The actor looked back on his impressive career, sharing lessons he's learned and stories from set, in conversation with Danny Leigh.
Listen to the interview in full
On 9 September 2016, Jeremy Irons joined an audience to discuss his career, from falling into theatre because he thought acting “might be a nice way to live my life,” to the moment he won an Oscar for Reversal of Fortune in 1991 and his most recent projects.
We asked interviewer Danny Leigh to share some of the highlights from the evening.
The worry at the start of Jeremy Irons’ BAFTA Life in Pictures was how you followed the montage of clips that opened it. With dozens of glorious moments from a screen career of more than 35 years, a different actor might have ended up overshadowed by their own performances. Yet as soon as he walked onstage, a very dapper Irons was a lesson in showmanship.
“I really enjoy risk. I always feel like I can’t do it when I start an acting job and I love that.”
The first thing under discussion wasn’t acting at all. As he explained, Irons only came to the profession after a spell as a schoolboy musician in 1960s Dorset. He played the drums, the name of the band, superbly, The Four Pillars of Wisdom. “We wore Arab head-dresses and did covers of The Beatles and Buddy Holly.”
Later, he graduated to a guitar, busking for the crowds outside the cinemas of Leicester Square. “Playing to the queues,” he called it, and it cemented a love of performance that – after a spell as a social worker in Peckham – led him to try acting. “I just thought it might be a nice way to spend my life,” he said about his decision to train at the Bristol Old Vic, where his tutor Nat Brenner told him he might actually make it if he learned to stand up straight.
Even after Bristol, he spent less time acting and more time working as a cleaner for a company called Domestics Unlimited:. “How people live,” Irons smiled. “You wouldn’t believe it.” But the 70s would prove a busy decade on stage and TV, until the landmark series Brideshead Revisited in 1981. (Having realised it might be a success, Irons confessed he wanted the role of Charles Ryder largely because he survived until the end.)
Watching a scene from his breakthrough movie The French Lieutenant’s Woman, he winced self-consciously. But the audience were rapt, as they were when he discussed the challenge of playing two parts in one film – a Victorian paleontologist and the modern actor playing him in a film-within-a-film. Cast as both men’s lover, Meryl Streep was, he said, “hugely generous”, especially when preparing for a love scene with shows of casual affection. “By the time we got to the scene it felt completely natural.” Then, that evening, Irons arrived for dinner with Streep and her family. “And Meryl was Meryl again, mum and actress. But she had chameleoned into my lover for that day to make it easy.”
BAFTA/Jamie Simonds
Less happy was his experience on Roland Joffe’s The Mission. Here, music again took a role, although the memory of the iconic scene in which Jesuit priest Father Gabriel plays the oboe was tainted by composer Ennio Morricone later changing the score. So the trained eye, Irons said, would see him playing the wrong notes. “But I did learn to play the bloody thing.”
Still, his clearest memory on set was a spiky relationship with co-star Robert De Niro who, perhaps because their characters were adversaries, spent two months refusing to speak to him. In the end, there was a loud “set to.” Now, the pair are firm friends, but the memories linger: “I don't know how much of it was method, but it was very unpleasant,” he said to gales of laughter.
After The French Lieutnant’s Woman, one of most enduring movies again found him playing two parts: David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers, with its dual roles as twin gynaecologists. He had, he said, used energy points on the body to subtly differentiate the characters, putting the dominant brother’s energy in the centre of his forehead (“where you headbutt people!”). It was, he said, “a good idea. It might even have been mine.”
Irons admited the “creepiness” of Dead Ringers got under his skin. This seemed the right moment to discus Reversal of Fortune, in which he played Claus von Bulow, the Danish aristocrat found guilty but later acquited of trying to murder his wife. The role saw Irons win the Oscar for Best Actor, which he discussed with wry pragmatism. An Oscar is won, he said, more from your time having come than your actual performance. Still, he remembered the thrill of hearing himself announced as winner - kissing a nearby Madonna, despite not knowing her. “My fee didn’t go up,” he said, “[but] it’s a very comfy place to be, having an Oscar. You feel you’ve got a seat on the sofa.”
There was still time to discuss the full breadth of his screen work, from his first “juggernaut movie,” Die Hard With A Vengeance to working with David Lynch on the experimental Inland Empire (“like the most obscure, enormous modern painting”). “When I start an acting job, I always feel like I can’t do it,” Irons said at the end of a hugely entertaining evening. “I like risk. It seems it energises me.”
By Danny Leigh
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