Hollywood’s most lovey-dovey couple
They even hold hands while riding bikes! As Mamma Mia star Pierce Brosnan and wife celebrate 25 years, inside the marriage of...
Pierce Brosnan and his wife Keely shaye smith were on a morning bike ride around their neighbourhood in Malibu, california, when they spontaneously reached out and held hands as they pedalled. The moment, captured by a photographer, was a typical display of affection between the former James Bond actor and his wife, who have just celebrated 25 years together.
Film audiences can’t help but view actors as being something like their stage and screen characters. But that would be a big mistake in the case of irish-born Brosnan, 65, who played the love’em-and-leave’em spy in four Bond films.
now he is back as much more likeable sam carmichael, the lovelorn irish-american architect lover of Meryl streep’s Donna in the second Mamma Mia! romcom.
in the original 2008 film, Brosnan’s suave, sensitive character was one of three men who might be the father of Donna’s daughter sophie. But critics were brutal about his duet with streep of the ABBA hit sos — one said: ‘He couldn’t hold a note if it had the Queen’s head on it.’
Brosnan, a self-effacing star who admits he cringes to hear his own warbling, agreed.
after the makers of Mamma Mia! Here We Go again wickedly made him sing another snatch of sos, Brosnan admitted last week: ‘singing is not necessarily my forte — i enjoy singing, i’m not quite sure other people enjoy my singing.’
could this lack of the usual Hollywood vanity help explain why he remains with his 54-yearold wife when many of his peers have dumped theirs for a younger model? and why, whenever they are out in public together, they can’t help behaving a bit like lovestruck newlyweds?
Brosnan, who lost his first wife and daughter to cancer, once described Keely as ‘my north star, always looking out for me’.
incurable hand- holders, the couple never miss a chance to show their devotion, to an extent that might seem a little cloying after 18 years of marriage were it not so refreshingly rare in the showbiz world.
out in the street, Brosnan rarely misses a chance to plant a smacker on his wife’s lips, as he did when the couple emerged from scott’s restaurant in Mayfair, London, earlier this month.
THE actor, famed for his irish charm, gushes enthusiastically when asked about his wife. ‘i love her vitality, her passion,’ he has said. ‘she has this strength that i wouldn’t be able to live without. When Keely looks at me, i go weak.’
at an age when some Hollywood couples are communicating only through their lawyers, the Brosnans post adoring messages on instagram.
a few days ago, he wrote: ‘Thank you for the Love My Love of these past 25 years, onwards...’
on Father’s Day last month, Keely wrote to him: ‘ Thank you for taking this lifelong journey into parenthood with me. You’re the coolest dad i know.’
and on his birthday in May, she trilled: ‘ You are a bright light in this world and you light up my world with so much love and joy!’
They could keep such intimacies private, of course, but find it even more romantic to share their joy and inspire other couples.
Brosnan has 652,000 instagram followers. For the middle-aged women who make up his core fan base, his devotion to a wife who is not the surgically enhanced, rakethin Hollywood norm is a crucial part of his appeal (as, of course, are his enduring good looks).
of course, cynics might claim the couple’s devotion is, in part at least, a Pr exercise. But friends disagree. ‘ They really are deeply devoted to each other. They’re true soulmates,’ says one who knows the Brosnans through their environmental activism.
‘Pierce tends to wear his heart on his sleeve about things — including, obviously, Keely.’
it’s true that Keely has had her detractors. Her ample figure has regularly featured in the list of ‘Best and Worst Beach Bodies’ published annually by national enquirer magazine.
But the couple rise above such barbs. They share mutual interests, notably in the environment and art, but more to the point they raised two sons together — Dylan, 21, and Paris, 17 — who are both models.
Brosnan and Keely met at a beach party in Mexico in 1994. a former model who had appeared in a pop video with the band Huey Lewis and The news for their single stuck With You, Keely was working as a TV presenter and interviewing the cheers star Ted Danson. she found Brosnan ‘ captivating’, recalling the ‘mischievous sparkle in his eyes’.
They went on their first date a few days later and talked until 3am. ‘i understand why women find him sexy because he is an appealing man,’ she said later. ‘ He really likes and appreciates women.’
