Irons Ready For A New Challenge
by Val Aldridge, Evening Post (Wellington)
February 16, 2001
British film star Jeremy Irons is in Wellington. The international, controversial star of the film Lolita tells Val Aldridge that he is taking part in the BT Global Challenge, around the world yacht race, because he is easily bored and needs new challenges
He sits in big Zinzan's shadow, facing a battery of cameras, television, press. The overseas media asks "who is Zinzan?" of the mast-type person. "Some rugby person."
Pick the international star in this lineup of boat people. It wouldn't surely be the taut-faced nervous fellow, eyes constantly travelling the media crowd?
On further scrutiny, it is indeed Jeremy Irons, the charismatic star of the controversial film Lolita. He's just flown in to be a "celebrity legger" on the Wellington to Sydney run of the BT Global Challenge, a round the world yacht race, in leading yacht LG Flatron.
Watchful. Perhaps that's partly why he's so good in his roles; he takes in other people, stores them up for later use. The sponsor's cap sits low on his brow, his near 1.8-metre (5ft 11in) frame sloped under the table, and looking decidedly edgy.
In front of him is the sole ashtray on the table. He draws first on a roll-your-own and then on a thin brown cigarillo-type fag. To be a compulsive smoker, even if you're an international movie star with an Oscar on your office shelf, is to be uncomfortable in company these days.
He says he told the skipper, a fresh-faced blond Conrad Humphries, that he'd be smoking on what, till now, has been a smoke-free boat. An accomplished punchline follows, delivered in a voice like velvet.
The brown eyes smile and he nods toward his skipper: "He says `Fine. If you can keep the paper dry, have a cigarette'."
That sounds an ominous precursor of conditions to come. Irons has been an amateur sailor from the age of five – he was born in Cowes on the Isle of Wight, which bills itself as the home of yachting – but only small-boat, old-fashioned sailing.
He first won international acclaim for his role 20 years ago in the television series Brideshead Revisited. He seems more relaxed discussing acting rather than sailing.
Asked if he has paid for his place, like most of the amateur adventurers in the crews, he laughs and says of the parade of interviewers, "I'm paying for it now". He says he always finds media promotion difficult.
Irons, 52, says he agreed to take part in the race because he's easily bored, needs challenges. "It is a desire not to hang around. Life is short, I like to do things which test me, surprise me, require risk and which open up things about myself and about life I didn't know."
Is that what draws him to deep and difficult roles? Yes, he says. Numbered among his successes have been the movies The French Lieutenant's Woman and the eerie Dead Ringers, in which he played good and bad twins.
His Oscar was won for his part in Reversal of Fortune in 1990, in which he played Claus von Bulow; von Bulow was accused of killing his wealthy New York wife by insulin injection in a case that drew international attention.
Irons, who has starred alongside such beauties as Glenn Close and Meryl Streep, seems to be at his best in dark, brooding parts.
He had to be persuaded to take the role in Lolita, which was based on Vladimir Nabokov's novel about a 40-year-old's affair with his 12-year-old stepdaughter.
"We made it at a time when paedophilia was, still is, a very high-profile problem and it was seen as a film about paedophilia.
"It wasn't, it was something different but the film caused a huge fuss. I was very disappointed at the outrage."
One of the functions of film and art, he says, is to stir up questions, to make us question human behaviour and try to understand it.
Lolita is a disturbing film, he says, "but I hope when you get to the end of the film you understand a little bit more how people can get into that sort of mess.
"There is the paedophile in all of us, the murderer in all of us . . . we all have these qualities but thank God we keep to the straight and narrow and go by society's rules".
The von Bulow role was difficult, he says, because he was impersonating someone who was still alive.
Von Bulow had been found guilty but was freed on appeal. Having lived the part, Irons says he is 99 per cent sure von Bulow did not kill his wife, "but he did carry guilt . . . anybody whose wife is not happy carries guilt."
Irons, who lives in Ireland with his actress wife Sinead Cusack – the couple is said to have spent more than NZ$3.4 million restoring a 16th century Kilcoe castle near Skibbereen – says they must by necessity spend a lot of time separated.
"But that's the nature of our relationship as actors." On the other hand, this is the guy who once told an interviewer that the older his wife got, the more beautiful she was.
The have-a-go star has just returned from a fashion shoot in Saigon for international designer Donna Karan, and last year sang a bracket of five Noel Coward songs at the Last Night of the Proms.
He says that he's now regretting being the voice of the millennium for the British Government's millennium ads, which left the impression he was endorsing the Millennium Dome.
He later got offside with the government for his criticism of the Dome. He had felt it was a complete fiasco, he says. "I said all along `dump the dome, don't even start building it. It will be a millstone round your neck'. . . "