Jeremy Irons Is Looking For Passion In His Roles
by Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
September 23, 1984
Dispassionately, over a cup of good English tea, Jeremy Irons is talking about passion. ''It is the quality I like most in women and in men,'' he says. ''By passion, I don't mean only sexual passion. I mean enormous caring toward something. I love that energy. It seems such a good way to get through life, to be deeply involved with things, whether it be a play or a dog or a woman.''
Mr. Irons has become something of an expert on the wuthering heights of romance.
His latest exploration into the heart's landscape is ''Swann in Love,'' a new film directed by Volker Schlondorff and based on Marcel Proust's ''Remembrance of Things Past.'' Mr. Irons plays Charles Swann, a wealthy man of exquisite taste and one of the few Jews to be accepted into the high society of Paris in the 1880's. The film tells the story of Swann's tormented love for a sensuous courtesan, Odette de Crecy - ''a woman,'' Swann says, ''I didn't like and who wasn't my type.''
But he is stuck. ''My love is a sickness that is so entrenched that to tear it out would destroy me,'' Swann muses. ''As surgeons say, it's inoperable.''
Asked if he liked playing a character that makes Heathcliff seem downright ambivalent, Mr. Irons smiled: ''I find him rather endearing,'' he said. ''His big mistake is he wants to possess a woman. He's a collector of many things - paintings, furniture, sculpture - and he tries to possess this phantasm, which Odette is, the sort of woman who will not be tied down.
''And a lot of women can't be. You have to let them be free.''
He recalled the part of the story when Swann offers to pay for Odette's trip down the Nile, even though he knows she is secretly going with another man.
''He feels that if he pays for the trip, then she's his. That's an extraordinary double think. The same as if you buy a picture and you lend it to the National Gallery and say 'It's my picture.'
''I don't believe in that,'' he adds softly.
He is restrained about ''Swann in Love,'' which is doing well in England and is widely praised here as handsomely filmed, but otherwise received mostly negative reviews when it opened here at the Paris theater.
''I don't think it'll go big in Ohio,'' he said, wryly. ''It's very difficult to be objective about a picture you've been involved with. I've seen it three times now, and I like it more each time I see it. I think it's all right as a piece of work.''
Although he says he feels much closer to the witty, brilliant and acerbic Henry Boot, whom he played in Tom Stoppard's ''Real Thing,'' than to the dilettantish and rather vapid Swann, he found ''bits and pieces'' of Swann in himself.
''This business of possession. I used to sort of want my woman to be the woman who was there in my house looking after my things,'' he says, stressing the possessive in a mocking way. ''That's a fairly immature attitude. I was taught by a woman that this was not acceptable.''
The handsome actor, whose brooding, well-bred English looks are often compared to the young Laurence Olivier, has specialized in love-struck leading men.
In the ''French Lieutenant's Woman,'' he played a proper Victorian who languished for years for the mysterious Meryl Streep.
In ''Brideshead Revisted,'' he played the emotionally repressed Charles Ryder, who was languidly devoted to his friend, Sebastian.
In the movie of Harold Pinter's triangle drama, ''Betrayal,'' he played the callow, hapless lover of his best friend's wife.
And in ''The Real Thing,'' the play that turned him into a matinee-and-evening idol, he was a playwright whose first wife called him ''the last romantic'' and whose second had an affair that provokes a torrent of raw vulnerability and jealousy.
He took the Swann role, he said, to work with the director, Volker Schlondorff, to widen his base in Europe and to learn French.
His voice is used everywhere except France, where the film has been dubbed by a native.
''It would have been too much for the French to have an Englishman directed by a German, photographed by a Swede, playing opposite an Italian in a sacred French subject with the protagonist having an English accent.''
He also was drawn to the role because he thought Proust would help him hone the ''internal'' acting style he had worked on in ''Brideshead'' and ''Betrayal.'' ''I'm very interested in what one conveys without words because I think it's one of the ways we communicate best in films or plays,'' he said.
He had never read the great master of modernism and fiction, and at first it was, predictably, tough going. ''All I could really see from it was that the man didn't know when to put a full stop. He rambled on in a self-indulgent way,'' he recalled. ''Then I got into it and discovered great areas that I knew about in the way that memory is flashed off through little things, the way colors and smells set us off, and I thought, 'Ah, now he's addressing me.' ''
He said he feels that Proust, in his theme of collecting things and memories, is as timeless as Shakespeare.
