BRAND NEW INTERVIEW - Jeremy Irons: Enduring Love In The Gaze Of The Press
by Michael Shelden, The Daily Telegraph (London)
December 10, 2001
Jeremy Irons talks to Michael Shelden about his taste for playing weirdos, his enduring if 'dysfunctional' marriage - and his problems with the press.
WEARING a blue robe and matching pyjamas, Jeremy Irons sits in the dim light of his dressing room with his bare feet propped on a chair beside mine. He takes a long drag on a hand-rolled cheroot, squints through the haze and gives me a friendly kick. Women, says Irons, like a touch of the dissolute in a man. He denies he's a womaniser, but 'I do love women, and I have a habit of affectionately touching them' "You know what still amazes me about acting?" he asks, in a husky drawl. "It's the fact that I can inhabit a part so completely and then walk away from it with no strings attached. I can play a killer and experience all his emotions, yet go home a free man."
A wicked grin lights his face and he laughs. "I keep thinking that I've played enough weirdos, but I can't seem to help myself. I'm drawn to dark, enigmatic characters with secret lives."
Indeed, at 53, his fondness for playing disturbed and debauched lovers - from the gruesome twin gynaecologists in Dead Ringers to the obsessed pursuer of nymphets in Lolita -has earned him a strange sort of sex appeal.
He's been called "the thinking woman's pin-up", and was recently featured as a young model's dark seducer in magazine ads for Donna Karan's fashions.
"What woman wouldn't want to be seduced by Jeremy Irons?" Karan gushed, when the ads first appeared.
Perhaps it's better to ask what draws women to a man who's the very antithesis of a hunk. There is no denying that his smoker's voice has a sexy resonance to it, that his dark hair is sleekly attractive and that his wan smile is wonderfully suggestive. But the rest of him has grown awfully rough around the edges.
The thin figure sitting opposite me looks cadaverous in the shadows. His face is gaunt, with thin lips and baggy eyes. He chain-smokes his little brown cheroots with the manner of a man dissolute to the core. In fact, "dissolute" is a word he rather fancies.
"You know," he says, pointing his cheroot at me, "women like a touch of the dissolute in a man. They find it attractive."
I don't have to take his word for it. I can see abundant evidence of it on the Toronto set of his latest film (tentatively titled "The F Scott Fitzgerald Project"), where various young women in the crew seem to follow his every move with eager eyes. At one point, I notice a few of them huddled near a monitor, watching the video replay of a scene in which Irons passionately kisses his young, leading lady, Neve Campbell. (He stars as Fitzgerald, the hard-drinking author; she plays his secretary.) The kiss is a long one and the women viewing it are rapt, appearing to savour every moment.
It doesn't seem to matter to them that Irons is twice the age of pretty Neve. Though it's been 20 years since he set hearts racing as the moody star of Brideshead Revisited and The French Lieutenant's Woman, he can still be very convincing in the part of a romantic leading man. Yes, his bad-boy image has its appeal, but he also cultivates an air of sophisticated charm that has served him well on screen, especially in his Academy Award-winning performance as aristocratic Claus von Bulow in Reversal of Fortune.
The son of a chartered accountant from the Isle of Wight, he was not a child of privilege or blessed with a glamorous upbringing. He was an average pupil at his boarding school -Sherborne in Dorset - and never attended university. For 10 years, he struggled to establish himself as an actor and worked at a number of odd jobs before suddenly emerging in the early Eighties as one of Britain's brightest young stars.
He speaks modestly of his ability to exude what he calls "creamy English charm", explaining that it comes primarily from physical qualities beyond his control. "I'm tall and lean, and I suppose you could say that I carry clothes well. And I have a very English face, which in my case means not a modern face. I was once told by a drama teacher that I would have been a big star if I'd been born 30 years earlier."
What, as an actor in drawing room comedies? "Well, as a kind of David Niven character who looks good at parties and pronounces all his words properly. I like Niven as an actor, and I think that Hollywood might have wanted me to follow in his footsteps, years ago. But I was determined not to do that."
If you imagine the debonair Niven trying to play Lolita's seedy seducer, you may understand why Irons has a talent for stirring up what one critic calls a "queasy type of lust". The reason that his performances are often so unnerving is that he can so easily make a tormented character seem attractive and repulsive at the same time.
"When my career began to take off after Brideshead, something in my personality made me rebel against the stereotypes that Hollywood wanted me to play. I knew I couldn't be a traditional star. There is too much anarchy in my blood. Besides, I rather enjoy shocking people."
Indeed he does. Last summer, he was the talk of the tabloids after he was photographed outside a Soho nightclub kissing the sultry beauty Patricia Kaas, a thirtysomething singer known as "the French Madonna". When the incident took place, Sinead Cusack - his wife and the mother of their two sons, 22-year-old Sam and 15-year-old Max - was at home, sound asleep. "Too Much Fire in Old Irons" was one of the more memorable headlines that appeared the next day.
