Acting Out Bizarre Twists
by Roger Ebert, The Record (Bergen County NJ)
March 25, 1991
Jeremy Irons remembers exactly where he was when he learned he'd been nominated for an Oscar this year, at London's Heathrow Airport to pick up his son, but he remembers even more vividly where he was two years ago when he was not nominated.
"That was the year I did Dead Ringers.' It was very strange. I was lying in the bed in Australia at the same time the nominations were announced, and I suddenly got this stomach blow, and I thought, I've not been nominated,' and, indeed, I got up, and there were long faces around the breakfast table. This time, it was nice but, strangely enough, I was prouder of the work in Dead Ringers.'" In the David Cronenberg movie, he starred as twin gynecologists who played macabre mind games with a woman played by Genevieve Bujold. This year, he has been nominated for "Reversal of Fortune," in which he plays an equally bizarre character, the aristocratic Claus von Bulow, who was acquitted on charges of trying to murder his millionaire wife. In the movie, when told he is a strange man, Von Bulow hollowly replies, "You have no idea."
Irons is the odds-on favorite to win in the Best Actor category, which would be a form of poetic justice, since a friend once tried to explain Von Bulow to him: "He said, He is an actor. Not a very good actor either, but he's an actor.' And I said that was very interesting, but not something I could use. And then I read a review that said I played Claus like a bad actor, and I thought, Well that's wonderful.' You feed in a lot of stuff before you begin a performance, and then you do it and bits come out. It's a much more instinctive process than is often imagined."
Irons shared these thoughts during a recent visit to Chicago to accept the Chicago Film Critics' Award for Best Actor. I asked him why so many people wanted to see "Reversal of Fortune," a movie that even the studio had little faith in before the first festival reviews arrived, filled with enthusiasm.
"What we had," he said, "was this man who gave nothing away, this cold northern European, who sat there hour after hour, day after day, giving nothing away. And then you had drugs, and money, and all the good stuff... and the German maid. If you could find a way to tell the story, people would almost certainly be interested."
The way the director, Barbet Schroeder, and the writer, Nicholas Kazan, found to tell it was to have the film narrated by Sunny von Bulow (Glenn Close), who, in the film as in life, lingered in an irreversible coma. Faced with the possibility of a story so morbid that any humor would seem sacrilegious, they had the narrator share the audience's curiosity about what really happened: "You tell me," she says. And then they found Irons to play Von Bulow with a solemnity verging on playfulness, as he toys with his famous defense attorney, Alan J. Dershowitz (Ron Silver).
"I obviously couldn't do an imitation," Irons said. "When they first asked me to do the role, I suggested a few other people, because, physically, I'm not right for it, and I don't like makeup. I don't like things getting in the way. And yet, if you know how the character looks, and people did, it's important for them to be able to believe you are that character.
"So, I had to do something to allow people to forget how he looked, even though they'd seen him everywhere during the trial. For me, that was a simple thing of the hair, which Dick Smith, a great makeup artist, did for me. He gave me receding, thinning hair, which changed my face completely, and then we played around a little with the jaw; Claus has a very square jaw. It enabled me to convince myself to inhabit him, and once I was convinced, of course, I could then go ahead and convince other people."
Irons never met him?
"I didn't meet him. I wanted to remain objective about him. I didn't want the danger of either making a friend of him or finding I didn't like him." Von Bulow apparently is a man not lacking in a certain sense of humor. I asked Irons if he thought Von Bulow would want to meet him if Irons won the Oscar, perhaps as a way to savor the irony.
"I don't know. I think this must be difficult for all the family and for him as well. The more successful the picture is, the harder it is for them. It would have been easier had this picture died and just disappeared, because, after all, they had a difficult time 12 years ago, I mean a really difficult time, and they got through it, and they made their lives, and Claus moved to England, and now there's this film about it." How seriously does Irons take the Academy Awards? How important is winning?
"Well, it's great to be nominated, that's an honor, but if you have spare hours between now and when the votes are cast, will you spend them on your knees? The Oscar is important because it generates work. As an accolade, it's nice, but it's important because producers are very encouraged by hiring persons who are Oscar nominees or winners. You bring with you the smell of success, and everybody likes touching that, and they hope maybe you will work the magic on their project."