JEREMY IRONS; Riding the Wave From 'Brideshead' To Broadway
by Stephanie Mansfield, The Washington Post
March 22, 1984
Jeremy Irons is the hottest actor in town.
"I know. It's stifling in here. Sorry, love," he says.
He's in the tiny dressing room of the Plymouth Theater, where he's playing to sold out audiences in Tom Stoppard's new smash, "The Real Thing."
Katharine Hepburn's seen him in it twice. So has Paul Newman. Mary Tyler Moore, Mick Jagger, Jerry Hall, Marsha Mason and Barry Manilow have all been spotted in the audience. A Broadway play taken to new hypes, "The Real Thing" is breaking box office records and Jeremy Irons is a major reason.
A heartthrob for the '80s. The thinking woman's Tom Selleck. Part Olivier, part Errol Flynn. Seen as Charles Ryder in "Brideshead Revisited," Irons is boyishly sexy with legs that go from here to New Jersey and a stealthy sense of humor. Whatever it is, he's got it.
"Passion and vulnerability," he muses, sticking a Marlboro Light between thin lips. His hair is light brown and brushed off his high forehead. He wears bottle-green jodhpurs tucked into high, flat-heeled riding boots. The collarless shirt is open at the neck, the sleeves rolled up. The face is dramatic: high cheekbones, neatly trimmed beard and liquid brown eyes that squint through the cigarette smoke.
His performance as the arrogant playwright Henry Boot who has a lot to learn about marriage, fidelity and the course of true love has been hailed as the most auspicious Broadway debut since Richard Burton's.
"I'm not aware of it, of course," Irons says, talking about the sudden fame. "I'm only aware of it when people ring me up and say, 'How are you coping?' I say, 'Coping with what?' It's very nice when people admire your work. That is lovely. That sort of ego massage. But I don't think it's useful to take it too seriously."
He's unfailingly polite and deeply charming with his clipped British accent, but says he is lazy and selfish and when he peers into the glaring mirror, flicking back a strand of hair and apologizing for not removing his makeup from a fashion photo session that afternoon, one detects a thin bat-squeak of conceit.
"Somebody said to me three years ago, 'You're flavor of the month,' and I hit them. Since then I haven't been called that."
His long, tapered fingers cradle the cigarette.
"I remember very early on, my agent said to me, 'Now listen, you're on a wave now. You really have to take it.' " He leans forward. "I said, 'Don't talk to me about waves, we're on a f------ ocean!' "
He was born on the Isle of Wight, the third child of an accountant. His parents separated when he was 13, and young Jeremy was sent to a private school. The academic life paled next to performing, so he forgot about being a veterinarian and moved to London. He enrolled at Bristol's Old Vic School, played John the Baptist in "Godspell," then joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he married his second wife, actress Sinead Cusack, daughter of Irish actor Cyril Cusack. In 1978, he won the coveted Clarence Derwent award as best actor in Simon Gray's "The Rear Column" and snagged the lead in "Brideshead Revisited."
The same time the 13-hour television series went on, Irons starred in "The French Lieutenant's Woman" opposite Meryl Streep.
"A numerologist said to me once, 'You're a number one' which means I'm going to be very successful and I've always known that I was lucky. I just hope I have the resources to cope when that luck fails. I have a melancholic side to my spirit which gets me pretty low.
"I was called 'smiler' as a kid. I don't know if I was altogether spoiled, but I think I've always been blessed with a sort of fairly open personality, although I find it very difficult to be extremely happy and I'm sorry about that. There have been rare occasions when I think this is just wonderful."
Broadway has been pretty wonderful, except for the fact that his wife and 5-year-old son Sam, have just returned to London after a short visit.
This is Irons' first stage appearance in four years and his first appearance on Broadway.
"There was a fear," he says. "But it wasn't the fear of failing. I love that risk that you could fall on your a-- or you could succeed. I had huge confidence in the play. But when I read the play I knew I had to turn it down." There were film commitments, Harold Pinter's "Betrayal," Jerzy Skolimowski's "Moonlighting" and a French production of Proust's "Swann in Love." "I was really sick . . . I knew I wanted to do this play. I felt it was talking about things that people want to hear about."
In the play, Henry Boot falls in love with a younger woman, leaves his wife and then is shattered several years later by his new wife's infidelity.
"I think what is debilitating to the human spirit is the way we give up so quickly," Irons says quietly. "I do believe that you get a second wind in marriage. If you do commit, find a way of coping with the outside attractions, just keep at it, you actually get somewhere which you don't if you give up. I think that's what Tom is saying.
