Pierce Brosnan: James who?
He's a good husband, a great father, a serviceable singer and a brilliant Bond. But one of these roles Pierce Brosnan would rather not talk about - despite Nigel Farndale's best efforts.
Where do we stand on Pierce Brosnan? Opinion, well, the little of it I canvassed before meeting him, seems divided. Men are unexpectedly harsh. He's too smug, they say. Too knowing of his good looks. Clearly spends a couple of hours a day working on his hair. Women are kinder, their theme being not just that Brosnan is good-looking but that he has been a good father to his five children (two adopted) as well as a good husband to both his wives (his first having died of cancer). That's three goods.
My impression of him, when we meet in Soho, is that he does not seem particularly comfortable in his skin. Though he has a crusher handshake, there is a primness to him, a preciousness. He is immaculately groomed in black suit, black shirt and black scarf flicked over his shoulder, just so. His hair is (suspiciously) black too, as well as neatly cut and blow-dried, and all this blackness makes the vivid blueness of his eyes the more startling.
He's had his teeth fixed, which may be a sign of vanity. Then again, if you look out for him in his full screen debut - he plays 'first Irishman' in The Long Good Friday - you'll see he had teeth like Victorian gravestones, so this seems fair enough. Unless he has had his face fixed as well, which he claims he hasn't: he has indecently smooth and young-looking skin. Perhaps it's the L'Oréal moisturiser. There is an ad campaign running at the moment showing his face next to a pot of the stuff.
He may not look his age, but does he feel it? 'No, it's good Irish genes,' he says. 'I don't feel 54, but I do see the age creeping in. You do change little by little.' He saw his Spotlight photograph the other day, the one that appeared in the official casting directory when he first started acting in 1975, after training at the London Drama Centre.
'This young kid in the production office said, "F--- me, is that you?" So he thought I'd changed. Perhaps it's a matter of perception. I don't think my mother looks her age. She has a sharp disposition in her 76th year. And the old man that I never knew had a spry, chiselled look to him. Snow-white hair. Flinty, squinty eyes. I look a bit like him.'
Thomas Brosnan was an alcoholic who earned a living as a carpenter in County Meath and who abandoned his family when Pierce was two. The young Brosnan's mother left Ireland for London to train as a nurse, leaving her son to be brought up by her parents. He followed her over when he was 11, only to be picked on at school for being Irish. He fought back and soon learnt to conceal his Irishness. He has described his childhood as full of 'loneliness'.
As an adult he has been compared to an expensively elegant yet tightly furled umbrella, and that's about right. But the unease you notice is also partly to do with the way he talks himself up, partly with his convoluted, overly wrought speech patterns - they are almost stream-of-consciousness at times, with him asking and answering his own questions. It is also to do with his mid-Atlantic voice. It seems self-consciously smooth, whispery and polished, tortured almost, as if he is still a teenage boy trying on various voices to see which one seems the most impressive, rather as schoolchildren try out different signatures before settling on one. There's an obvious explanation for this: an identity crisis. He's an Irishman who has taken American citizenship, but has made his name playing a well-spoken Englishman. 'It's only confusing if I let it be,' he says. 'Intrinsically, I'm the same person I was as a young lad and I think I still have the optimism of life, still the same wants and desires to be good and great about what I do. I have asked myself that question. When I went to America I spoke so much about who I was and gave so much away in a confessional, Irish, story-telling way that I suddenly realised I had given up a lot of myself. I had to shut up.'
Did his 11-year-old self have a strong Irish accent? 'Yes, and a strong sense of his Irish identity. Very Irish. Nineteen sixty-four; Putney Comprehensive School. Made to feel different, and no child wants that, so the performance began. The seeds of acting. Before that, I was in Ireland and the first theatrical performance was being an altar boy at church. The whole celebration of the Catholic Mass. I was enjoying being up there and looked at. I still go to church. Went last night.'
The impression he gives of being uncomfortable with himself may also be to do with his having had his identity stolen by James Bond. These days he seems to want to play it down. The biography on his website even begins: 'Perhaps best known worldwide as James Bond...' Perhaps?
Read more...
http://commanderbond...n...&item=47684 - The Telegraph
