Jeremy Irons: The Man Behind All Those Sinister Characters
by Janet Cawley, Biography Magazine
July 1, 2000
Since Jeremy Irons the actor has carved out a career playing brooding, obsessive and morally ambiguous souls, it's a bit startling to discover that Jeremy Irons the man is anything but that. Witty, collected, and friendly, Irons admits to only one obsession at the moment: finishing his restoration of a centuries-old home in Ireland.
"It's a tower house built by the Normans in 1260 and it's been derelict since 1603. I'm the main contractor," he half-laughs, half-sighs. "I pay the wages every Friday and I'm there every day I'm not here," he explains, referring to a quick visit to New York where his wife, actress Sinead Cusack, is opening in an off-Broadway play.
"I've done up houses I've lived in before, but nothing of this magnitude," he says, adding with a chuckle, "and I probably never will again."
Unlike his onscreen characters, Irons can laugh at life--and at himself. Asked if he plans to see the acclaimed Broadway revival of Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing--the play that won him a Tony when he starred in it 16 years ago--the actor doesn't hesitate. "I'm not going," he says, his voice deep and melodious. "I decided it would be like a husband going to his first wife's wedding. I thought 'I know the woman, I don't want to see anyone else making love to her.' "
He's also sanguine about the dark, conflicted roles that constantly come his way. "I think it's a problem every actor has," he explains cheerfully. "The things he's good at playing are always the things he's asked to play. Producers or directors come across certain characters and think 'Oh, that's Jeremy Irons character or a Michael Caine character or a Richard Gere character.' After I did Brideshead Revisited, that set a stamp and people began to think I was an interior-dialogue character, so I played a lot of them."
Not that he's about to stop. This month, Irons stars as Rupert Gould, a man obsessed with restoring navigational clocks, in Longitude (based on the book by Dava Sobel.) The four-hour A&E movie intercuts the stories of two lives centuries apart: the first is that of John Harrison, an 18th century self-taught carpenter-turned-clockmaker who after decades of struggle built the "impossible clock," one that could survive ocean voyages and tell time at sea, enabling sailors to calculate their longitude for the first time. The second story is Irons' Gould, a World War I naval officer who suffers a nervous breakdown and then discovers four of Harrison's clocks in the basement of the Greenwich Observatory. Gould becomes fixated on repairing the timepieces, eventually leading to two more nervous breakdowns and the loss of his wife, family, and reputation.
"The emotional turmoil as he descended into his breakdowns was the hardest thing to act in the role," Irons admits. "And it's very interesting that he became quite obsessive about doing up clocks, which I suppose are the most ordered of things."
Does Irons share his character's fascination with timepieces?
"My wife would say I have no interest at all in time," he laughs. "That I don't even recognize it." However, he is intrigued by the elasticity of time--"moments that in reality last 30 seconds but feel as if they last five minutes. Why does that happen? I don't know."
Jeremy John Irons was born September 19, 1948, in the yachting resort town of Cowes on England's Isle of Wight, the son of Paul, an accountant, and his wife, Barbara Anne. In the British tradition, young Jeremy was sent away to the first of a series of boarding schools at age 7. Initially he dreamed of becoming a veterinarian, but his plans were stymied when, as he puts it, "I showed no proficiency at all for the sciences." At 17, he graduated from the Sherborne School in Dorset, having received the requisite education for an upper-middle-class Englishman. Years later, he told the New York Times that when he was cast as Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited, "I understood Ryder completely. He was a man who kept his emotions deeply hidden and didn't give very much, who certainly didn't give any of his real self...I really think Ryder is the man I was educated to be."
But Irons followed a very different path. After playing his guitar for small change outside movie theaters in London, he decided he enjoyed performing. Soon he landed a job as an assistant stage manager with a theater company in Canterbury, then quickly won acceptance to the prestigious Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. There he trained in the classics, toured with the repertory company, and met and very briefly married a fellow Bristol Old Vic actor, Julie Hallam.
