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June18,2006 - June25,2006 |
Jeremy Irons revisited in Julia
Celebrated British actor plays philandering husband in Istvan Szabo's Canadian movie
By Angela Baldassarre
Originally Published: 2004-10-03
At age 56, British actor Jeremy Irons is as handsome and elegant as he was when he was first introduced to North American audiences in the famed 1981 mini-series Brideshead Revisited.
One of the best actors alive, Irons depicted the slow mental breakdown of twin gynecologists in David Cronenberg's thriller Dead Ringers; and delivered an ironic, witty, and self-aware performance as accused wife murderer Klaus von Bulow in Reversal of Fortune which won him a Best Actor Academy Award. He also won a Tony Award on Broadway for The Real Thing, in which he costarred with Glenn Close. Since then, he's starred in Kafka, Louis Malle's Damage; Waterland in which he played opposite wife Sinead Cusack; provided the sinister voice of Scar in The Lion King; and proved a worthy foe to Bruce Willis in Die Hard With a Vengeance.
This year he stars in two movies, Michael Radford's The Merchant of Venice opposite Al Pacino, and Istvan Szabo's Being Julia, which opened the Toronto International Film Festival recently.
Adapted by Ronald Harwood (The Pianist) from W. Somerset Maugham's novel Theatre, Being Julia focuses on the reluctantly dimming star of Julia Lambert (Annette Bening), a flamboyant theatrical diva in 1930s London who feels the shadows of the wings reaching out to pull her into darkness: She's past prime, and her leading days are numbered.
Terrified at the prospect of being bumped from centre stage, Julia - who has a teenaged son, a dead mentor (Michael Gambon), a best friend "who plays for the other side" (Bruce Greenwood) and a producer-husband, Michael (Irons), who indulges her hungry ego - goes a little middle-aged crazy. Under the endearingly tolerant nose of her show-must-go-on spouse, she has an affair with a hopelessly smitten, pudding-faced young American (Shaun Evans), indulges in several diva-scale snits, and generally starts providing a considerably more smashing dramatic spectacle of her offstage life than on. After being told by Michael that audiences are being made to suffer along with her work, Julia takes an extended - and for her painfully unnatural - vacation. When it occurs to her that her worst dreams are being brought to life in the vacuum of her absence (i.e., that she's being replaced by an ambitious but untalented bimbo who happens to be boffing Mr. Pudding Face and hubby), Julia begins to plot her revenge.
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