''D.H. Lawrence, by contrast, was dealing with the sexual perception of his time, which was very bleak and very tied down. And 'Lady Chatterley' only really works if the audience sees sex as his readers at that point saw it. There's no way you can do that now.''
In period work, he said, it is important to focus on the notion that ''really what one's addressing is the audience's emotions and intellect and their imagination.''
''I remember when we made 'French Lieutenant's Woman,' Karel Reisz said it must not be a costume picture. One's seen so many Hollywood pictures from the 30's and 40's where it was all flounces and robes and no real connection.''
Costumes are irrelevant to ''Swann in Love,'' he says, calling it a ''wonderful study of jealousy and the incomprehensible love one has for people sometimes.''
Mr. Irons said that it was intriguing to play a story of an affair between a man and a woman that was based on Proust's real-life affair between himself and another man.
''It makes you understand a little bit better that business of wanting to possess,'' he said. ''I sort of suspect, looking at my homosexual friends, it's tougher for them to believe in a commitment to one another, because there isn't the same sort of emotional bond as men give to women.''
While he was making the film, he rented a house in Paris with Mr. Schlondorff, and the two talked constantly and at all hours of the night about the emotions and memories that Proust explores.
''There's actually more of Swann in Schlondorff than in me, his feelings of uncertainty toward the women he loved, a lot of the jealousy is his,'' said Mr. Irons.
Sipping his tea, staring off reflectively as he often does, Mr. Irons added: ''As you get older you get more jealous, actually, I think as you realize how fragile realtionships are. When you're in your teens or 20's, it's all a piece of cake and then you fail eight or nine times. And by the mid- 30's you tend to be more subject to things like jealousy because you know that they are such delicate flowers, relationships.''
When told that a remark about acting on jealousy ''violently'' sounds Othello-esque, he looks up in surprise. Later, he concedes he is thinking of a project to explore the Moor's doomed brand of green-eyed fever.
''I want to do an Iago and Othello and find another actor to alternate with me,'' he said. ''It would be very stretching.''
The making of ''Swann in Love'' reflects the monumental nature of the 3,000-page work. It took 21 years, a procession of directors and scriptwriters, and the grim determination of its producer, Nicole Staphane.
Mr. Irons talked about the well-chronicled tensions on the set, with everyone feeling an enormous burden of responsibility toward the Proust reputation.
''Schlondorff thrives on tension,'' he said. ''I don't.''
He said the director, whom he said he admires and would like to work with again, was under great financial pressure. There were also ego clashes among the star-filled cast, which includes Alain Delon, Ornella Muti, the Italian actress, and the French actresses Fanny Ardant and Marie- Christine Barrault.
''I found myself constantly soothing people, saying it's all right, it's great,'' he said.
''They put in Delon, which threw the balance and created a lot of tension,'' he said. ''Delon is a great actor but a very difficult man to work with.''
Mr. Irons got on better with Miss Muti, who plays the beautiful Odette.
''I think it's the best work she's been called on to do,'' said Mr. Irons, warmly. ''I'd be talking through a scene with her seeing her eyes become startled when she realized she was being treated as an intelligent actress. I thought 'Oh this doesn't happen very often.' She blossomed.''
Now he is contemplating what to do next. The offers are not wanting for the actor who has been labeled ''a thinking woman's Tom Selleck'' and who won Glamour Magazine's award for being ''the thinking woman's sex symbol.''
''I think its a huge compliment,'' he said. ''If one's going to be blown up so large on the screen or be on stage for so long, it's very helpful if there's an element of attractiveness about one.''
There were rumors that he might return to ''The Real Thing,'' but he shrugged them off. There have also been rumors about an Allan Carr film project with Diana Ross.
He will only say he has done enough languishing for the time being, and is looking for a role with the bite of Henry Boot.
''I'd like to do an American movie playing an American,'' he said. ''I'm not very interested in playing a policeman or a spaceman. As far as film characters, if there was any one word I wanted my characters to have, that I would look for, it is passion.''
Naturally.