Jeremy Irons

Right from the start of his career, Jeremy Irons was what Orson Welles called a “king” actor. He that plays the king must have the voice, the stature, the presence and the gravitas, and Jeremy Irons has them all. In that baroque, doomed film The Mission – it gets better every time you see it -- Robert de Niro has the wild energy but Irons has the inner stillness. This authority comes in especially handy when, now, in a later phase, he is sometimes called upon to play the autumnal patriarch whose rueful wisdom the brilliant young would like to borrow. In Stealing Beauty, Liv Tyler quite credibly adores him. I always thought the principal casting in the famed television series of Brideshead Revisited was back to front, because Irons was too much of a natural aristocrat to be credible as someone drawn to the aristocracy, and if he had played the decaying Sebastian the sense of loss would have been all the greater. By that measure, his Oscar for playing Claus von Bülow in Reversal of Fortune was earned in the first scene. Intelligence marks everything he does, even when he is being interviewed, a situation in which most actors go into default charm mode. Irons thinks before he speaks, and then, as the viewer will find here, speaks well.