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“When actors were unable to record their lines in the studio, Correy and Abraham turned to Zoom. One of the actors who recorded his “Once Upon a Studio” dialogue from home was Jeremy Irons, who played the villainous Scar in “The Lion King.” Irons reportedly maintained his signature cool exterior as he viewed the story reel, but he threw his whole body into his recording session, repeatedly knocking his headphones off his ears as he imagined Scar dodging Mr. Toad flying by on Aladdin’s magic carpet.”
Unlock the Ancient Wonders in AlUla Narrated by award-winning actor Jeremy Irons
Come along with an international team of researchers as they unlock an ancient paradox in the desert oasis of AlUla.
Follow their journey – from legendary heritage sites such as AlUla Old Town to mysterious mustatils – in the Discovery Channel Documentary Architects of Ancient Arabia.
Christmassy cheesy goodness coming your way! Jeremy Irons presents a festive cheese selection, from the delicately creamy Collection Luxury Truffle Brie to the rich and subtly crunchy 3-Year Old Cornish Cruncher Cheddar. Because this is not just cheese, this is M&S cheese.
And the best bit? With Jeremy’s help, Marks & Spencer is donating £2 million to good causes this Christmas.
“I am so proud that merely by my endorsement of some great food, M&S is supporting both kids in Kolkata who have so little, and sick people in rural Ireland to get emergency help. I congratulate M&S on their inspiring campaign and hope it leads to further humane initiatives, as we battle against and emerge from this Global Pandemic.” – Jeremy Irons
Jeremy’s chosen charities are The Hope Foundation and Irish Community Rapid Response.
A documentary short film narrated by Jeremy Irons thanking Save Venice supporters and showcasing the beautiful places, people, and patrimony that make our preservation work essential.
Hear from: Paola Marini, Art Historian and President, Association of International Private Committees for the Safeguarding of Venice; Giovanni Cucco, Mosaic Conservator; Gabriele Matino, Art Historian and Save Venice Research Fellow; Greta Sartorato Student, Istituto Veneto per i Beni Culturali; Marcella Ansaldi Director, Museo Ebraico di Venezia; Alberto Nardi, Save Venice Board Member and Owner, Gioielleria Nardi; Frederick Ichman, Chairman, Save Venice; and Tina Walls, President, Save Venice
Produced by Magnet Media Films. Filmed in Venice by Ginko Films. Additional Venice footage by Illumina Films. Filming and broadcast permissions authorized by the Ufficio Beni Culturali of the Curia Patriarcale di Venezia.
Save Venice Inc. is the leading American nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the artistic heritage of Venice, Italy. Since 1971, Save Venice has worked tirelessly to preserve, protect, and promote the art and culture of Venice and has funded the conservation of more than 550 projects comprising over 1,000 individual artworks. In 2015, Save Venice established the Rosand Library & Study Center in Venice, creating a nexus for the research of Venetian art, history, and conservation. Save Venice also provides grants for fellowships, exhibitions, and publications to advance Venetian scholarship and conservation.
The Red Funnel Isle of Wight Digital Literary Festival is delighted to announce that the Cowes born, multi-award-winning actor Jeremy Irons will be opening the digital festival on Friday 9th October at 7pm.
Irons will read Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark (An Agony in Eight Fits).
Boojum and Snark Irons’ reading brings Carroll’s enigmatic nonsense poem to life. The Hunting of the Snark describes the voyage of a bizarre crew of nine tradesmen and a beaver on their quest for the elusive and mysterious Snark, who lives in the sea and might be a dangerous, deadly Boojum.
The poem is a backward one with Carroll writing the last line of the poem first. Written in 1874 while caring for his sick cousin and godson the finished poem wasn’t published until 1876.
The Hunting of the Snark has been chosen for its Island connection: the book is dedicated to Gertrude Chataway and opens with a poem that uses her name as a double acrostic. Carroll met the nine-year-old Gertrude on the beach in Sandown in 1875.
Esteemed career in the The Arts Irons has a rich and much-lauded career in theatre, film and television. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1990 for his performance as Claus von Bulow in Reversal of Fortune.
He was awarded Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe and Emmy for his role in the television miniseries Elizabeth I (2005) alongside Helen Mirren. He went on to play Pope Alexander in the Showtime historical series The Borgias (2011), and portrayed Henry IV in the BBC Two series The Hollow Crown opposite Tom Hiddleston.
Irons may be best known for his role as Charles Ryder in the cult TV series Brideshead Revisited (1981). Most recently he starred alongside Regina King in the HBO series WATCHMEN, the revamp led by Damon Lindelof.
