Irons In The Fire; The Oscar heat is on, but the British actor insists it's no big deal
by Clifford Terry, Chicago Tribune
March 17, 1991
Jeremy Irons popped into town the other afternoon, to accept a Chicago Film Critics accolade for his performance as Claus von Bulow in "Reversal of Fortune" - he missed the actual awards ceremony the previous night because his wife, Sinead Cusack, was opening in a play in London - and then nipped right out again, flying off to New York to attend a benefit honoring Robert De Niro.
"You know, we really don't understand movie actors in England," he would say at one point during his brief stay here. "If you are one, you keep a very low profile, and every now and then do a play to show you really are an actor."
The United States understands Jeremy Irons and his colleagues very well. The primary reason the 42-year-old actor is in the news this month, of course, is not because of a Chicago prize or a Manhattan fundraiser, but because he will be a leading Best Actor contender at the Academy Awards ceremonies March 25.
Every year the British Academy of Film and Television Arts puts on its own affair, but it just isn't the same as its stretch-limo-laden Hollywood counterpart.
"It gets a national television audience, not an international audience," Irons said during an interview session at the Ambassador East, after lighting the first of several cigarettes.
He is wearing a double-breasted gray suit and black turtleneck - your basic Alain Delon/early French gangster outfit - and he emits a combination of cool (but not unfriendly) reserve and suave deportment that might be described as David Niven Redux.
"I mean, an extraordinary number of people see the Oscars. In England, we really don't go in for all that, for better or for worse. I think it's all part of generating interest in the industry. And it is an industry in America. It isn't really in England. It's just a few very good filmmakers and some fairly good actors who every now and then try to make a film."
Because he is English and both a film and stage actor (a Tony winner yet), it would seem that he will have less personally at stake on the night of the 25th than strictly Left Coast types. Asked about this, he slowly reflects, then gives a characteristically measured response.
"I suspect so. It's also because I try to keep my career very much in proportion to my life. I find when I spend extended time in Los Angeles, my career tends to take on a greater importance because other things aren't there - my wife, my sons, my home, my country. All that is there is my work, so that becomes more important, possibly too important. Success is a very transitory thing. To be successful, I think, is the American dream. It's not my dream. It's wonderful to be successful; better to be happy. The two of them don't necessarily go together."
Over the years, some of those performers who aren't enthralled with the competitiveness of the Oscars have suggested that after the five actors and actresses have been nominated, it should be left at that. Irons disagrees.
"I think that's a bit half-cocked. To say these are the five best actors of the year is as meaningless as to say there's one best actor. The thing is, it's a game. It's rather as if you sit down one evening and play Trivial Pursuit, and one of you wins. I mean, it was great fun and you all had a good time. The Oscars, of course, are a lot more important than that because they do generate business in the films, so there's a lot more at stake.
"I think the sad thing about the Oscars is that it means that a lot of good pictures come out all at the same time, and inevitably, these films don't get enough attention as they would if they were spread out over the year."
He claims he has no preconceptions about the aristocratic Von Bulow, whose conviction of attempting to murder his heiress wife was reversed. "I was in New York while the trial was going on, but I didn't read the papers very closely. I'm just not that sort of person. I don't follow cricket teams, football teams or murder trials. I really didn't have an opinion about whether he was guilty or innocent. I do now, but I can't talk about it, can I? I mean, one of the greatest things about film is that the audience can make up its own mind. But I had to make an informed decision, because you can't play an accused murderer without knowing if he did it or not."
Purposely, he never met his subject matter, but watched him on Barbara Walters' and Phil Donahue's TV shows, and studied videotapes of the trial. "I also talked to people, like (writer) John Richardson, who've known him for many years, and others who knew him less well - who had the fortune (or misfortune, depending on how they felt) of sitting next to him at dinner.
"At first, I thought I was wrong for the part. I'm not into impersonation, and even if I was, I haven't got the right frame for Von Bulow. I'm slighter than he is, younger, with more hair, and the shape of my face is different. All of which is important for the sort of man he is. You have to be able to convince yourself you are the person before you convince anyone else that you are the person. So I was very concerned. But the work we did on the hair really enabled me to do it. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I thought, 'That's not me. That's someone else. That's him.' By the way, he writes to me occasionally, and tells me either that something I said was inaccurate - 'It's not like that' - or that he really didn't mean something he had said."