Irons' big break came in 1971 when he was cast as John the Baptist in a production of the rock musical Godspell in London's West end. He has summarized his musical talents by saying he sings like an actor and dances like a duck ("but mind you, I think that ducks do some really nifty footwork.") Nonetheless, he enjoyed a long run in the play, which paved the way for other theater and television work in England.
It was during Godspell that Irons met Cusack (daughter of famed classical Irish actor Cyril Cusack,) who was appearing in a play next door. The two wed in 1978 and have two sons, Sam and Max.
Three years later Irons became a force on this side of the Atlantic as well, thanks to the popular television series Brideshead Revisited, in which he played the melancholy gentleman painter who narrates the story. He cemented his reputation in America by starring as Meryl Streep's Victorian lover in The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981.)
But instead of parlaying his newfound stardom into bigger parts and salaries, Irons spent the next several years doing small, arty movies before debuting on Broadway in his Tony-winning Real Thing role. He followed that with a two-year stint back in England with the Royal Shakespeare Company before eventually taking on one of this most challenging acting jobs: playing deranged twin gynecologists in the 1988 psychological thriller Dead Ringers. It was a part other big-name actors, reportedly including Robert De Niro and William Hurt, had turned down, but Irons won rave reviews for his "schizophrenic marvel" of a performance. And he moved on to portray yet another conflicted, sinister, and enigmatic character--Claus von Bulow, the socialite charged with attempting to murder his heiress wife Sunny (played by Glenn Close, his co-star in The Real Thing)--in 1990's Reversal of Fortune. Said Alan Dershowitz, the attorney responsible for von Bulow's acquittal: "Jeremy Irons is a better Claus von Bulow than Claus von Bulow." The Academy agreed and handed Irons the 1990 Oscar for Best Actor.
Since then, Irons has appeared again with both Streep and Close in The House of the Spirits (1993,) provided the voice of the scoundrel Scar in the Disney animation The Lion King (1994,) faced off against Bruce Willis in Die Hard With a Vengeance (1995,) and played an ailing writer in Stealing Beauty (1996.) More recently, he starred as Humbert Humbert, the professor who falls in love with a 14-year-old girl in the 1997 remake of Lolita, which vigorously defended against charges that it encouraged pedophilia. He also starred in 1998's The Man in the Iron Mask.
Generally speaking, Irons' characters are not guys you'd care to spend much time with. They can be caddish, criminal, contemptible, and downright disgusting. Yet he says he has no trouble slipping in and out of their personas. "The characters are fairly ordered even though they may be chaotic in themselves," he explains. "They're circumscribed in a way one's own life isn't. So it's always rather a nice relief to get into a character and then, of course, get out and into your real life, which is always far more complicated...I find [the characters] easier than me."
And lest he sound locked into one type of role, Irons plans "to play a very outgoing guy" in his latest film, due to start filming this summer. He describes it as "a thriller," but declines to disclose its title.
What spare time the actor has these days is spent rebuilding his home-to-be, Kilcoe Castle. He shies away from estimating a move-in date, explaining, "they always say the way to make God laugh is to tell him your plans." All he'll say is that after 18 months of work, he's optimistic that the heat, water, and electricity will be hooked up soon. In the meantime, he and his wife live nearby. Their older son, Sam, 21 is studying at the University of Dublin and Max, 14 is enrolled in a British boarding school--just as his father was.
Given the family's acting heritage, does he think his sons might eventually join Mom and Dad on stage? "No. My older son is very interested in photography; the younger is too young to really know what he wants to do," Irons explains. "But we certainly don't encourage them [to go into acting] because I think it's a burden to have to tread in the paths of your famous parents. It's nice to make it on your own."
And, as far as Irons is concerned, in your own way--public opinion be damned. As proof, he took a jab at political correctness last January 1 when he announced that his New Year's resolution was to smoke more. So how much is he smoking these days? "Well," he laughs, "I sort of self-moderate. I reckon probably about 20 a day, but I roll my own. I don't like the rubbish that comes in the paper and I like fresh tobacco."
Ask him a serious question though--such as whether he has any regrets in life--and Irons instantly becomes earnest. "Oh no," he says firmly. "Life's too short for regrets. I don't believe in regretting."