"My first marriage was very brief," he says. "It lasted three years in all. I was so young, 22, and I was a bit bruised. What I did learn was that basically what you have in a marriage is yourself and another person and it's usually yourself which makes it work or makes it not work. It's very difficult to change oneself. I mean, one can try and be considerate or better in bed or generous or not take for granted so much, but basically your own characteristics stay with you."
He crosses his legs, resting an elbow on one knee.
"I think what I sort of know is if you leave a woman after 10 years and then start off with another woman, 10 years into that you're 10 years older so you'll be different, but you'll have the same problems, the same boredoms, the same niggles. I want to see what it's like to be married for 30 years. Actually see if you can both fail and succeed and ride out the wave."
As Henry Boot, he describes coping with the outside attractions. "Sometimes, surprisingly, there's someone, not the prettiest or the most available, but you know that in another life it would be her. Or him, don't you find? A small quickening. The room responds slightly to being entered. Like a raised blind."
Does Irons "catch the glint of being someone else's possibility?"
"Oh, yes. Yes."
Does he act on it?
"No." Pause. "I do. I mean. I hate talking about this."
He smiles, and goes on, choosing his words slowly. "There is a part of me that is committed absolutely to my wife. No one else could touch that. And it's because I work in a very junglelike business, I need a rock. But I do love women, and I would hate to go through life denying myself that joy.
"I suppose you act on them," he says, "when you're ready to change your life. Or you need to change your life. Sometimes I think I'd love a wife who would travel with me and just take care of me and run the house and in fact my wife is the opposite."
He pauses, lights another cigarette. "Actually, if I had one I suspect I'd be bored."
Irons has deliberately chosen the most visible roles available, and has no false modesty about his career.
"I act because I think it's an area of human nature that I can maybe throw light on through my particular makeup and my particular mind."
And a desire to be loved?
"I don't know," he smiles mischievously. "Maybe I was taken off the breast too early."
He says he would "get terribly bored being me," hopes to direct and produce someday and carries a bit of every character with him. "They're always sort of yours, they're always there. I may grow out of them or get bored with them or come to dislike them as I did with the character in 'Betrayal.' "
In the film, Irons plays a married man who has an affair with his best friend's wife. When he first saw the film in England, Irons liked it.
"Then a year later I saw it over here with someone I was very fond of and I was pretty embarrassed to have known enough about that man to be able to play him. Because he was light and naive. Everything I don't like about myself was there. I was playing the sort of easy man, the easy lay, the man who wants his cake and eats it too. I'm not like that. I've put that side of me way away."
Henry Boot, on the other hand, is a character he loves. "He is vulnerable, yet he believes passionately in what he believes. These two qualities are wonderful. I love that side of me. Passion and vulnerability. Together."
"I think that's a quote from me," his costar, Glenn Close, says later. She has stuck her head in the dressing room to say Irons is late for a rehearsal.
"We hit it off the first moment we met," sparking rumors of an off-stage romance. Not so, she says. "Our working relationship deepened into a friendship, which allows us to spin the magic that we do."
Close's admiration for her costar is unqualified. "In many ways, he's unusual for an actor. He seems very sane, and certainly knows what he wants and yet he has wonderful manners. He's a good man. He's got a good soul. He's considerate and generous. He also has a wicked streak in him. Last night, he hid on the sofa in my dressing room under a pile of towels and I heard these strange, groaning noises and I screamed bloody murder."
Close, whose film credits include "The World According to Garp" and "The Big Chill," says Annie "is a bitch of a part." She is not as sympathetic as Henry Boot, which "is the kind of role you can't compete with. I came to terms with that. It was a little difficult for a while."
Irons says he is "too trusting," has only a few male friends and finds it easier to be friends with the opposite sex. "I do believe it's the mystery of the other person which draws you together in friendship, and we understand our own sex better. There is less mystery."
Irons will be appearing in "The Real Thing" until mid-June. After that, he says he'd like to make a comedy. Maybe with Walter Matthau.
"About four months ago, somebody asked me, 'What is your dream?' And I thought, 'I have my dream.' I'm working with people I love, doing material I love, and they appreciate me for it. And I have a wife I love and a son I love and a house I love and a boat I love. I said, 'I don't have a dream.' Then I thought, 'God that's really boring.'
"Then I went down to St. Tropez for a week and stayed in this house and went down to the harbor one day and there was the most beautiful boat, a two-masted sailboat."
He claps his hands, a gleeful smile crosses his face. "And I said, 'That's my dream! That's it!' "