Enter The Irons Age
by Iain Johnstone, Sunday Times
March 31, 1991
The last thing Jeremy Irons did before ascending the steps to collect his Oscar as Best Actor for portraying Claus von Bulow in Reversal of Fortune was to kiss Madonna sitting in the front row of the auditorium in a long white frock beside Michael Jackson. (He later said he very nearly kissed Michael Jackson -- "I would have kissed anybody, really, at that point.") ''Why did you do that?'' I asked him. ''Well, you know,'' he replied, ''at a moment like that you feel like kissing the whole world.''
Irons is now a man with a million-dollar bounty on his head, and more. But it is unlikely that he will succumb to the lure of the agents. Four weeks previously he had been discussing with Madonna the possibility of his playing Peron to her Evita in the planned film of the Rice-Lloyd Webber musical. ''It wasn't a very good role. I didn't want to be Mr Evita. I don't know how it got released I don't like to talk about parts until they're signed. So I had apologised to her during one of the commercial breaks in the ceremony and told her I was sorry, and she said: 'Not half as sorry as I am.'''
In his acceptance speech, Irons thanked Glenn Close, who played the still comatose Sunny von Bulow, for persuading him to take on the part, and David Cronenberg, director of his last big film, Dead Ringers, adding pointedly: ''Some of you will understand why.'' It was a remark addressed to his fellow actors who nominate their own category. Many of them, including Paul Newman, had written to Irons saying it was a shame that he had missed out on a nomination for his remarkable portrayal of the twin gynaecologists who gradually subsume each other's characteristics and eventually take each other's lives. ''I have no doubt,'' Irons told me, ''that if it wasn't for Dead Ringers I wouldn't have received the Oscar. It was a reward for both parts.''
But there are certain parts that lend themselves to Oscar nominations and others, just as difficult, that do not. Irons has never been a man to look for an easy lead. His search has almost consistently been for a challenge that will intrigue him. Ten years ago the director Karel Reisz chose him for The French Lieutenant's Woman because, he recalled, ''I had seen him play a part in which he was prepared to be unsympathetic, very pinched, dry and savage. I felt that was a real act of courage because young actors are so image-conscious.'' No member of the Academy was going to vote for a stiff Englishman who abandons his fiancee for the siren of the title and, inevitably, it was Meryl Streep who received the Oscar nomination.
He remains, however, grateful to Reisz for giving him his big break into movies. ''I had been going up for a lot of films and I would continually see the deadening of the eye when they asked me what I had done, and I'd say: ''I haven't really done anything.''
''It really doesn't matter who wins,'' the compere Billy Crystal quipped at the start of Monday night's ceremony, ''because no matter who wins, Saddam Hussein will claim he did.'' But as the winners are led from the stage to face the waiting press in a temporary tent behind the Shrine Auditorium, even the foreigners know that this is a country where winning is at a premium especially when it comes to an actor's price.
Claus von Bulow was a winner, acquitted of the attempted murder of his wife, Sunny, in the second of two televised trials which made him a familiar face in America. He now lives in London with his daughter, Cosima, and is emerging as a familiar face in the social scene here. ''Have you ever met him?'' eager journalists demanded of Irons afterwards. ''No,'' insisted the actor. ''What would you say to him if you did?'' someone persisted. The actor took a reflective puff on his cigarette: ''I would probably tell him a few things about himself.''
It has always been a source of amazement if not of suspicion to me that Irons and von Bulow have not met. When Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard professor who orchestrated the successful appeal and then wrote the book Reversal of Fortune, came to London to promote the movie, he had dinner with von Bulow. ''I know, it's more of a coincidence that I haven't met him than that I have,'' Irons agreed. ''Perhaps we have nearly bumped into each other walking along the street, but when he sees me he ducks behind a lamp post.''
But the actor did acknowledge, for the first time, that they had been in touch with each other. ''Claus writes me letters, usually clarifying points in something the press has reported he said. They have his address and phone number on them and I write back to him. He claims not to have seen the film but wrote that friends have told him he has reason to be grateful to me for my performance. I was once in a room when he telephoned a mutual acquaintance who was telling me about him, but I declined the offer to talk to him.''
