Taking A Chance On Life As An Actor
by Jay Stone, Vancouver Sun
October 23, 2004
A teacher once suggested that Jeremy Irons join the army
Acting! You meet Jeremy Irons sitting on the balcony of his downtown hotel room, rolling his own cigarettes -- tastier, he says, and more economical that way -- and wearing an incongruous strand of beads around his neck. He is an elegant English gentleman with a strain of counter-culture in him: The tall, reserved actor who started as a busker and was told, as a schoolboy, that his future probably lay as a parachutist with the Royal Marines.
"I suppose there is a sort of Boy Scout in me. The army might have been all right but at that time I had no desire to do that," Irons says, recalling the advice of his schoolmaster when Irons was a mediocre student in England.
"I used to wander around playing my guitar, earning money. I could, I think equally, have joined the circus or joined a fairground. Instead I joined the theatre and liked it and then thought, 'I've got to learn how to do this,' so then I went to drama school. It suited me very well. It's given me a fantastic life. It's given me the ability to do things that a lot of people dream of."
The theatre is very much on our minds today. Irons is wanting to talk about Being Julia, the Canadian movie set in the world of the London stage in the 1930s. Irons plays Michael Gosselyn, an impresario and the husband of an aging theatre star (Annette Bening.) It's a film about growing older in the theatre, and an older woman's revenge, and it includes such stalwarts of the genre as the sexy ingenue, the calculating diva and the slightly befuddled producer trying to keep everyone happy.
It's based on a Somerset Maugham story, but its themes are in no way dusty or out of date. Ask Irons if show business still has room for, say, the sexy and ambitious ingenue, and he replies, "Oh please. All you have to do is to go back to the files and see who's on Mr. [Harvey] Weinstein's arms over the years," referring to the head of Miramax films.
Irons, 56, came to the world's attention -- what he calls "my first big international boost into the arena" -- in the TV series Brideshead Revisited, which was followed by the movie version of The French Lieutenant's Woman in 1988. He won an Oscar for his role as Claus von Bulow in the 1990 film Reversal of Fortune. He works on TV, stage and in movies: he has also won a Tony Award (best actor in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing) and an Emmy (his voice-over performance for The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century.)
Like his character in Being Julia, he lives in a show business family. His wife, Sinead Cusack, is an actor (as are her father and three sisters,) and he knows the strains that Michael and Julia have in the movie when their private lives run up against the responsibilities of the stage.
"It's a big part of my wife, the actor in her," he says. "And she will sublimate that for us and for the children but it can never be forgotten . . . I hope I'm a support for her in the way Michael Gosselyn's a support to Julia."
They have two sons, Sam, 26, a photographer, and Max, 19, an aspiring actor. Irons says acting is a hard road, but he has to let his son decide for himself whether it works.
"I think it's a less interesting and secure profession than it was when I started, 30 years ago or whatever. But when I said to my father I want to be an actor, he was a chartered accountant, he had no experience of it at all and he gave me the best advice. He said, "You have to try. I don't know much about the business and I think it's a really tenuous business, but if you don't try and if I don't support you, then you'll always regret it."
Irons gave himself 12 years to make it in the business. And 12 years later, he was making The French Lieutenant's Woman.
Irons became interested in theatre as a student. As a teenager, he was playing the violin in the orchestra of the opera Noye's Fludde, which was being put on at his school.