Despite the acclaim, Irons does not consider "Reversal of Fortune" his most satisfying work. That distinction came in David Cronenberg's "Dead Ringers" (1988), in which he played the dual role of twin gynecologists of opposite temperament.
"That was harder work. It was a picture in which I think I was in every scene except two. It was playing opposite oneself and trying to have chemistry with someone who wasn't there. And trying to overcome the technical problems doing that, and still allow the performance to come through."
New York magazine's David Denby wrote that the actor - who previously "lacked sensuality and heroic address" - had suddenly become "a concealed black comic, a wanderer down hidden paths of strangeness."
"I like that," Irons said. "People say, Why don't you do comedy? Well, I think there's a lot of comedy in a lot of things I do, like (the film) 'Moonlighting' and 'Dead Ringers.' But it's fairly concealed. Like the best things in life."
If Irons doesn't exactly concede that "Dead Ringers" was a "breakthrough" assignment, he does say, "It sent me in a slightly different direction for a while. One meanders about, one explores different channels, as an actor. I wouldn't like to go too far down one particular channel."
There are those who say he hasn't explored nearly enough, that prior to "Dead Ringers," he had mostly accepted roles, starting with "The French Lieutenant's Woman," that were "earnest" and "sincere." Not unexpectedly, Irons demurs. "Well, I suppose Gabriel in 'The Mission' is earnest. Nowak in 'Moonlighting'? Not particularly earnest. Jerry in 'Betrayal'? Not terribly sincere, really . . . . No, I wouldn't agree with that. Actually, just about all the characters I've played have been a bit different. Now, they are all the same height."
Irons, who was reared on the Isle of Wight and later studied at a tony public school in Dorset and the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, made his film debut in 1979 in Herbert Ross' "Nijinski." He then gained dazzling acclaim in America for his portrait of bottled-up, self-absorbed Charles Ryder in the extraordinarily popular TV adaptation of "Brideshead Revisited," Evelyn Waugh's satirical tale of Catholicism and champagne.
Originally, the producers had wanted him to play the role of flamboyant Sebastian Flyte (played by Anthony Andrews). "I had done a television series called 'Love for Lydia' - a role called Alexander. He was sort of a minor Sebastian, not such a dazzling role, but you know, loved his mother, drove too fast, drank too much and fell off a bridge in Episode 8. I'd sort of done that, so when I read 'Brideshead,' I closed the book, and thought Charles was the one for me - that strange, enigmatic, difficult Englishman. It was great experience. We shot for 18 months, doing 13 hours. I mean, it was the equivalent of doing six feature films back to back."
Except for one sequence, he has finished filming "Kafka" for Steven Soderbergh ("sex, lies and videotape"), which may premiere this spring at Cannes.
"It has very little to do with Kafka, except that it's called 'Kafka' and I play Kafka. It's a black comedy thriller about something that might have happened during his life, but as far as we know, it probably didn't. I'm sure we could have found a sexier title, but we'll do a sexy logo. Anyway, I play Kafka, but it's not like anything he really would have done.
"We filmed it last fall in Prague, and the mood was mixed. I mean, people forget very quickly the liberties they've just gained. Things were terribly complicated: worry about the economy, prices, the experience of (Czechoslovakian President Vaclav) Havel and his regime. I'm so sad that so much money has been spent in Kuwait that could have so usefully have been used in Europe to bolster those regimes economically while they reorganize."
Inevitably, various labels already have been hung on Irons. Glamour magazine has called him "the thinking woman's sex symbol" (his wife "doesn't much like" the sex-symbol stuff), while, on a higher plane, he and such stage and screen contemporaries as Ben Kingsley have been categorized as "minimalists" (as opposed to the knock-'em-sock-em school represented by performers such as Peter O'Toole and Albert Finney).
Comment? Pause. Reflect. "I'm a great admirer of O'Toole and Finney . . . . I don't quarrel with any labels. I guess I'm not very interested in acting when it shows - which may mean that I do keep it in. People said about 'Dead Ringers': 'The twins are so different, but you don't do anything to make them different.' I said, 'Well, that's what I do. I try not to do anything that shows.'