“As you get older, you look back and try to make sense of the kind of person you’ve become,” Jeremy Irons confessed a few years ago. Today he turns 75 and he does so working on what he is passionate about, acting, and proud of having started a family.
The actor, who spent part of his childhood in a boarding school and experienced his parents’ divorce at the age of 15, has said on occasion that he has spent his life “trying to return to that feeling of home.” He has found that sense of family in the theater and in the movies, but above all, in his personal life, together with the Irish actress Sinéad Cusack, with whom he has been married for 45 years and with whom he has had his two children. , Samuel and Max. “You don’t really have a home until you have kids. And that home is created by the children,” he says. His children have already grown up; They are now two men, 45 and 37 years old, both actors.
Jeremy Irons is still at the forefront. “Basically, I want to keep working, so I don’t worry about the size of the character; If it’s interesting, I’ll do it. In a way, it’s quite nice to play smaller roles. It means that I get home sooner and I can continue with my life,” he reflects. For next year he has three premieres pending in which he participates: The Beekeeper, Eternal return and Frankel: “I am very lucky because I work in an industry that often pays very well and allows me to do other things that interest me.”
With more than a hundred credits behind him, he can boast of being one of the nine actors who have won the Triple Crown of Acting, that is an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony; In his case, he has an Oscar, two Tonys, three Emmys and also two Golden Globes. Of course, although he has participated in major North American productions, he has always been faithful to his British roots: “To be honest, I have made films in Hollywood only because they paid. very good,” he said on one occasion.
Born on September 19, 1948 in Cowes, Isle of Wight (England), as a child he showed his artistic inclination by playing drums and harmonica in a student band. When it came to studying, he opted for Veterinary Medicine, but he did not obtain the degree. He moved to Canterbury, in the south-east of England, to try to gain a foothold in the theater scene. While still a teenager, he did various jobs at the Marlowe Theater in Canterbury and later studied at the Old Vic Theater School in Bristol. They say that while waiting for his first opportunity in London’s West End, he dedicated himself to cleaning houses for several months in the British capital, until finally his career began to take off with the musical Godspell.
After participating in plays and the occasional television series, her first highlight came in 1981, when she starred in the television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, which was a resounding success and earned her a Golden Globe nomination. That year he starred alongside Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, which caught the attention of critics. He continued to achieve successes, such as The Mission or Inseparables, until he established himself as an internationally renowned actor. In 1990, his performance in The Von Bülow Mystery earned him the Oscar for Best Actor. It was in that decade when he established himself with films such as Wounded, The House of the Spirits, Lolita or The Man in the Iron Mask, among many others.
Already in the 2000s, Irons won an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe for his role in the miniseries Elizabeth I. And in recent years he has become interested in superhero projects such as Watchmen, Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice, Justice League or Flash.
In his personal life, he married for the first time at the age of 21 to actress Julie Hallam; The marriage did not last even a year. Almost ten years later he walked down the aisle again with his current wife, Sinéad Cusack. His confessions about love – “Part of our nature is to have as many partners as possible” – and his closeness to other women have led to the belief that the couple lives in an open relationship.
He has come to define his marriage as “dysfunctional.” And once, she declared: “Sinead and I have had some tough times. Every marriage has them because people are impossible. I am impossible, my wife is impossible, life is impossible. No marriage is what it seems.” On numerous occasions, images of Irons kissing other women have come to light and his wife has also been photographed kissing other men. Despite everything or perhaps because of it, Irons and Cusack are on their way to their golden wedding anniversary.
