adds that Irons always knows exactly what he wants and is not shy about asking for it - both in career terms and in details of day-to-day life. "I remember in a restaurant recently, the waiter kept pouring us more wine after every sip. I hate that habit, but have put up with it for years. Jeremy, on the other hand, immediately said: 'Do you mind - I'll pour my own wine.' "
Work did not come easily to Irons at first, but he resolved to give himself until the age of 30 before re-thinking his career options. Meanwhile he went for endless auditions, and even did a spell on the BBC children's programme Playaway. This was not his finest hour - he spent his time cavorting around the set with a brightly coloured cardboard box emblazoned with his name over his head, and delivering the line: "Do clap along, children."
By the age of 30, he had cracked it. He had landed the starring role opposite Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant's Woman, and was in Brideshead Revisited. He was originally offered the part of Sebastian Flyte, played by Anthony Andrews, but insisted on the role of Charles Ryder, declaring that he was the only person he knew who could get it right - small wonder that he got a reputation for arrogance.
He is a notoriously difficult man to work with, highly demanding of everyone around him as well as of himself. "I think I do sometimes take it all a bit seriously," he agrees. "I do get very involved and that's quite awkward for other people." But he is unrepentant and, as he explains himself, it becomes clear that there is an element of ruthlessness mixed in with the practised charm. "The only thing that matters is whether or not you are good at what you do. I don't care if Van Gogh was difficult. I'm sure that there are painters we have never heard of who were absolute darlings. Yet where are their pictures?"
Irons is fond of his similes - he has a theory that human beings are like harps and that he, as an actor, is exploring a wider variation of chords than most people. "Most of us pluck just three or four strings in our lives. But I search inside myself for the other sound, the other feeling, the other being, I suppose."
After he had agreed to play Humbert, for example, he noticed himself becoming intrigued by the behaviour of young girls: "I remember going down to my son's sports day just before we began shooting Lolita and I asked him to point out the nymphettes in his year." Once he has finished playing a role, he says that a resonance of the character usually remains inside him. "The sound is there for a while, perhaps for ever." But he is relieved to report that he has already shaken off the ghost of Humbert. "This year, when I went to my son's sports day again [after Lolita was finished], I had no desire at all to look for nymphettes."