CARE AND CONTROL
by Suzie Mackenzie, The Guardian (London)
August 3, 1996
Jeremy Irons works hard at being a good husband and father, at being a valuable member of society, at being an Englishman with proper reserve, and at being a person blessed with disarming modesty. He also works extremely hard at acting. So wheredoes the acting stop?
Just recently, Jeremy Irons says, he was walking up a hill close to his Oxfordshire home, with his ten-year-old son, Max. Usually they horse-ride or cycle. 'A hill feels different when you walk up it, doesn't it?' Max observed. 'How do you mean?' Irons asked him. 'Longer?' 'I mean you see more things when you walk.' 'You do,' Irons told his son. 'That's the secret of it. Getting the pace right.' And as he told me this, Irons leaned forward in his chair and he smiled.
Jeremy Irons is an enigma - all the more so for his seeming transparency. He acts - it is his job he would say - like a man possessed of a secret of which he himself is only too aware. I watched him descend from one of his motorbikes, a BMW 1,000cc touring bike, pull off his helmet, shake the sweat from his hair and then pause to allow time to admire his lean-limbed graciousness, the clean regularity of his features, his open beauty. It reminded me vaguely of his Richard II, ten years ago with the Royal Shakespeare Company. The king with the hollow crown. Over -rehearsed I had thought at that time. But this was before I had seen Cronenberg's Dead Ringers, the film in which Irons plays both leads, identical twin brothers, gynaecologists, who are destroyed in the process of trying to separate out their identities.
Everyone had advised him not to do it. His wife, the actress Sinead Cusack, told him not to do it. Red rag to a bull as far as Irons is concerned - he is a boy, not a man, in this way. Irons knew that De Niro had already turned the part down. 'Bob didn't like it that they were gynaecologists. He thought it would he better if they were lawyers.' William Hurt had also declined. 'Bill said he found it hard enough to play one role, playing two he would certainly go mad.' But Irons was intrigued. He went to Canada, talked to Cronenberg and liked him. He worked with a small selection of Cronenberg's crew on video. He said yes.
It was the performance that would transform his acting - his career had already been transformed seven years before, in 1981, with The French Lieutenant's Woman, following TV's Brideshead Revisited. Dead Ringers was the film that made of his narcissism, his self-consciousness, an art. This I can do, it said. And this, and this. Look at me. And it didn't matter because this was what the film was about - painfully dissecting and extracting different bits of human psychology and laying them out on the operating table in full view. It was like an anatomy lesson in technique, except that, like all great art, the technique was invisible, apparently effortless. It dazzled and diverted. We could admire the operation. But we could no more perform it than fly.
Watching him now, I can't help thinking how beauty and charm are their own diversion - how easily they tempt you into under-estimation. Too much concentration in one area finds you looking the wrong way. And perhaps it is just the memory of that film, but every move, every nuance, every shift of gear seems controlled. I wonder if he is ever caught off guard. He is likeable, warm and funny. And if there is a coldness there, it is probably accurate when he says that it is more English reserve than anything innately icy. 'I don't like to wear my heart on my sleeve.' But he may not be right when he asserts that he isn't bright. 'I'm not clever. I don't have that clarity of mind. Sinead has it, but then she went to university. I'm canny, I work from instinct.' Instinct, like impressions, precede experience and knowledge. Instinct is what develops when you are in danger and have to survive.
So how did he do it, I asked him. How, when there was no discernible physical difference between the twins, did he make their distinct personalities so palpable. It was simple, he said, with a sly smile. 'With Elliot, the aggressive twin, I acted from here.' And he pointed to his forehead. 'And with Beverly, the shy wimpy one, I acted from here.' And he pointed to his throat. 'You see?' If you have a trick, a mystery, why reveal it, he says? There is enough familiarity in our lives. How to keep the mystery living, how to stop the flame of passion from being extinguished by the inevitable repetition of daily existence, is the business, the passion of being alive. We can know each other too well. This is how he thinks of his characters. 'As dark houses with shutters that open and close and through which sometimes you glimpse something that makes you want to go in.' It is what he observes of people. 'Closed, and every now and again, a chink.' It is the allure of this light, this hope and expectation that provides the courage to enter another personality. 'To fall in love.' And if you love someone, he says, then you don't probe their mystery too deeply. Everyone has a public self, a private self, and a secret self.