Brosnan was cast as Bond the same year and, as his career took off, he sent her air tickets to wherever he was working so they could spend more time together. ‘We just seemed to fit,’ he said.
i witnessed them in action at a glitzy party thrown in London by elton John and Gianni Versace. on arrival, Keely walked behind her husband-to-be, massaging his shoulders as they navigated the packed room.
They didn’t marry until 2001 (six months after Paris was born). at their lavish wedding reception in ireland, the couple embraced beside an ice sculpture of rodin’s The Kiss and were showered with rose petals as they cut a six-tiered cake.
They worked together for a campaign to prevent an ecologically ruinous salt factory being built on Mexico’s Pacific coast. They have also visited the White House to push for a crackdown on whaling, and hosted a Malibu fundraising party for an animal rights charity.
Last month a documentary codirected by Keely was released, called Poisoning Paradise, about pesticide pollution on the Hawaiian island of Kauai.
Their other absorbing mutual passion, after animals and the environment, is art. Brosnan studied to be a commercial illustrator before switching to acting.
He paints prolifically: recently, his painting of Bob Dylan fetched more than £1 million at a charity auction in cannes.
More crucial to the strength of their marriage, friends say, has been Keely’s ability to provide emotional support to a man who admits that at times he has struggled with depression.
it is fitting that Brosnan plays a man coping with the loss of his wife in the new Mamma Mia film.
When he met Keely he was still grieving for his first wife, the australian actress and former Bond girl cassandra Harris. she had died of ovarian cancer three years earlier in 1991, aged 43, after they were married for 11 years.
Brosnan was left to care for their son sean, as well as cassandra’s children (charlotte and chris) from her previous marriage, who he had adopted. His wife’s illness had left him devastated and he praised a ‘compassionate’ Keely for encouraging him to mourn.
no pushover, she was reportedly less sympathetic when his older children came off the rails more than a decade ago with drink and drugs problems. she was said to have ordered Brosnan to stop indulging them, as she didn’t want their younger children to be influenced by their bad behaviour.
FIVE years ago, in 2013, the actor suffered a second blow when his daughter charlotte died — and a third tragedy followed three years later when Beau st clair, his longtime producing partner, was also claimed by ovarian cancer.
although Brosnan is stoical after so much heartache and talks about ‘just getting on with life’, he admits it hasn’t been easy.
‘i don’t look at the cup as half full, believe me,’ he said last year. ‘ The dark, melancholy irish black dog sits beside me from time to time.’
Brosnan’s painful childhood provides another compelling reason why he may crave the security of a loving, stable marriage.
His father left his mother at their home in navan, co Meath, when Brosnan was two. she went to London to work as a nurse, leaving little Pierce to live with relatives and then share a room with two factory workers in a boarding house. He wasn’t reunited with his mother until she remarried when he was 11. at school in england, he was bullied for his irish accent.
His catholic faith has been a
source of strength for him, even though at his school monks used to beat the boys daily.
He says: ‘I was raised as a Catholic and I will always be one... I pray and go to Mass. I also believe in life after death.’
He spoke this month of the importance to him of ‘the power of prayer, of doing good things and trying to be as honest as you possibly can’.
When Brosnan isn’t filming, he and Keely — who writes gardening articles as well as making TV programmes — divide their time between homes in California and Hawaii. But Brosnan, who is estimated to be worth more than £60 million, insists they prefer the simple pleasures in life and having ‘quality time’ together.
He described one weekend that involved a short road trip to Santa Barbara, California. They looked at houses, he said, and drank ‘great’ wine. ‘We didn’t listen to any music. We just listened to the sound of each other’s voices and sorted out the world.’
Asked last year to describe his perfect day off, he said: ‘It was yesterday. I painted in my studio, then I went down and sat on the beach, read and did some drawing. Then I had lunch with Keely.
‘Around five o’clock, I went out and watched the sun go down. Keely sat beside me, we had a glass of champagne and talked about the day.’
Recently, Brosnan described being romantically conventional over two long marriages as ‘the way I like it’.
He is content to fool around with women only on screen — ‘legal cheating’, as he says Keely once called it at a dinner party.
Meanwhile, she has compared him to a fine wine, ‘ ageing beautifully’, and the same could probably be said of their marriage. Bitter experience, says Brosnan, has taught him to ‘squeeze out every ounce’ of the joy you find in life.