In fact, not meeting him was the wisest thing the actor could have done. He watched recordings of the trials and of von Bulow's television interviews with Barbara Walters and shrewdly observed: ''He gives away a lot by not giving much away.'' Irons had little difficulty with the accent: if the Danish-Austrian could acquire a cultivated anglicised drawl, it was hardly the hardest thing in the world for one of Britain's finest actors to accomplish the same. But what gives the film its heartbeat is the lingering doubt the conscience of the Dane. And this is the enigma that the actor so subtly kept alight.
When Irons left the Bristol Old Vic Drama School in the early 1970s, the director's parting shot to him was pessimistic. ''In the 1930s you'd have made a fortune, but your face is all wrong for the present. It's too long. It's too refined. And you speak proper English. That's not fashionable now.'' Little was he to know that a decade later a television series called Brideshead Revisited would make it very fashionable. Irons had learnt about the idea from George Howard, the chairman of the BBC, in whose house it was shot, and actually lobbied Granada for a part. They offered him Sebastian Flyte but he turned it down. ''After I read the book I thought, 'Well, yes, Sebastian's all right but I know about him. Charles Ryder is the interesting one, the coloured lens through which the audience is watching.'''
Having established himself so securely in British television and theatre, he went to America and earned more laurels acting opposite Glenn Close in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, one of the last straight plays to enjoy a long run on Broadway. Irons won a Tony and undoubtedly was the toast of the town, as I can vouchsafe myself. We met for dinner at the 21 Club after the play and were kept at the bar for half an hour while other people were led to empty seats. I mentioned this to the maitre d', who confided: ''We were waiting for the Robert Benchley table to come free for Mr Irons.''
He returned to New York two days before the Academy Awards ''to keep me away from Los Angeles'' and to host the NBC comedy programme Saturday Night Live. ''I absolutely refuse to mention the word Oscar,'' he told the audience. ''In fact I've been doing some woodwork to keep my mind off it.'' He held up the results two large wooden Oscars. It became a running gag throughout the show, with Irons turning out candlesticks shaped like Oscars and appearing in a boxer's dressing gown with the words ''Vote for me'' on the back.
After his win he looked in at the Governor's Ball and then dropped by Swifty Lazar's traditional bash at Spago's. His presence was a relief to all concerned, especially the waiting TV reporters outside, since Kevin Costner broke tradition by eschewing the invitation and gave a private party for his cast and crew and their friends and relations in another restaurant. Irons felt entitled to enjoy his hour. ''LA goes a bit mad. They pour milk and honey on you all day. But they only remember for about a week.'' More memorable for him was a lunch the following day with Meryl Streep (who avoided the ceremony since she was seven months pregnant and did not want to get jostled), Mike Nichols and Harold Pinter ''without doubt the most important collaborator in my professional life so far'' to discuss the film of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. Irons will play the innocent butler and Streep the knowing English housekeeper.
His wife, Sinead Cusack, was not with him at the ceremony. Obliged to remain in London, where she is appearing in Map of the Heart at the Globe Theatre, she and her friend, Tessa Dahl, checked into the Draycott Hotel to watch the ceremony live on Sky Movies. Joking to the audience that he wanted to save the cost of a call, he showed her his Oscar over the satellite and told her: ''I wish you were here to help me carry this, because you helped me win it.'' In fact, he did ring later at 5am London time, and Tessa answered saying they had been celebrating with three bottles of champagne and that Sinead was in the shower. ''Why isn't she asleep?'' Jeremy asked. ''Oh, she's going on breakfast television in an hour.'' ''Crikey,'' he teased, ''I hope she's not going to undo all the good I've done by winning this damn thing.'' But, of course, the professional Miss Cusack managed to appear superbly sober.
Today he is back at his home in Oxfordshire and, after church, he and Sinead will be hiding Easter eggs in the garden for their sons, Sam and Max. Unlike other families, they may even hide an Oscar as well.