After some extensive stage work in the classics, Jeremy Irons made his first impact as Charles Ryder, the outsider looking on at the decline of aristocracy in the 1981 BBC miniseries of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Over 12 hours playing time, Irons was able to dramatize every facet of his complex character, a rather ghostly, passive, loving yet slightly scheming man who describes his own past in ornate language that is lingered over in Irons’s cello-like voice-over, which matches the rich brown sadness of his eyes and his piercing sudden smiles.
Charles doesn’t have a firm center, and so he tries out being a little gay at Oxford and a lot in love with the boyish and charming Sebastian Flyte (Anthony Andrews, in a very moving performance), an alcoholic who is at war with his Catholic mother Lady Marchmain (Claire Bloom, memorably seductive and manipulative). “I believed myself very close to heaven during those languid days at Brideshead,” Charles says at the end of the first episode and the start of the second. “It is thus I like to remember Sebastian—as he was that summer when we wandered alone through that enchanted palace.”
Irons makes Charles appealing and poignant, a conventional man trying to be unconventional before caving in to society and his own nature, and he also isn’t afraid to show us the inactive, wormy side of the character. Irons had an unwholesome, funereal presence and a lugubrious way of speaking that exactly suited the character he was playing in Brideshead Revisited, but his best scenes are the ones where Charles toys with being louche and decadent like Sebastian, doffing his clothes to reveal a surprisingly sinewy body.
Irons was a leading man to Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), where he tried hard to keep a low flame of desire going but didn’t get much in response from Streep. He was the center of Jerzy Skolimowski’s Moonlighting (1982), where he had to carry the film with gently Polish accented voice-over and silent, nearly mock-feminine, doe-eyed reactions to all of the material abundance of a capitalist country (he is comic in a low-key way here when his character is being frustrated or annoyed). Irons gives an observant performance of real sweetness in Moonlighting with little dialogue or obviously dramatic situations to sustain it.
After that he won a Tony award for his performance in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing on Broadway in 1984 and made a few prestigious movies that didn’t work out too well before taking his best part—or parts—the twin gynecologists in David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers (1988), which cannily uses how Irons appears to be Boris Karloff crossed with Montgomery Clift.
Starting from the archetype of the “good” and “bad” twin, Irons establishes this accepted movie convention and then goes about complicating it, step by step, until we can’t be sure where one quality—or twin—leaves off and the other begins; he gives a tour-de-force performance here, to be sure, detailed and twisted and vulnerable and unexpectedly funny in a monster mash sort of way. This is the movie that revealed Irons as an actor most stimulated by challenge rather far removed from his classical theater roots, for he seems to relish the jolts of humor in Dead Ringers and the charge of what could be considered trashy material done in a cool and formal style by Cronenberg.
Irons won the Oscar for best actor for his Claus von Bulow in Reversal of Fortune (1990), a skillful if limited performance where his soulful eyes and the ghoulish voice he uses makes for an effective contrast. That role allowed him little scope compared to Dead Ringers and Brideshead Revisited, and he seemed to know as much. In his Oscar speech, Irons rightly said, “Some of you might understand why…thank you David Cronenberg.”
Irons then took big risks in the graphic sex scenes in Damage (1992), where he is struck by a mad passion for Juliette Binoche. In that movie Irons had to carry the whole thing with his eyes and with his body, and he was at his best, loaded and repressed, furious and seething with guilt and desire. But then Irons made a bad mistake when he accepted the role of the Latin-American autocrat in The House of the Spirits (1993), in which he was howlingly miscast and gave one of the worst performances of the 1990s.
He was a villain in Die Hard: With a Vengeance (1996) and had an interminable death scene in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty (1996) before taking one more role that suited him: Humbert Humbert in Lolita (1997), in which he displayed all of his aptitude for unreasonable and nasty passion. In the years after that, Irons moved mainly into more secondary roles, often as a support for divas like Fanny Ardant in Callas Forever (2002), Al Pacino in The Merchant of Venice (2004), Annette Bening in Being Julia (2004), Helen Mirren in Elizabeth I (2005) for TV, and Laura Dern in David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006) before having to resort to parts in superhero pictures and worse.
Irons sometimes puts his foot in his mouth in interviews, which is why most actors should seek to restrict such opportunities for disaster. But the voice of his Charles Ryder is not to be forgotten, and his twins in Dead Ringers are as alarming as ever. Surely he is ready for a major role again, maybe as a decadent elderly aristocrat caught up in some kind of body horror?