His first wife left him, just like that, after a couple of years of marriage. He was 22. And though he says now that he wasn't surprised - 'I was so horribly sensible. I was always saying things like we should save money, buy a house, have a family' - it must have been a terrible shock at the time. Not because he is so vain that he thought he could never be left, but because in some trusting way he assumed that marriage is for life. If you marry at 20, as he did, you marry partly out of fear, he says, the need for security. He had seen actors in their fifties with families, still unable to afford a home and it made him afraid.
His parents divorced when he was 13. His father fell in love with someone else and left. His brother, six years older, and his sister, four years older, had already left home. For most of the time Irons was away at boarding school and in the holidays he made a point of travelling. But still it was hard, he says, to be with a mother who was very unhappy. Years later, 12 years ago, when he was feeling depressed and melancholic, Irons went on one of his three visits to a psychotherapist. She told him that it was the experience with his mother that drew him to women that he could protect. 'And there's some truth in that,' he says. 'I love to protect, it's a big part of the attraction.' He says this as if it would never have occurred to him.
He was 24 when he fell in love with Sinead Cusack and they have been together ever since - another 24 years, half his life. Not apparently effortlessly together - marriage isn't a technique, it is not acting. 'We've done all right,' he says. 'We have produced two sons. We've had difficult times but, unless you are boring, you are bound to have trouble.' There have been imbalances, he says, because of his sudden fame. 'It took me time to discover the value or the valuelessness of fame.' A good seven years, he estimates, during which period he admits he wasn't easy. 'I think I am less funny when I am tense.' And there have been injustices. 'She is a better actor than I, but I am much more successful. It is a problem that she deals with with pretty good grace.' And had it been the other way round? He would not have been able to cope, he says. He would have found someone else within six months. Already there is a conflict, because he hates it when she works away. 'I know it's not a very helpful thing for me to say because she is a wonderful actress and a wonderful mother and there is guilt bound up with that. I know she doesn't appreciate it when I say it, but I think she likes to know that I miss her.' The things that drew him to her bind him to her. A fragility - his first thought when he saw her was 'there's a girl who needs steadying'. Her Irishness, a certain colour and vibrancy she has. He loves her family, an acting family, as he points out, 'the antithesis of my own uptight middle-class Englishness'.
He admits he is a conservative man in many ways, though his illustration tends to belie this. He has often thought he would like to have had a homosexual affair. 'I believe we are on this earth only a short time, and in that time we should experience everything we can.' But he never has, never will. 'There is too much of a stigma attached to it for me.' And he believes in the value of marriage. 'I believe in it as an institution, yes. I think it is something which should be nurtured and valued. It is a signal to society that you're going to make one hell of an effort and that you expect its support.' And if, when he was away, Sinead found someone else, was unfaithful? He would cope, he says. 'You have to decide what you want in life, the big things.' And anything which doesn't really affect these things you can live with. 'Can't you?' he says.
His parents' divorce taught him the value of family life, and acting, he says - drama school - taught him how to touch. He means it quite literally, how to put his arms around another human being. 'You don't get a lot of that at boarding school.' In his twenties, after his first marriage ended, he went to live with his father and stepmother at the mill they had near Oxford. It was the first time that he had embraced his father. 'And I got to know him again, this lovely man. And I realised how alike we were. How we enjoyed the same things. I'd visit in my caravan and we'd mess around cutting down his willow trees.' And you sense behind all this how strongly he has determined in his own mind to be the father to his sons that his father was to him only in his imagination.
