The Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation celebrated the unveiling of the W.B. Yeats Bedford Park Artwork, Enwrought Light by Conrad Shawcross, with great actors Jeremy Irons, Sinéad Cusack, Ciarán Hinds, and Ruth Negga, on 6 September 2022, at St. Michael’s & All Angels Church in Chiswick, London.
Gabrielle Donnelly – Sat, Jul 23, 2022
Jeremy Irons (Image: GETTY)
IT’S EASY to forget Jeremy Irons is one of our biggest stars. His breakout role as Charles Ryder in the BBC’s acclaimed 1981 adaptation of Brideshead Revisited might have come some ten years into his career but it opened doors – lots of them.
Later that year he starred opposite Meryl Streep on the big screen in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and he hasn’t been out of work since. He is one of a handful of stars to achieve America’s “triple crown of acting”, winning an Oscar for Reversal Of Fortune with Glenn Close, an Emmy for TV period drama Elizabeth I with Helen Mirren, and a Tony for the Tom Stoppard play The Real Thing. Later he enjoyed huge success in the long-running TV series The Borgias and, more recently, has played opposite Lady Gaga in House Of Gucci and starred as wartime British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in the Robert Harris adaptation Munich: The Edge of War.
Yet away from the stage or screen, he shuns showbusiness circles and is happiest, he declares, at Kilcoe Castle in County Cork, southern Ireland, a 15th-century doer upper he bought a few years ago and has enjoyed renovating.
It is where he likes to huddle away from the bright lights of London, tinker with broken furniture and occasionally even take out his fiddle to join in musical evenings in the local pub.
He is so low-key in his private life, those around him can forget that he is, well, really rather famous. He chuckles as he recalls one time when his two sons were small and their then nanny took a work call.
“She answered the phone and came running into the kitchen,” he smiles. “She said, ‘Clint Eastwood is on the phone for you!’ Then she dropped to the floor in a faint.”
He shuns show business circles deliberately. “I don’t spend time with actors when I’m not working,” he insists.
Although he makes an exception for his actress wife Sinéad Cusack and their son Max, 37, who followed in his parents’ footsteps, unlike his elder brother Sam, 43, a successful photographer.
LASTING LOVE: Irons has been married to actress Sinéad Cusack for nearly 45 years (Image: GETTY)
Perhaps it is no surprise to learn Jeremy, 73, never planned to be an actor. The son of an accountant and a housewife, brought up in middle-class comfort in Cowes on the far-from-edgy Isle of Wight, he always wanted to be a vet.
“I wanted the sort of life that meant working with animals and being in the country, but I found out that my brain isn’t very good for sciences, so that wasn’t an option for me,” he admits. What his brain was good for, he discovered, was drama.
Playreading classes were the only ones that interested him at Sherborne, the public school he attended, and when he left, the obvious next step for him was to take a quick jaunt across the West Country to Bristol Old Vic.
“I wanted to be a gypsy. I wanted to travel around and stay outside of life and comment on it with a group of friends telling stories around the campfire,” he says.
“I wanted to be able to move outside the structure of life’s society, which I’d been educated in and didn’t like. I wanted to be a rogue and a vagabond, I was very romantic about it.”
What he found, when he left drama school, was a life of hard slog with more than a few knockbacks along the way.
He is reputed to have spent a few months busking around the streets of Bristol before he began to land small parts in plays, which led to larger parts in plays.
That included a stint in the 1970s with the Royal Shakespeare Company where, he recalls: “I might be rehearsing character A in the morning, doing a matinée as character B in the afternoon and playing character C in the evening.”
“I think I’m incredibly privileged,” he says today. “I work in a profession I love with some of the most wonderful people in any profession.
“OK, actors aren’t always the most wonderful community to be part of, but when it’s working, and we have a situation where the director has got the mix right, and the crew are all doing their job, and we have actors who are all telling the right story – and the same story, by the way – and are all adding their knowledge of life to it, and all going in the same direction, then that is the most wonderful feeling in the world.”