Free digital festival
Decide the talks you want to see – check out the programme
Take a note of the day and the time of each talk. It’s free; you don’t need to register, book a ticket or reserve a seat
The Ancient Mariner Big Read is an inclusive, immersive work of audio and visual art from the 21st century that reflects the sweeping majesty and abiding influence of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 18th century epic poem.
The Ancient Mariner Big Read, which launched on Saturday, 18 April 2020 and was commissioned by The Arts Institute at Plymouth University, will see the 150-verse poem divided into 40 readings, with readers, including Jeremy Irons, each recording three or four verses to be broadcast daily for free. The project will combine the readings with works from major artists and refocus on the poem’s “urgent ecological message”.
Reader: Jeremy Irons Actor Recorded at Bath Priory, Somerset Artwork: Glenn Brown The Shallow End Oil on panelJeremy Irons photographed by Philip Hoare
It is an ancient Mariner, And he stoppeth one of three. ‘By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?
The Bridegroom’s doors are opened wide, And I am next of kin; The guests are met, the feast is set: May’st hear the merry din.’
He holds him with his skinny hand, ‘There was a ship,’ quoth he. ‘Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!’ Eftsoons his hand dropt he.
He holds him with his glittering eye— The Wedding-Guest stood still, And listens like a three years’ child: The Mariner hath his will.
The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone: He cannot choose but hear; And thus spake on that ancient man, The bright-eyed Mariner.
“Porto Legends — the Underground Experience” is an immersive virtual show that brings you deep into the hidden secrets and legends of the Undefeated City.
From
the magical architecture of the Porto Customs House — Furnas da
Alfândega and the work by the renown historian Joel Cleto, OCUBO Studio
created a show full of mystery, suspended between reality and
imagination.
With
artistic direction by Nuno Maya, the show is narrated by the voices of
Pedro Abrunhosa, the great Portuguese author, and “Best Actor” Academy
Award winner Jeremy Irons.
All mysteries are an integral part of the soul of the city and will be narrated by voices, graphic animation and music, so the walls of Furnasda Alfândega will come alive to tell the public their story.
The
show is a unique and immersive audiovisual experience of national
resonance which aims to become a landmark of the city, a must-see
cultural icon to be enjoyed by the people of Porto and by visitors
alike.
From Good Friday, 19 April 2019, through Easter Monday, 22 April 2019, BBC Radio 4 aired Jeremy Irons reading The Psalms of the King James Version of The Bible.
Click on the audio players below to listen to each episode:
Jeremy Irons reads Leonard Bernstein’s poem “Finalizing the Deal, I Believe You Call It”, a negotiation with a gender-changing God, penned six months before his death.
In May 1990, near the end of his storied life, Leonard Bernstein drafted “Finalizing the Deal, I Believe You Call It,” a poem bargaining with God, reminiscent of his Symphony No. 3, “Kaddish.”
Click on the player below to listen to Jeremy reading the poem:
.
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Leonard Bernstein, composer and conductor, rehearses at Carnegie Hall in 1959 in New York City. (Photo by David Attie/Getty Images)
Finalizing the Deal, I Believe You Call It
1. Trimeters
I made a deal with God.
God, she was tough to deal with.
Dealt me a tempting clause —
Then a sharp zap to the kidney.
It wasn’t a real deal,
Really, just a sort of
Gentleperson’ s Agreement.
We almost shook on it;
The snag was Time, time
Not just to live it out
To the maximum, only to write
That one Important Piece.
“How do you know it will be
That important?” she asked.
“I’ll know, all right, but there’ll be
No way to prove it. Not in a court
Of law, especially our kind
Of court. No witnesses.”
“Bull****,” she murmured. “It’s the same
Old thing again: Afraid
To Die, afraid to try
The consequences of Not-to-Be.”
“Wrong,” I said. “Afraid
Died in my vocabulary
Long ago — except of hurting
Someone I love, and then
Of not writing my Piece
Before my Not-to-Be.”
Long discussion; not to bore you
With it: We swapped equations,
We weighed the torts and liens.
2. Tetrameters
Then she became suddenly tender,
At the same time changing gender.
“I offer the Answer to the Unanswered Question
In trade for cancer, or lethal indigestion.”
I thought to myself: unfair bargaining.
Much more painful to know the Answer
Than any form of mortal cancer.
3. Mixed Doubles
“But the Cosmos,” she wheedled,
“The ultimate macro-atom.”
”No deal, thank you, madam.”
Changing gender, she played her ace
In the hole. The biggest. “Beginninglessness.”
That did it. I signed on.
We shook on it.
I’m still shaking.
