Every corner of the world has an Irishman
Ireland’s population is a little over five million. Yet globally, as many as 82 million people claim Irish ancestry. Former 007 Pierce Brosnan talks movingly of the mystical pull of his birth country in a new documentary
HE PLAYED the quintessential Englishman, James Bond, and has made California’s millionaire’s playground of Malibu his home for 24 years, yet Pierce Brosnan is at heart an Irishman, through and through. “There’s something deeply mystical and powerful about the Irish,” says the County Meath-born actor. “What it is, it’s very hard to define, but we certainly bring it out in song, in our writing, the way we spiritually kind of connect to the world.”
While only five million people live in the Republic of Ireland, more than 82 million worldwide proudly claim Irish heritage.
“As a people we have travelled far – every corner of the world has an Irishman, a woman there somewhere, left to seek fame and fortune,” he says.
Urbane and handsome at 70 years old, an Irish lilt still ringing in his voice, Brosnan reveals in a new documentary, Quintessentially Irish, how the land of his birth still exerts a pull on him despite being abandoned there by his father, then left by his mother to be raised by relatives, and finally being dragged away to England at the age of 11.
“Those first 11 years of my life were somewhat solitary, but I think it’s what gave me the interior life of an actor and an artist, and made me the man that I am today,” he says in the film, which started streaming this week.
Brosnan is among Emerald Isle stars including Brendan Gleeson, Sharon Horgan, Fleabag’s Andrew Scott, and Bob Geldof who celebrate the island nation’s powerful grip on them in the documentary, which examines what being Irish means to them.
But it’s the star of four blockbuster 007 films – GoldenEye, Tomorrow Never Dies, The World Is Not Enough and Die Another Day – and hit movies including The Thomas Crown Affair and Mamma Mia!, whose heartfelt tale of his Irish roots resonates.
“I’m from Navan, County Meath, grew up on the banks of the River Boyne,” he tells the filmmakers. “My father, God bless him, Tom Brosnan, he went off into the hills never to return.” His mother, barely 20, struggled to cope.
“Being a single mother in the ’50s in a very closed environment, and Catholicism really did mangle somewhat the lives of many people,” says Brosnan. “My mother left when I was a young lad to be a nurse in England. It was her courage and her glory, and thank God she did. She went off to make a life, so I lived with my grandparents, with an aunt and an uncle. One way or the other Navan is very much a part of my life, and you acknowledge that it’s your roots, it’s where you come from, it’s the seed and the bone and the flesh of your soul.”
Brosnan was a wee lad when his mother called him to join her in London, where he saw his first movie – “Goldfinger. Dazzled! Never seen anything like it” – and was treated as an outsider in school.
“I was known as ‘Irish’, that was my nickname, and I took it and wore it with pride,” he says.
Struggling to find himself, he reveals: “I almost went into the Army. Almost became a cop.”
But theatre seduced him, and he won his first television role – playing an Irish potato farmer. “So Ireland came back into my life,” he says. Moving to America seeking wider fame, he won the title role in television adventure series Remington Steele, and persuaded producers to film an episode in his homeland.
“I said, ‘Well, Remington is an enigma, we don’t know who he is. Why doesn’t he look for his father?’ Remington looks for his father; Pierce looks for his father. It all dove-tailed rather well.”
That led to him becoming the fifth 007 in 1995.
“The irony of an Irishman playing James Bond didn’t escape the funny bone of my life,” he says. “I think people accepted it.” Brosnan is among many stars in the documentary revealing what it means to be Irish.
“Any Irish person never really loses their Irishness,” says actor Andrew Scott. “I have a lot of family in America that have been there for over 30 years, and they’ve become even more Irish.” Actress Sharon Horgan points to actor Brendan Gleeson as the epitome of Irish
allure: “Red hair, charming, gift of the gab, they’re all Irish traits, I think.”
Bob Geldof sees in the Irish: “A great rootedness, a great openness, a great joie de vivre.”
EVEN Prince Albert of Monaco, whose mother Grace Kelly’s grandfather hailed from County Mayo, celebrates his Irish roots. “Through my mother’s family, through the Kellys of County Mayo, and the ancestral home in Drumilra, we know that the Irish connection was very solid,” he says.
“No matter what the adversity is, it’s that incredible spirit of never giving up.
“I’m here. Yes, I have my hopes and aspirations and great dreams, but I fear nothing, and so I’m free. That is what makes Ireland such a great country now.” For the actress Jessie Buckley, it is less grandiose: “My dad’s home-made brown bread: that’s what’s quintessentially Irish to me.”
Actor Jeremy Irons, who lives in a castle in Cork with Irish wife Sinead Cusack, says he is “honoured to be accepted as a b ***** d Englishman”.
The documentary’s Irish-born filmmaker, Frank Mannion, 52, says: “When people think of Ireland, it’s of Leprechauns, potatoes and Guinness, but there’s so much more. We’re a very progressive society, Europe’s most prosperous economy, and have spread across the globe.
“Ten million people left Ireland over the decades, spawning 82 million with Irish heritage worldwide. Pierce Brosnan is representative of that diaspora, living the American dream, but Irish at heart.”
Brosnan still embraces his Irish mother, Mary May, aged 91, who lives in Wimbledon, saying: “She’s a great lady, and she’s always been there for me. She’s my mother, and I love her dearly.”
She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer when Brosnan was just a teenager, and has since survived two further bouts of cancer. “She’s an amazing woman, and she’s taught me a lot about life and how to deal with adversity,” he adds.
“We speak every day. There was time lost, you know, at the beginning of our lives.We’d had so many years of separation, and hellos and goodbyes. So we’ve made up a lot of life over the years.
“The success that I’ve had has been shared with her, and she comes on the set with me from time to time. I try to find movies in that neck of the woods just so I can continue that kinship.”
True to his word, Brosnan is currently filming near Leeds playing an Irish boxing coach in movie Giant, and next shoots in Britain opposite Helen Mirren and Ben Kingsley in The Thursday Murder Club.
He confesses to a love-hate relationship with his home in Los Angeles.
“I love LA, I hate LA, I love LA. It drives me nuts. I fly in over it and I think: ‘Why do I live here?’ But you’ve got the beach – it’s gorgeous. That’s been good to me.
“I’m an American citizen, but my soul is Irish. The spirit of me is Irish. I can certainly feel it in my bones, and in my blood, being Irish.”