He told me a story that occurred only a few weeks ago when his favourite dog was killed in an accident. She was four months old and he found himself overcome with an uncontrollable grief. 'A pain of such enormity it was like being burned.' It is not possible, I said to him, to have so much grief for a dog. It must have been for something else. For his father perhaps. No, he says. His father died peacefully, six years ago, one year after having a stroke. Irons took the decision that the doctors should not prolong his life unduly. 'I said they should take him off the drugs. I knew that was what he wanted.' His father's death was a good one, he says. Both men were ready. 'There was time to say goodbye.' So maybe it was grief for your son, I suggested, for the unhappiness he would feel at losing his pet. No, Irons insists. 'Children are tougher than grown-ups. You must know that.' The grief was for himself, he says, pure and simple. And for his dog. 'She died before her time.' He carried her body to the grave that he had prepared crying like a baby. And Sinead had cuddled him and tried to comfort him, though she could not understand his grief. Women, he almost says, are tougher than men.
He relates all this with painstaking honesty and clarity, and there is no reason not to accept it. Except that it is hard not to observe how the characters he plays, and chooses with great deliberation, increasingly subvert his ideal of bourgeois bliss. And somewhere here, there is another Jeremy Irons, the Elliot twin, the one who acts from his head.
He has always carefully crafted his career. When the late George Howard, a family friend, told him Granada was planning to film Brideshead Revisited at his home, Castle Howard, and that he thought Sebastian the perfect role for him, Irons went away, read the book and determined he would play only Charles Ryder. The reason was simple. He had already played an H E Bates character on television similar to Sebastian. 'The same sort of guy who loved his mother, drank too much and fell off a bridge halfway through.' Irons had decided he wanted to be present throughout filming. 'I wanted to be at the helm, to learn about film-making.' And he had the arrogance, he says, to believe that only he could get Ryder right. 'Most actors would make the mistake of thinking that Charles had to shine, be the hub of the action. I know he had to hold back, be like a post at a party.' It is this quality of holding back, of withholding while appearing to give everything, that characterises his acting. It is his instinct, he says. Something about the bright light of the public realm makes him cautious. There is a hermetic, retiring side to him. 'Sinead is far more gregarious.' When Brideshead was launched in America, 'to great fanfare', he was at home in London, in bed with flu. And when The French Lieutenant's Woman opened in London with a glamorous party for the glitterati? 'Do you where I was?' he asks? He was on his knees on Hampstead Heath digging up the marble floor of a conservatory that was about to be demolished. 'At the moment the film opened, I looked at my watch and thought, you are in the right place.' He chose not to capitalise on this early success. 'I didn't go to Hollywood. I wasn't interested in becoming the new Englishman in America. Everyone was saying, 'You can be the new polished upper-class English gent', and I thought, I'm bored with that, I hate it. There is something inside me dirtier, rougher, odder, uglier.' And yet when he was asked if he would like to be put forward for the Hannibal Lector role in Silence Of The Lambs, he said no. And now I think I understand why. Lector is a psychopath, outside society. He is already beyond the pale. Irons plays characters who like to subvert from within. Their deceptions are ordinary, commonplace, bourgeois you could almost say. Which makes them all the more dangerous because they threaten the family, society, the very fabric that holds us all together.