~LB
Revised Prague
May 29, 1990
Understanding Bernstein’s “Finalizing the Deal…”
How do we measure a musician’s merit? How do we make peace with not knowing our legacy?
In Finalizing the Deal, Bernstein craves a God-like understanding (“conception of the inconceivable”) he calls “beginninglessness” — a concept he coined two years earlier in “Beauty and Truth Revisited” (“For want of a clearer / Conception of the inconceivable, / Beginninglessness, the lineage of a star, / The key, the Ultimate Creative Mind, / He calls it God…”).
As he and God argue over the importance of his “one Important Piece” and how it will be judged (*warning: Bernstein’s God swears), Bernstein says he no longer fears death (“Afraid / died in my vocabulary / Long ago”) — only personal and professional regret (“hurting Someone I love” and “not writing my Piece / Before my Not-to-Be”).
Bernstein — who suffered from cancer and the side of effects of treatments, and often advocated against nuclear war — rejects two offers from God (the “answer to the Unanswered Question” and understanding “the ultimate macro-atom”).
This time, “beginninglessness,” is offered; Bernstein accepts, sealing his fate, if not calming his soul.
.
Audio of Jeremy Irons recorded for The Bernstein Experience on Classical.org/WGBH Educational Foundation by Mark Travis, Associate Director of Media, Production, for the New York Philharmonic. Special thanks to Jeremy Irons, Mark Travis, Jamie Bernstein, author of Famous Father Girl; and Barbara Haws, archivist of the New York Philharmonic Archives.
Leonard Bernstein’s poem used by permission of The Leonard Bernstein Office, Inc. All rights reserved.
Jeremy Irons Breathes New Life Into ‘The Poems of T.S. Eliot’
by Lyndall Gordon
THE POEMS OF T.S. ELIOT By T.S. Eliot
Read by Jeremy Irons
3 Hours, 41 Minutes. Faber & Faber.
There is no definitive voice for reading T. S. Eliot. His own manner, with its proper enunciations, can’t be placed. He was always from somewhere else. In his native St. Louis, his family looked to ancestral New England; at Harvard, he came from a “border state.” As a newcomer to London, teaching schoolboys in Highgate, he was “the American master.” He discarded his American accent without ever coming to sound unquestionably English. I wish it were possible to consult Professor Higgins: Can there be a neutral delivery, devoid of geographical cadence? The recordings of Eliot’s poems try for transparency; lasting content takes precedence over any one reader at a single point in time.
Eliot is the master of the unsaid. Irons’s sensitivity to Prufrock’s hesitation on the brink of utterance allows the poetry to bring out a prophetic impulse without sounding entirely absurd: “Do I dare / Disturb the universe?”
Like other great readers of Eliot (among them John Gielgud and Alec Guinness), Irons combines the velvet with emotionally alert variations in pace. With the line “It is impossible to say just what I mean!,” he speeds up the frustration seething beneath Prufrock’s genteel front, complete with formal necktie. Irons makes a bold decision to let loose the speaker’s longing, to the point of a sigh, and he is wonderfully suggestive in the variations on “Shantih shantih shantih” echoing on at the end of “The Waste Land.” I used to wonder if “the peace which passeth understanding,” Eliot’s note to this word, was building or fading. The poet’s own deadpan reading did not provide an answer, but Irons comes down on uncertainty with three different intonations. His final, stretched-out “Shantih” injects a strange intimacy following a thunderous “DA,” announcing rain — water as a sign of the spiritual fertility that Eliot longed for all his life.
Irons voices an Eliot who craves, desires and suffers more openly than in the sober accents of Gielgud and Guinness. Their recordings, completed during the poet’s lifetime, perhaps felt the impress of Eliot’s neutrality. Yet for them, and for Irons too, the poet appears one of us, which is to say that in all these recordings Eliot becomes more English than I think he really was. Irons glides smoothly over a barrage of judgments in “Marina,” “Death” being embodied in “Those who sit in the sty of contentment” and in “Those who suffer the ecstasy of the animals.” Here is an annihilation of the flesh worthy of his Puritan forebear Andrew Eliott of Salem, a juror in the witchcraft trials.
Instead, Irons lends himself to what coexists with the voice of judgment: what is hesitant, what feels unattainable and the struggles of a flawed being in “Four Quartets.” A high point is when Eileen Atkins joins Irons in the best “Waste Land” reading ever in terms of interpretation and play of voices. Listen especially to the repartee of a man and a woman caged together in a hellish union. Their emotional duo and the naturalness that Irons brings to Eliot make this set of CDs a special gift.
Lyndall Gordon is the author of “The Imperfect Life of T.S. Eliot,” and, most recently, “Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World.”
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