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Jeremy Irons

Jeremy IronsAKA Jeremy John Irons

Born: 19-Sep-1948
Birthplace: Cowes, Isle of Wight, England

Gender: Male
Race or Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Actor

Nationality: England
Executive summary: Dead Ringers

The English actor Jeremy Irons was educated in a boarding school, and says he still remembers the haunting loneliness of his first night away from home at the age of seven. His parents divorced when he was in his early teens. He played drums in a rock band, Four Pillars of Wisdom, and later worked as a solo street musician, singing and playing his guitar outside theaters, eventually applying for work as a stagehand. Within months he was playing small roles on stage, and within a year he was studying drama at the Bristol Old Vic Theater School. Between failed auditions he worked as a bricklayer, house cleaner, and gardener.

In his first prominent stage role, he played John the Baptist in the original London production of Godspell with Robert Lindsay. He won rave reviews as Franz Liszt in the BBC mini-series Notorious Woman, and made his film debut with a few lines in the gay love story Nijinsky with Alan Bates. He won the Tony award in 1984 playing a man who has an affair with his best friend's wife in The Real Thing, co-starring Glenn Close and Christine Baranski, and won the Oscar in 1991 as playboy, scoundrel, and possibly murderer Claus von Bulow in Reversal of Fortune, again co-starring Close.

In his best performances, he played the director in the movie mystery Inland Empire with Laura Dern, a Jesuit priest in the jungles of Brazil in The Mission with Robert De Niro, a Polish contractor in the political allegory Moonlighting, the debtor in default in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice with Al Pacino, Annette Bening's manager and husband in Being Julia, an unfaithful lover in Harold Pinter's Betrayal, and deranged twin gynecologists in David Cronenberg's stomach-turning masterpiece Dead Ringers. He also played Alan Rickman's vengeful brother in Die Hard: With a Vengeance with Bruce Willis, and voiced the villainous Scar in Disney's The Lion King, where he repeated his spine-tingling sinister catch phrase from Reversal of Fortune, "You have no idea".

His wife is actress Sinéad Cusack, and Irons has described their marriage as "completely dysfunctional". She is the daughter of Irish character actor Cyril Cusack, best known in America as the driver of the getaway car in Odd Man Out with James Mason, the fire chief in François Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451, or the artist who created a nude ice statue of Ruth Gordon in Harold and Maude.

Father: Paul Dugan Irons (accountant, d. 1983)
Mother: Barbara Anne Brereton Brymer Sharpe Irons (homemaker, d. 2000)
Brother: Christopher Irons
Sister: Felicity Irons (rush weaver)
Wife: Julie Hallam (stage actress, m. 1969, annulled 1969)
Wife: Sinéad Cusack (actress, m. 23-Mar-1978, two sons)
Son: Samuel James Brefni Irons (b. 16-Sep-1978)
Son: Maximilian Paul Diarmiud Irons (b. 17-Oct-1985)

    High School: Sherborne School, Dorset, England (1965)
    Conservatory: Bristol Old Vic Theatre School (1968)

    Academy of Achievement 2000
    Oscar for Best Actor 1991 for Reversal of Fortune
    Golden Globe 1991 for Reversal of Fortune
    Emmy 1997 for The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century

    FILMOGRAPHY AS ACTOR
    Red Sparrow (19-Feb-2018)
    Justice League (26-Oct-2017)
    Assassin's Creed (13-Dec-2016)
    Their Finest (11-Sep-2016)
    Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (12-Mar-2016)
    Race (19-Feb-2016)
    The Man Who Knew Infinity (17-Sep-2015)
    High-Rise (13-Sep-2015)
    Beautiful Creatures (13-Feb-2013)
    Night Train to Lisbon (13-Feb-2013)
    The Words (27-Jan-2012)
    Margin Call (25-Jan-2011)
    The Last Lions (13-Jan-2011) · Narrator
    The Pink Panther 2 (6-Feb-2009) · Avellaneda
    Appaloosa (5-Sep-2008)
    The Color of Magic (23-Mar-2008)
    Eragon (13-Dec-2006)
    Inland Empire (6-Sep-2006)
    Casanova (3-Sep-2005)
    Kingdom of Heaven (4-May-2005)
    Being Julia (3-Sep-2004) · Michael Gosselyn
    The Merchant of Venice (3-Sep-2004) · Antonio
    Broadway: The Golden Age (Apr-2003) · Himself
    Callas Forever (16-Sep-2002)
    And Now... Ladies and Gentlemen... (25-May-2002)
    Last Call (25-May-2002) · F. Scott Fitzgerald
    The Time Machine (4-Mar-2002)
    The Fourth Angel (15-Aug-2001) · Jack Elgin
    Dungeons & Dragons (8-Dec-2000)
    Longitude (2-Jan-2000)
    The Man in the Iron Mask (13-Mar-1998) · Aramis
    Lolita (27-Sep-1997)
    Chinese Box (4-Sep-1997)
    Stealing Beauty (29-Mar-1996) · Alex
    Die Hard: With a Vengeance (19-May-1995) · Simon
    The Lion King (15-Jun-1994) [VOICE]
    The House of the Spirits (21-Oct-1993) · Esteban Trueba
    M. Butterfly (9-Sep-1993) · René Gallimard
    Damage (2-Dec-1992) · Dr. Stephen Fleming
    Tales from Hollywood (19-Oct-1992)
    Waterland (12-Sep-1992) · Tom Crick
    Kafka (15-Nov-1991)
    The Civil War (23-Sep-1990)
    Reversal of Fortune (12-Sep-1990) · Claus von Bulow
    Australia (13-Sep-1989)
    Danny, the Champion of the World (29-Apr-1989)
    Dead Ringers (8-Sep-1988) · Beverly and Elliot Mantle
    A Chorus of Disapproval (1988)
    The Mission (29-Sep-1986)
    The Wild Duck (3-May-1984)
    Swann in Love (23-Feb-1984)
    Betrayal (19-Feb-1983)
    Moonlighting (18-Sep-1982) · Nowak
    Brideshead Revisited (12-Oct-1981)
    The French Lieutenant's Woman (18-Sep-1981) · Charles and Mike
    Nijinsky (20-Mar-1980)


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