She's no fan of wedlock. He likes younger girls. So what is the secret behind this very peculiar marriage?
by Ross Benson, Daily Mail
July 23, 2001
Jeremy Irons is caught in a clinch with a younger woman. So where does that leave his wife of 23 years?
BY: Ross Benson
AS A young man, Jeremy Irons had a winsome way of attracting any girl he fancied. He would produce a guitar and then serenade her with a medley of songs that always included the old Everly Brothers' hit, All I Have To Do Is Dream. The Oscar-winning actor is still employing the same romantic approach on film sets and fashion shoots, but the technique is looking distinctly threadbare these days.
The songs may not have changed and the girls certainly haven't. They are what they always were - young, desirable and occasionally susceptible.
The trouble is that Irons isn't a strutting teenager any more. He fights to keep himself in physical trim, but the hard fact remains that he is a grey-haired, 52-year-old married man with two children, aged 22 and 15.
His friends take a tolerant view of his antics which, earlier this month, included kissing actress Patricia Kaas, 32, outside a London nightclub at an hour when most married men his age should be at home, safely tucked up in bed.
'You must remember that Jeremy's a serial snogger,' says one.
His bizarre choice of clothes is another matter. In a daffodil yellow leather jacket with trousers tucked into biker boots and flowing public-school locks tucked under an Afghan beret, he seemed, on that particular night, to be in a Sixties time warp.
'You have to wonder what's going on inside his head,' says a fellow thespian who has known him for the best part of 30 years. The answer would appear to be obvious, but Irons denies it. 'I don't think it's a midlife crisis,' he says. 'I don't notice myself being more crisis-ridden.' There may be some truth in that, for in a sense, Jeremy Irons has been in a crisis of one sort or another for most of his life. The child of a broken home, he gives the distinct impression of being in perpetual search of himself.
THIS was given stark illustration by his enthusiasm for Iron John, the New Age self-help book by American poet Robert Bly, which advises men to get in touch with their masculinity by hugging trees, beating drums, collecting twigs and weeping on the shoulders of other men.
This inner discord - one critic called him 'a man in search of a personality' - helps make him the consummate actor he is. But it also makes for a difficult companion, and Irons has been variously described as pretentious, controlling, obsessive, contemptuous and arrogant.
It also makes him a troublesome husband, and his 23-year union with Irish actress Sinead Cusack has had its quota of difficulties.
'There is no such thing as a happy marriage,' Sinead says. 'There are moments of happiness, boredom and misery. These moments are what marriage is made up of.' Irons puts it more brutally. 'It's a completely dysfunctional marriage,' he says, only half joking.
Both he and Cusack seem to enjoy talking publicly about their ups and downs.
But Irons is less forthcoming about his parents' marital disruption.
He never mentions that they divorced when he was a boy. Or that he spent his teenage years, along with his older brother, Christopher, and sister, Felicity, shuttling between his chartered accountant father, Paul, and his mother, Barbara, who remarried and settled near Henley in Oxfordshire.
The break-up of his family did not appear to affect him unduly as a teenager. He was educated at Sherborne, the 500-year-old, GBP 5,000a-term public school in Dorset.
Friends from his Oxfordshire youth remember him as personable, well-mannered and easygoing.
'He once turned up at my house with 40 people for an impromptu party - much to the fury of my parents,' says Louise Hall, daughter of the late principal of Oxford University's Brasenose College. 'It was Jeremy who got me out of trouble by sending my mother flowers the next morning.' On Boxing Day, he would invite his friends over to his mother's home in the Chilterns for an informal breakfast followed by a long walk through the woods. 'He was great fun back then,' one of his crowd recalls.
But all was not quite as it seemed.
After the death of his mother last year, he remarked that although he had felt 'a soul-wrenching love' for his father, who died in 1983, he didn't have quite the same feeling for his mother.
'I think she sent me and my brother away to school so that she could enjoy life and be free during term time.' It was a harsh judgment on a woman who took immense pride in her son's achievements and who left him more than GBP 300,000 in her will.
BUT then, Jeremy Irons has made a habit as an actor of wearing his hang-ups on the sleeve of his powder-blue jumpsuit. 'I strongly believe it is an actor's duty to live life to its deepest and not just skate comfortably over the surface,' he says.
Indeed, he hardly set foot on the ice of his first marriage. While training at Bristol Old Vic he met and wed Julie Hallam, who once starred briefly in the old BBC crime show Softly, Softly.