“It doesn’t always happen, but when it does, it’s like being part of a great orchestra playing a great piece of music. I get back from life one thousand per cent more than I put into it, and I think I’m very lucky because there are very few people who can say that.”
He is quietly proud of the acting success of Max, currently starring in the tense TV miniseries Flowers In The Attic, while taking another starring role in the long-running television spy thriller series Condor.
“He’s a wonderful actor,” Jeremy says. “He’s much better than I was at the age he is, and has been since he started. “He has difficulties at the moment because these big series like Condor, they keep you trapped.
“They sign you up for five series and it’s very hard to find other work that can fit in because they’re never sure when they’re going to start.
“So he’s been hanging around for longer than he should, waiting to film the third series. I keep telling him to do theatre, but he’s very much his own man. Although he did say the other day that he’d love to make a film with me, so who knows?”
Ask Jeremy what advice he would give to young people wanting to enter the profession, and he looks grave: fortunate as he admits he was himself, he is under no illusions about the difficulties.
“I would say to them – ‘Do anything else that you can!’ If there’s anything else that you’re good at, do it. If you have to act, act with amateur dramatics. If you really can’t do anything else, then learn how to do it, and practice, practice, practice.
“And know, going in, that the quality of work around is worse and less than it used to be. I’m incredibly lucky – which is why I’m talking to you here – but there are thousands around who aren’t.
“So make sure your life doesn’t hang on being able to work as an actor, because it probably won’t happen. But if you’re really determined, then push on through and maybe you’ll have a chance – if you’re lucky.”
Even if a young thespian does make it professionally, he adds, they should prepare themselves for a rough ride.
“It’s a very tough life for actors, certainly on their personalities. You have to put up with constant rejection. You have to put up with people thinking you’re more interesting than you are, which is not good for people.
“And above all, don’t do it because you want to be famous, which is what so many kids now seem to be doing in this world which we’ve created. Really, don’t do it for that reason because fame – apart from getting the odd table at a restaurant – is not what it is cracked up to be.”
True to his early veterinary ambitions, he remains an enthusiastic animal lover. His pet Smudge, a rescue from Battersea Dogs Home, goes everywhere with him, including the red carpet.
“Animals tend to make me happier,” he says. “I have very happy times when I’m with my dog and my horse.”
Then he smiles, thinking of Sinéad, the beautiful blonde to whom he has been married for nearly 45 years.
He rarely talks about their relationship; but right now just cannot resist making a small Irons-style joke, adding: “And with my wife, too. Believe it or not, she comes pretty close to my horse and my dog.”
Jeremy Irons attended the Allora International Festival of Cinema Art and Music, in Ostuni, Italy, from June 21-26, 2022.
Jeremy Irons and Sinead Cusack attended the 2022 Borris House Festival of Writing and Ideas in Co Carlow, Ireland. The festival took place from 10-12 June 2022.
Jeremy and Sinead read The Wasteland by TS Eliot, to mark the centenary of its publication. Jeremy and David Puttnam also had an ‘In Conversation’ session. Sinead Cusack read work by Seamus Heaney, during a discussion with Roy Foster and Catherine Heaney.
Jeremy and Sinead were also part of the Voices in Support of Ukraine, on the morning of Sunday 12 June.
Jeremy Irons and Sinead Cusack attended the launch of The Bright Foundation on 9 June 2022, in Hastings, East Sussex, UK.
The Bright Foundation (registered charity no. 1179452) is an arts education charity founded by Academy Award winning costume designer John Bright, providing creative learning to children and young people from two venues in and around Hastings.
Jeremy Irons and Sinead Cusack will be guests of the “Allora Fest”, the first edition of the International Festival of Cinema, Art and Music, which will take place in Ostuni, Italy, from 21 to 26 June.
On June 21, at 4 pm «Actors Talk Acting: Alfre Woodard and Sinead Cusack», the artistic director and journalist Silvia Bizio talks with the Emmy Award-winning actress Alfre Woodard and the Tony Award-winning candidate Sinead Cusack about the profession of actress.
