Pierce Brosnan – a Profile of the Matador and the Last James Bond
“I think that all the films I’ve ever made are personal, even James Bond, because it’s so much of myself, so much of who I am as a man and as an actor. You have to invest yourself in every character that you portray”.
Born in Drogheda, County Louth and bought up in Navan, County Meath, Pierce Brendan Brosnan is one of the most famous Irishmen in the world today. He could also be one of the smartest, because his production company – the aptly-named Irish DreamTime – has several big-budget movies in development.
Most keenly-awaited is probably the Topkapi Affair, a follow-up to The Thomas Crown Affair, the film that really saw him emerge as a full-blown movie star outside the world of 007. Also on their slate is Butterfly On The Wheel, a kidnap thriller in which Brosnan really throws away the rulebook and plays the villain, a kidnapper who terrorizes a family after snatching their young daughter.
Since Brosnan and Beau St. Clair formed Irish DreamTime in 1996, they have regularly returned to Ireland to roll the cameras: in their first production The Nephew, Brosnan co-starred alongside veteran Irish actors Donal McCann and Sinead Cusack, and in Evelyn, where Brosnan played a single father fighting to keep his family together, he again picked the cream of Irish acting talent in Aidan Quinn, Stephen Rea and John Lynch.
Even though she works more behind-the-scenes, Beau St.Clair has been with Brosnan all the way, and worked on films such as The Mosquito Coast and as production supervisor on the musicals Threepenny Opera and Shogun before joining him at DreamTime.
As most people remember, it was the television series “Remington Steele” that first bought Brosnan to the public eye, although the more sharper-eyed had already spotted him in a cameo as “First Irishman” in the classic The Long Good Friday, starring Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren in 1980.
Remington Steele was a career criminal gone “straight” and started again as a private investigator, and ironically the huge popularity of the show meant that he missed out on his chance to be James Bond. He had originally been chosen to replace Roger Moore in 1986, but his small screen contract stopped him getting his license to kill, and the role went to Timothy Dalton instead.
It would be ten years later before Brosnan finally stepped into the role – and over thirty years since a young Pierce had stepped into a movie theater for the first time and sat down in front of the silver screen to see Goldfinger – the very the first Bond film that was released in 1964.
While the four films that Brosnan starred in as 007 made over a billion dollars worldwide and he established himself at the No.2 spot as the Best Bond, the No.1 spot is still held by Brosnan’s own favorite:
“There was only one Bond for me, and it was Sean Connery. That made the role daunting.”
Much has been made of Brosnan’s ability to switch between English and Irish accents so easily, but although his childhood gave him this ability, it was not necessarily a happy time. Although he was close to six foot tall by the age of 11, the family had recently left Navan and moved to London and the young Pierce was regularly bullied for being Irish. There had been some darker moments before that:
“In those dark days, in the 50s in Ireland, if you were a single parent living in that society, you were somewhat shamed and stigmatized. I can certainly relate it to my parents, especially my mother. The old man took to the hills and my mother never saw him again, and suddenly you are spoken about in the Sunday service in church, never directly but they would bring up the issue of being a single parent and of marriage falling apart.”
Regardless of the past, Brosnan was made a Freeman of Navan in 1999, and four years later he was awarded an honorary OBE – awarded to non- British citizens by Queen Elizabeth II to people who have made an important contribution to British interests – and became “an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire”.
Today, Brosnan is getting some tremendous buzz for his role in The Matador – something that certainly never happened for most of the other actors who played Bond – and we may well see him in his tuxedo once again, but this time it will be as he steps up the podium to receive an award. It seems that he’s determined not to get trapped in sharp suits, drinking shaken not stirred martinis:
“Bond is an enigma. He’s smooth and bigger than life, but he’s vague as a personality. It’s a little like doing a period piece. Look, I’m thankful, the role made me an international star. I’ve been in the backwaters of Papua New Guinea and heard, “Hey, Bond.””
