Jeremy Irons: The Reluctant Supermodel
by Lydia Slater, Sunday Times (London)
February 4, 2001
The American designer Donna Karan has turned Jeremy Irons into a model, but the actor makes an unlikely clotheshorse, discovers Lydia Slater.
Jeremy Irons was an obvious choice for Donna Karan's new spring/summer advertising campaign. Not only is he an internationally famous, rumpled British actor with killer bone structure, just like her previous choice, Gary Oldman; he has also, unlike most men (even models), frontline experience in wearing a body.
In case you don't remember - oh, the fickleness of fashion - Karan's finest hour came in the mid-1980s, when she put the women of the world into leotards with snap fasteners at the crotch, and called them "bodies". Hugely popular with the power-dressing female executive, the body was not widely adopted by gentlemen for anatomical reasons.
Irons, however, has always been prepared to suffer for his art. When he played Claus von Bulow in Reversal of Fortune, he copied his attire precisely, right down to the groin-fastening shirts. "It's so they don't wrinkle around your middle," he explains. "It definitely helped. I found myself standing much more stiffly, and it gave me an insight into his personality." Who can doubt it?
Now 52, the clothes that Irons models for Karan are very different, for which he is doubtless grateful - loose, pyjama-style suits, and (phew) crumpled shirts, which are offset perfectly by Irons's haunted expression and tousled hair. ("I wasn't sucking my cheeks in," he assures.) The scene is set in Ho Chi Minh City, and focuses on the tragic-looking passion between Irons and his co-star Milla Jovovich, as they canoodle steamily in costly outfits.
Irons's face has a repertoire of expressions that extend far beyond the traditional model's pout/snarl to encompass a rather queasy type of lust and a miserable- looking happiness.
"It was rather like acting," he muses. "Only, if a film is a concerto, then this was like playing jazz. You still build inner stories. I was imagining a chance encounter with a wraith."
Why was he chosen? "I've no idea, and I was terribly surprised to be asked. I haven't modelled for 35 years, not since some terrible thing I did for a magazine wearing 'hip clothes' - ghastly."
The answer must be partly because Karan admits to fancying him ("What woman wouldn't want to be seduced by Jeremy Irons? " she has swooned), but mostly because, ever since Brideshead Revisited, Irons has been associated with a certain type of understated British elegance - beautifully cut but shabby suits, ancestral tweeds and so on. His resonant voice is redolent of port, cigars and ancient cloisters; his hair still has the trademark public schoolboy's floppiness, even though he is a chartered accountant's son and was born on the Isle of Wight.
It is not that you expect him to wear cricketing flannels all year round, but when he appears in an orange lumberjack shirt with a tartan interior, tucked into baggy blue cords and finished off with Timberland boots, the look doesn't quite fit the image.
"Don't you like this shirt?" asks Irons, looking a touch wounded, then bursting out laughing. "I'm not very interested in clothes," he admits. "I can see their aesthetic appeal on other people, but for me, they have to be practical. I hate the feel of new clothes; it's nice when they've moulded to your body."
When he does exercise his sartorial tastes, the result is not always a success. He owns, for instance, a pair of bright scarlet shoes - "which I wear when I want to put a spin on something".
Mostly, however, his wardrobes are full of scruffy clothes that would be more appropriate for a builder than for an international A-list celebrity. "But I do have some things by Donna Karan - a very nice jacket and a pair of sweaters," he insists. "I felt totally comfortable in the clothes I wore for the shoot, although in real life I'd never wear shoes without socks."
For the past two years, Irons has more or less abandoned acting in favour of restoring the 15th- century Kilcoe Castle, in West Cork, which was destroyed by the English in the early 1600s, who left it without floors, walls or crenellations.
But this project has not been easy: Irons complains bitterly that, having removed the ancient render and repointed the entire building, a task that took 12 people nine months to complete, it had to be rendered again when water poured in during last year's winter storms. "The firm we wanted to do the job couldn't do anything for nine months, and when they did do it, it was the wettest August on record, and the render had to stay dry for two days after it was applied ... "
Still, he has no regrets about taking on the enormous project. "I think when you reach your fifties, if you have fairly youthful looks for your age," he says, adding hastily, "with the light behind you - well, then there comes a time when you have to change, do something different to mark a new phase in your life. Like Brian Blessed climbing mountains, you know."
Aha! A midlife crisis?
"I don't think it's a midlife crisis," he says, drawing on his third cheroot with a slightly nettled expression. "I don't notice myself being more crisis-ridden, apart from the fact that the older you get, the faster time goes, and you begin to realise that if you don't do what you want to now, it's going to be too late. That's why I bought my first big motorbike when I was 40.
"I'd just finished Lolita, which I thought was fantastic, but which was dumped on from a great height, and I was bored with all the parts I was being offered, so I decided to find a project that tested and frightened me as much as film work. And there was a poetic equation to it. The castle would require far more money to be spent on it than it is worth, and I have always been paid too much, so it evened itself out. Hugh Hudson, the director of Chariots of Fire, came to see the castle and said, 'This is worth 20 films.'"
With restoration costs now estimated at more than Pounds 1m, Irons has had to go back to work, however. Last year, he left the castle for two-weekly intervals to perform his role of an evil wizard in the forthcoming fantasy Dungeons & Dragons. His next project is The Fourth Angel, a film about a man whose family is wiped out in a hijack and who takes revenge. "I can understand that," he says thoughtfully, his saturnine features suddenly exuding menace. "Like everyone else, I get frustrated by the things I read in the papers - hunting, transport, the health service ... I don't think field sports should be banned, it's a huge infringement of our civil liberties."
So, he won't be giving any more money to Labour, then? "I think they're getting enough money from other people, don't you?" he says. "Actors tend to be on the side of the underdog. And anyway, part of me loves to stick two fingers up at everyone."