They are a friend - as in Pinter's Betrayal, in which he played a man who has a seven-year affair with his best friend's wife. Does he love the woman? Oh yes, Irons says. And does he love his friend? 'He doesn't think about him.' A husband - Claus von Bulow in Reversal Of Fortune, the performance for which Irons won his Oscar in 1991. A father - having an affair with his son's fiancee, as in Louis Malle's adaptation of Josephine Hart's novel Damage. Irons is scathing about the final film. When he saw David Hare's script, he phoned Malle and said he would like to pull out. 'But Louis threatened to sue me for $3 million.' The problem he says was that Hare does not understand passion. 'He kept writing in the script: they make love. And I said to him. 'David, this may be distasteful to you, but how they make love is central to their relationship. You have to write it down. Plumb the depths of your imagination." But he should have known better. He had turned down Hare's film Plenty. 'I didn't like that English character. He was a cliche, he had no passion.' It is this exigence, so useful to him professionally, which occasionally tips over into intransigence and leads him into error. In New York recently he was giving a reading from Nabokov's novel Lolita - Irons is starring in a remake of the film as the paedophile anti-hero Humbert Humbert. On stage was a chair for a signer. Irons asked and was informed that there would be ten deaf people in the audience. Ten out of 300. 'This is political correctness gone mad,' he said. 'It's the signer or me. He goes or I go.' The signer went and so did the deaf audience. Later when the story hit the press, Irons wrote a letter of apology. Sinead wrote it in fact. 'She's much better at those things than I.' You can almost hear her admonishing. 'The wrong battle, Jeremy.' He spent a long time before agreeing to do Lolita. He felt it was 'too uncorrect', a difficult subject. Two things decided him. First, the director Adrian Lyne's passion: 'He really wanted me to do it and I thought if I was in his position and an actor was saying I don't want to do it because it may hurt my image, I would be really pissed off.' Second, a shrewd point from Lyne. He told Irons he was being too politically correct - and that did it.
But there is a more serious issue Irons says. 'One of the things we have to do as artists is to stir things up. There is too little debate in our society.' This may be the wrong subject for that debate, I said. It may be, he said. But a recent experience had convinced him it was not.
He was at a school fete, organising a raffle. A little girl came up to him. 'I put my hand on her shoulder, just like I would with one of my own kids.' Later, the teacher told him he should not have done that. 'And I thought, we are bringing up a generation of children who can't be touched, neither in anger nor in love, by the people who are there to guide them because, apparently, it will be misunderstood. We are creating a generation of fathers who are confused about their feelings towards their pre-pubescent daughters. And instead of saying your daughter will test the hell out of you - you are the man in her life, don't reject her, but remember it can never lead to anything - we practise political correctness. We should talk about these things. It's what life is.' You don't protect society by choosing to ignore what threatens it. It was interesting, he says, after the Dunblane massacre, how the church rallied to the families of the victims. 'But where was the church for that man who needed help all his life? Why wasn't one area of society there for that man?' In Bernardo Bertolucci's new film, Stealing Beauty, Irons plays Alex, a writer the same age as himself. He was originally offered the part of the husband in the film, but turned it down because he didn't want to play Sinead's husband - she plays the wife. It is a nostalgic, lyrical film about love and transformation set in the Tuscan hills. Italy is changing. Youth is passing. And Alex is dying of leukaemia. Who is Alex? I asked Irons. 'He is me,' he said, 'if I were dying. Except that he is not me because I have committed and Alex never has.' He is committed to his work, I say. 'I meant to another person,' Irons says.
He tells me he is not afraid to die. That you only fear what you cannot face and, for a moment, I have the oddest sensation that he really believes he will beat it. But no. Death is the one thing we all share, he says. 'And it's like everything else. If you don't fight it, it's all right. I look forward to that moment of dying, I really do, to the moment when I'll be ready to die.' He may not greet it with such equanimity if it came tonight, I say. 'Perhaps not,' he agrees. 'But I don't think it will.' His father died aged 69. And his father, aged 69, before him. If life pursues this symmetry, he has another 21 years to look forward to. 'If you have no regrets. If you have lived as you wanted to live. If you haven't hurt people. Then it's sort of all right.' And then he said this wonderful thing. 'I have always believed that the afterlife is what you leave behind in other people.' So now, with little left to prove, he has only to decide what to do with his time. Acting gets boring, he admits. And he gets fussier and fussier about parts. He would like to direct. 'There are two scripts at home, if I got mobilised I could do them.' To direct is easy, he says. 'But to direct well is a rare talent. I'm not sure I am good enough.' What he plans now is to take his bike and to ride with his eldest son Sam on the back, through Italy and down to Siena. And after that, he says, he will see.
Stealing Beauty, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, opens on August 30. Lolita, directed by Adrian Lyne, is scheduled to open at Christmas.