A theatre gave them a season of plays together - it was supposed to be a wedding present. According to Irons, working together put too great a strain on their relationship. They parted within months. 'I'm a very difficult person,' he concedes.
Sinead Cusack has every cause to agree with him. They met at a birthday party in London in the late Seventies, when he was appearing in Godspell and she was starring in London Assurance at the theatre next door.
The relationship almost ended before it started. 'After Jeremy was introduced to me, he called me Siobhan,' she recalls. 'I was so infuriated I hit him.' Irons described this as his coup de foudre, (the sudden, overwhelming and painful event that changed his life). Nursing a sore jaw, he invited her out for dinner. When she asked him up for a cup of coffee afterwards, he said that if he accepted, he'd stay for ever. She told him to push off.
He refused and they were married in Camden, North London, in 1978 (and not 1977 as he states in Debrett's Distinguished People Of Today. Not surprising, since neither Jeremy nor Sinead pay much attention to dates - both having, in the past, forgotten their wedding anniversary). A son, Samuel, was born six months later.
At this stage, Sinead was considered the more promising actor, but after the success of the TV series Brideshead Revisited, in which he played an effete version of the public schoolboy he'd once been, it was Irons who made it into the big time.
Starting with the French Lieutenant's Woman opposite Meryl Streep, he went on to appear in a succession of successful films which established him as one of Britain's finest actors.
The long absences that this entailed, coupled with his extramarital guitar playing, put an inevitable strain on his marriage and, by 1982, their relationship was under 'great stress', as the gossip columnists slyly put it.
'The trouble has been that we've hardly been together in the past two years,' Irons explained. Sinead agreed. 'Jeremy's been away working for long periods. It's very, very hard on a marriage, especially as we are both difficult people.' MRS Irons wasn't the kind of wife to sit at home and mope, however. The daughter of Ireland's leading actor, Cyril Cusack, she once enjoyed a fling with George Best, and had been a reluctant bride ('I've never liked the notion of being legally bound to someone - the legal bit is slightly abhorrent,' she said).
While Jeremy was away, she sought comfort in the company of thrice-married Terry Hands, then head of the Royal Shakespeare Company, who was between spouses. It was, Sinead later said, a cry for help, 'and Jeremy wanted to help'.
They reconciled and a second son, Max, was born in 1985.
Age has not mellowed Jeremy Irons, however. Rather to the contrary. They settled in a Georgian house in a peaceful village in the shadows of the Chilterns, but instead of relapsing into prosperous middle age, his behaviour became even more erratic.
'You must remember that Jeremy is terribly complex,' says one friend.
Winning the Oscar for his riveting portrayal of Claus von Bulow in Reversal Of Fortune has only aggravated his problems. 'It should have made him a Hollywood superstar, but it hasn't,' the friend observes.
And his decision to play a paedophile in the 1997 remake of Lolita certainly didn't help. The film was deemed too controversial to be distributed in the U.S. and, ever since, the work his talent deserves has been hard to find.
Admittedly, his career has started to pick up again recently but, with time on his hands and money in the bank, Irons found he was able to indulge his ever more capricious whims.
He bought his first motorbike at 40, and then started driving a 7.5ft-wide American High Mobility MultiPurpose Wheeled Vehicle.
He also bought a medieval castle in Ireland. 'There is a poetic equation to it - the castle would require far more money to be spent on it than it is worth,' he says.
If that sounds off-the-wall, so was his decision to paint the outside of the ancient fortress bright peach, insisting: 'Just as my mother's new hairdo always looked better the day after it was done, so the castle will look better tomorrow.' The locals don't agree. Nor does Greg Dyke, the BBC's director-general, who has a holiday home nearby. He calls it an eyesore, and its owner a lot worse.
Then there is his bizarre choice of clothes. They have become eccentric to the point of absurdity, and when he turned up for a Donna Karan fashion shot with actress Milla Jovovich, she refused to be seen with him until he changed out of his pointed Turkish slippers.
'He is angry and he's searching,' says another friend. 'The trouble is that Jeremy doesn't know what he's looking for.' The one bit of stability in all this, surprisingly enough, is his marriage to Sinead Cusack. The couple continue to have their difficulties (in the circumstances it would be a miracle if they didn't).
But despite everything, their relationship is a solid one. As Sinead once observed: 'Jeremy doesn't throw anything out. He's never even thrown out a Dinky car, so he'd find it difficult to throw out the major element of his world.' A mutual friend has another theory for their marital longevity.
He says: 'Sinead is the only person who'll put up with him.'