But in this case, Irons insists, he wasn't trying to shock anyone. He says that it was a perfectly innocent incident that was blown up into a scandal by bored and malicious tabloid journalists.
"I'd taken a break from acting and had been out of the limelight for two or three years. I think some people in the press thought it was time to drag me back into the limelight and make some trouble for me. A lot of them dislike me because I've never tried to hide my distaste for certain things, and they see that as arrogance. I've always had my worst press in England."
But what about the photographs, Jeremy? Isn't that you kissing the lovely singer?
"Here's what happened. Patricia and I were making a film together called And Now Ladies and Gentlemen. After we'd finished work on it, she and her manager asked me to meet them at a club. I hadn't been to a nightclub in 10 years, but I decided to go and drove there on my motorbike.
"Later, when I left the club, I kissed Patricia goodnight, then she drove off with her manager, and I went home on my motorbike. But I saw the photographer taking the pictures and knew there might be trouble. When I got home, I said to my wife: 'I'm afraid there's going to be a picture in the papers', and told her what happened."
Unfortunately, there wasn't just one picture. Whole pages were taken up with studio publicity shots of the couple on the set of their new film, one of which featured Jeremy with his arm around a nude Patricia.
For good measure, the tabloids also ran several old photos of Jeremy posing in public with other young starlets at his side.
"I couldn't believe it. They published these casual photos you do at Cannes as though I'd posed with people I was dating. But I couldn't even remember the names of some of these girls. I hardly knew them. It made me look like the world's foremost womaniser. I've played parts like that, so I guess the press wants me to be that kind of person in real life."
And you're not?
"No. What's true is that I do love women, and I have a habit of affectionately touching them." He pauses and, like a good lawyer, pleads his case by asking me to trust my own eyes. "You saw the way I am on the set. I'm constantly going up to people and touching them. That's just the way I am when I'm working. I'm not this wild nightclubbing playboy chasing women all over the world."
As though to emphasise his fondness for touching, he gives me another friendly jab with his toe. Yes, he's right: he does love to make physical contact with anyone who comes near him. He gives impromptu back rubs and neck massages, and puts his arm around strangers as though he were an old friend.
Well, I'm willing to give Irons the benefit of the doubt about Kaas, but what about his relationship with his wife? Hasn't he been quoted in the past as confessing that his marriage is difficult and dysfunctional?
"Yes, I'd say we are fairly dysfunctional. But I love my wife and we're very supportive of each other. It's just that marriage is such hard work and we're both difficult people. We go from day to day. We're like two struggling non-smokers who try to get through each new day without smoking that next cigarette."
That sounds like a lot of hard work to me, but Irons and Cusack have been with each other for more than a quarter of a century and have put down some deep roots. They've acted in films together - most notably Waterland and Stealing Beauty - they share a large house in Oxfordshire, and have recently poured hundreds of thousands of pounds into the restoration of a 15th-century castle in West Cork. "It will cost more than it's worth, but I'm always paid more than I'm worth, so it works out all right."
This year, Irons painted the exterior a warm shade of pink and has had to brave a storm of criticism from neighbours.
"They say a man with two homes loses his soul, but I find them necessary. If I'm having to lead the gypsy life of an actor, I want those homes waiting for me to return to. I like my roots."
Cusack's career as an actress has probably suffered from her willingness to keep the home fires burning while Irons plays the gypsy. This year alone, he has acted in four films and has come to Canada in the winter to play F Scott Fitzgerald in this new production about the author's last days. His wife has not accompanied him.
Irons is full of praise for Cusack's talents, but admits that she has not had an easy time working in the shadow of his success. "My wife is an amazing woman whose beauty gets more intense as she grows older. But I don't think she has a lot of confidence in herself. That might change, however, if the right film comes along."
When they met in the early Seventies, Sinead invited Jeremy to her flat for coffee and he impetuously promised: "If I come up, I will stay for the rest of my life." At that time, he was recovering from the failure of his first marriage, and now says that wife number one - actress Julie Hallam - left him because he was "very dull". It would seem that he has tried valiantly not to make the same mistake in his relationship with Cusack.
Whatever else it may be, life with Jeremy cannot be boring. Yet he now claims that he wants to slow down and spend more time just being an ordinary husband and father. He is devoted to his sons and wants to play a larger part in their lives. The older boy is studying to be a professional photographer, the younger is thinking of becoming an actor when he finishes school.
It's difficult to imagine Irons permanently forsaking his gypsy life. His status as a sex symbol may soon fade, but he seems to need acting as a form of release. In his Irish castle, he can play the eccentric country gent who shuns the limelight. In London and New York, he can roam the streets on his motorbike late at night, leaving breathless starlets in his wake with each completed film.
It's not surprising to hear that his wife understands exactly who he is. He stubs out his cheroot and explains: "My wife likes to describe acting as the shy man's revenge and I think she's describing me. I'm not by nature a person who likes to stand up and show off. But acting has allowed me to escape that more retiring part of my character. It liberates me in a way that nothing else can."