That’s rich! £7m Irons rails against ‘obscenely wealthy’

OSCAr-WInnInG actor Jeremy Irons doesn’t let his £7 million fortune stop him mouthing off about inequality. Despite owning no fewer than seven houses, Irons claims Britain’s biggest problem is the growing divide between the haves and the have-nots. ‘There are many problems which everyone thinks Europe can solve — whether it’s staying in or getting out,’ he says. ‘It won’t. Things will stay the same and we’ll still have this iniquitous gap between the very wealthy and the very poor.’

Irons has amassed an oligarch-style portfolio of assets, after getting his big break as Charles ryder in the 1981 ITV adaptation of Brideshead revisited.

Trophies include boats, horses, sculptures and a 15th-century castle in Cork, which he painted peach on a whim.

But he claims that ‘unregulated capitalism is drowning many people in society’.

‘Many people are getting obscenely wealthy,’ he says. ‘That is what we have to prevent.’

Irons, the 67-year-old son of an Isle of Wight accountant, also likes to rub shoulders with the richest one per cent.

He has dined with the late American philanthropist Paul Getty, who lived next door to Irons’s Grade IIlisted home in Oxfordshire. Another pal is Paul Allen, the multi-billionaire Microsoft co-founder. ‘I have developed a life which seems to need a relatively high income,’ Irons said recently. The self-styled ‘rogue and vagabond’ is also known for his eventful love life, with his second marriage, to actress Sinead Cusack, dogged by rumours of infidelity on both sides. So he has no plans to publish an autobiography — even posthumously — because it would ruffle too many feathers. ‘You can’t write the truth, you’d upset everyone,’ Irons says. After being linked to a string of glamorous younger women, including heiress Francesca Bortolotto Possati and Iranian author Maryam Sachs, it’s little wonder Irons takes his 38-year marriage to Cusack ‘one day at a time’.