ACTOR Jeremy Irons is out to rid himself of the persona of Charles Ryder, the character he played in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, which returned to Channel Four recently.
Irons (once the debonair hero of such dramas as Love For Lydia), makes this clear as he talks about his reasons for taking on the totally different role of the Polish foreman-Nowak in Jerzy Skolimowski’s film Moonlighting, which Channel Four also screened, last month.
‘It was done to break the mould,’ he says, ‘the Charles Ryder mould.’
Cetainly, Nowak, as played by Irons, was a mould-breaker, a Pole whom Irons created by drawing on his knowledge of Irishmen.
‘There are very strong parallels between Poland and Ireland,’ Irons says. ‘Their people both have inferiority feelings about their own worth. Both are very poor. Both have a history of being overrun. Both are the butts of international humour.’
Alt of which is not to say that in breaking the Charles Ryder mould. Irons is dismissive of the role or the series.
Jeremy Irons himself is sitting in his personal caravan outside Zap Studios in Sydney, Australia, wearing a black T-shirt, cords and sandals, drinking Australian lager from a can and casting his mind back to the role which brought him to the forefront of the modern school of English actors.
‘Charles Ryder.’ he explains, ‘is the one through whose eyes you see the story of Brideshead. What I felt I had to do was to be the eyes for the audience.
‘In any case, it is not an actor’s job to make himself shine — it’s an actor’s job to fulfil his role.’
What comes through as he speaks is not facile enthusiasm but analytical dedication. Jeremy Irons, Gent. Hot Property, keeping his cool, betraying no haste short of covering a lot of ground. And there’s a deal of ground to cover.
Public school, busking. Godspell, Wild Oats (in which his wife-to-be Sinead Cusack told him — as she was coming off-stage and he was going on — that she was pregnant), marriage, Brideshead Revisited, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Fame, Fortune and All That Jazz, Betrayal, The Captain’s Doll.
And now he faces possibly his most challenging test of all, the 2.2-million-dollar Australian feature film version of Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck.
He co-stars with Liv Ullmann, at 44 a renowned interpreter of Ibsen’s work.
Director is Henri Safran: Paris-born, London-trained, Sydney-based.
Irons’ producer is Phillip Emanuel, sometime boy actor in Coronation Street, founder of The Pool Theatre, Edinburgh, and now resident in Sydney.
In the film. Jeremy Irons plays Harold Ackland. With his wife. Gina (Liv Ullmann). Harold runs a photographic business in a small industrial town.
Harold and Gina and their 13-year-old daughter Henriet-te (Lucinda Jones) lead a quite happy life, despite the fact that they are poor and Henriette is losing her sight.
An old friend of Harold’s, Gregory Wardle (Arthur Dig-nem), shatters their contentment by revealing to Harold that Henriette is not really his daughter. She is the love-child of Wardle’s father. George (Michael Tate), whose housekeeper Gina once was.
Asked why he had decided to do the film Irons savs: ‘Great scripts are not easy to find. There is a lot of lavatory paper about.”
Producer Emanuel is in no doubt about Irons’ performance. ‘Magic,” he says, clearly hoping that the magic will also turn the tears and the laughter into hefty box-office takings.
Liv Ullmann defines the essence of the Irons appeal. ‘He brings with him a secret. I think that is always interesting,” she says. ‘Great actors always give the sense of having a secret.’
In part, the Jeremy Irons secret is technique. ‘You have to flirt with the camera.” he explains. ‘Make love to it. Make it laugh. I used to watch myself turning my head away from the camera, until I learned better. I use the camera as a window through which I pass to the people’
In part, his secret is in his attitude. ‘I am a romantic. I prefer to see life as something beautiful. There is an awful lot of happiness in the world. It needs no exaggeration.”
After he completes The Wild Duck. Irons is bound for Paris and the feature film Swann in Love, based on part of Marcel Proust’s masterpiece Remembrance of Things Past.
Again, characteristic of Irons’ approach, he is proposing to play the part of Swann in French and is listening to tapes to perfect his accent.
‘If Robert de Niro can put on weight to play a 15-stone boxer, as he did in Raging Bull, I can put on French to play a Frenchman.’ he says.
Irons docs not attempt to hide his hope that this feature film version of part of Proust’s classic would lead to a tele-vsion series based on the complete work.
After Swann in Love he is to play the role of Biggies — nostalgia hero for an actor whose appeal is at least three parts nostalgia.
On the way back to his hotel, I asked Irons how he resisted the temptation to do everything that was offered while he was so much in demand.
‘That would be the quickest way to shorten a career.’ he replies. ‘I’m pacing myself. I am only half-way there. I mean to work till I’m 70.’