Background
IRONS, Jeremy was born on September 19, 1948 in Cowes, Isle of Wight, United Kingdom.
IRONS, Jeremy was born on September 19, 1948 in Cowes, Isle of Wight, United Kingdom.
He had been educated at Sherborne and the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, and he was one of those English actors who had seen and felt the upper reaches of the class system.
He seemed happier doing exotics than gents: he was Mikhail Foldne in Nijinsky (80. Herbert Ross) and a very credible Pole in Moonlighting (82, Jerzy Skolimowski). Whereas he seemed conventional and staid in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (81, Karel Reisz), in the D. H. Lawrence story, The Captain’s Doll (82, Claude Whatham), and in the Pinter wrong-way-rounder, Betrayal (83, David Jones).
That he was looking for something different was evident from The Wild Duck (S3, Henri Safran), and the very unsatisfying Swann in Love (84, Volker Schlondorff), to say nothing of the woefully pretentious The Mission (86, Roland Joffe). Having wearied a little of lofty cinema. Irons turned to low'er depths: hence his magnifi¬cent double performance as the twins in Dead Ringers (88, David Cronenberg), one of the greatest performances of the eighties. Moreover, Irons’s capacity for gentleness and gallows humor surely enabled Cronenberg to enrich his own film. Thus, out of potentially exploitative material came a masterpiece, as well as the realization that Irons was adventurous, in love with disguise, play, and very bold strokes. In short, he was no Charles Ryder.
Whether that spirit can find the right parts remains in question. For the moment, Irons seems attached to Englishness and small subjects—A Chorus of Disapproval (89, Michael Winner), from Alan Ayckbourn; Danny the Champion of the World (89, Gavin Millar); and Waterland (92, Stephen Gyllenhaal), a curious and misguided adaptation of Graham Swift that seeks to transfer the Fenland to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Still. Waterland did allow Irons to work with his wife, Sinead Cusack.
Meanwhile, Irons won his Oscar for a verv skilled one-note impersonation as Claus von Billow in Reversal of Fortune (90, Barbet Schroeder). The result is sketchy, and a fraction of Dead Ringers, but it does show that Irons’s English gentlemen need to be bogus, and out of the dafter reaches of imagination, if they want to hold the actor’s interest, lie was wasted in Kafka (91, Steven Soderbergh) and he could not bring sympathy, belief, or the required monstrous, uncontrollable need to the M.P. in Damage (92, Louis Malle). He played one more aghast onlooker in Tales from Hollywood (92, Howard Davies) for TV. He was helplessly adrift in M. Butterfly (93, Cronenberg) and The House of the Spirits (93, Bille August), projects that began to suggest how easily Irons could become an outcast actor.
That 1994 prediction gets fair marks. Irons has wandered, he lias done voices, and he lias had some offbeat parts in films not widely seen: the voice of Scar in The Lion King (94, Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff); another awful villain in Die Hard: With a Vengeance (95, John McTieman); taking a long, wordy time to expire in Stealing Beauty (96, Bernardo Bertolucci); the voice of Siegfried Sassoon on TV’s The Great War (96); Chinese Box (97, Wayne Wang); valiant as Humbert Humbert in Lolita (97, Adrian Lvne), but a touch too sinister compared with James Mason’s healthy intellectual superiority; Aramis in The Man in the Iron Mask (98, Randall Wallace); voices in animated films—Poseidon’s Fury (99) and Faeries (99); Longitude (00, Sturridge—his old discoverer); a voice on Dungeons & Dragons (00, Courtney Solomon); Ohio Impromptu (00, Sturridge); The Fourth Angel (01, John Irvin); The Night of the Iguana (01, Predrag Antonijevic); Callas Forever (02, Franco Zeffirelli); The Time Machine (02, Simon Wells); as F. Scott Fitzgerald in Last Call (02, Henry Bromell).
Irons was best known as Charles Ryder in the universally admired TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (81, Charles Sturridge and Michael Lindsay- Hogg). He seemed so well cast as the gaunt, slightly out-of-his-element, and increasingly melancholy observer of grandeurs decline. His sad, subtle voice was made for the voice-over narrative. His soulful reticence was an unstressed sustenance to the larger sense of erratic but worthy aristocracy he beheld. His Charles Rvder was fit tor Waugh, and for Graham Greene. If one looked ahead, it was to imagine Irons as, maybe, Richard II, Uncle Vanya, or any of Greene’s mortified witnesses to their own lack ot quality.
Married Sinead Cusack.