Also on the 21st, in the evening, at 9.30 pm, Raoul Bova and the artistic directors Silvia Bizio and Sol Costales Doulton welcome the guests Paolo Canevari, Sinead Cusack, Matt Dillon, Jon Hamm, Jeremy Irons, Ayman Mohyeldin, Bobby Moresco, Edward Norton, Anna Osceola, Mario Parruccini, Joely Richardson, Oliver Stone, Marisa Tomei and Alfre Woodard, producers Marc and Vanessa Bikindou, Paula Boschi, Dean Buchanan, Leigh Collier, Michael Nozik, Celine Rattray, Agostino Saccà and others to inaugurate the festival and introduce the European premiere of Summer of Soul.
On June 24, expected meeting with Jeremy Irons at 4 pm the «Actors Talk». Interview with the actor about the challenges of winning an Oscar so early in one’s career and acting for stage and film.
Jeremy Irons and Sinead Cusack were on hand on 23 May 2022, for the RHS Chelsea Flower Show press day in London.
[This event happened on 30 March 2022]
In aid of charities in Poland and Moldova giving shelter, food and comfort to refugees fleeing war in Ukraine.
Speeches by the foremost expert on Putin’s Russia Misha Glenny and historian Sir Simon Schama.
Readings by Sinead Cusack and Jeremy Irons.
Music by the Kiva Cello Quartet; with a new arrangement of the Ukrainian National Anthem by Julian Jacobson, which includes passages from the Great Gate of Kiev by Mussorgsky.
Wednesday, 30 March 2022
18:30 – 20:30 BST
The Tabernacle
34-35 Powis Square
London
W11 2AY
United Kingdom
Organised by The Convention, this event will raise funds for the Wonder Foundation which, with its Polish partners, Panorama and Pontes, will provide long-term support for 600 families over the next year including accommodation for 125, as well as help with employment, education and assimilation to Polish society.
We are also supporting Katalyst, a food business incubator in Moldova that pivoted within hours of the invasion to preparing meals for refugees arriving in Europe’s poorest country, and providing them with food packages, accommodation, work and education.
Meeting the needs of the largest refugee crisis in Europe since 1945 is one of the great challenges of our time. The appalling things being done by Russian forces in Ukraine are in some way being countered by an extraordinary outpouring of generosity and commitment along Europe’s eastern border. After the UK’s shameful initial response, we are extremely glad to be part of this unprecedented effort in Europe. We hope you will be, too.
Jeremy Irons, Sinead Cusack, Eileen Atkins, Adjoa Andoh, and Elizabeth McGovern were at The British Library, on Tuesday 5 October 2021, to take part in the Josephine Hart American Poets Hour.
Visit The Poetry Hour’s Website
https://www.bl.uk/british-library-player/videos/the-josephine-hart-american-poets-hour
Photo by Henri Kisielewski / The Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation
From Sally at The Mill at Sonning:
“The Mill has had so many stops & starts over the last few months. Now it is onwards & upwards. Thank you for your support during this challenging year. You have been amazing.
I have conspired, with actors and friends, to put together a little Christmas entertainment for you. We have thrown everything cute into the mix from falling snow and beloved pets, to Christmas jumpers and Christmas trees. Even my Grandson has a tiny part. The cast – and what a cast! – have been so inventive when filming their lines at home. Lucy Fleming, Simon Williams, Tam & Danny Williams – 3 generations of Williamses !! Roz & Brian Blessed with doggie Milo. Jeremy Irons & Sinead Cusack. Two lovely actresses who often grace The Mill’s stage Elizabeth Elvin and Amber Edlin. And my good friend all the way from the USA – one of the original Ghostbusters – Ernie Hudson. Plus a final wave from my 2 year old grandson, Quint Okupniak Rolston. The piece has been beautifully illustrated by The Mill’s scenic artist Natasha Elcox. You will be charmed by the whole thing.”
jeremyirons.net 
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