Jeremy Irons tells Helen Brown why he relates to his latest character - an actor who squandered his talent
Thin, black roll-up between his fingers and fluffy white mongrel at his feet, Jeremy Irons is a man of contradictions. He says he’s “intensely private”, yet is most at ease before an audience; he’s an “unintellectual” who loves T S Eliot; a critic of capitalism who lives in a castle. He is also, I discover, when we meet at a rehearsal studio in south London, an Oscar-winner so grounded that he brings coffee for his interviewer.
“I got you a cappuccino,” he purrs, in a softer, sleepier version of the “chocolate on gravel” voice that made my old English teacher swoon when she first heard it on Granada’s 1981 TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, and that these days makes my kids squirm with delight when it comes snarling from the animated jaws of Scar in Disney’s The Lion King. “Do you...