![]() We didn’t have much money, and I bought most of our furniture at auction. If something needs really fine work, I will find someone. How much restoration of chairs or other pieces do you do yourself, and how did you learn that skill? In beds, you often replace the mattress, but chairs wrap around you, and if my theory - which I stand by - that inanimate objects absorb energy is right, the chair is the most likely piece to do so.Ī guest room features a ceiling made from woven willow branches. Often chairs - I’ve always been attracted to them. If there was something I loved, I’d buy it and do it up and sometimes sell it. I don’t know why, but the antiques business was just flying, and there was so much interesting stuff about. Then, I started going to the auction house in Bristol. My drama school fees were paid by my father, but my living wasn’t, so it was a way of generating a little income. After that, I found a collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Playbills and bought the lot. I picked up about ten, did an exhibition at a framer’s shop and sold them for a modest profit. I think it was when I started at theater school in Bristol that I first bought some paintings. Ours were pretty ordinary, prints and so on. It was just after the war, and unless you lived in a house that had come down to you over generations, people didn’t really think about furniture and pictures. Helens on the Isle of Wight which was, I think, a converted stable. My dad was an accountant and my mum a housewife who raised us, as was often the case in those days. Did you grow up in a family that was interested in art or antiques? Take a look at Irons’s most stylish movies on The Study. #IRON MONEY MANVILLE TV#In the 1981 British TV miniseries Brideshead Revisited, Irons (at right, with Anthony Andrews and Diana Quick) played a young painter who befriends an aristocrat at Oxford. ©Granada Television/courtesy Everett Collection. “She doesn’t have the passion I have.”įor nearly two hours, Irons talks to Introspective in fluent paragraphs about that passion, along with his belief that inanimate objects absorb the energy of their environment and about managing the restoration of Kilcoe Castle, his 15th-century home in southwestern Ireland. Does his wife of 40 years, the actress Sinéad Cusack (who arrives home mid-interview), take part in the decorating? Irons thinks for a moment. #IRON MONEY MANVILLE FULL#An eclectic assortment of furniture, much of it picked up at auctions or found in the street, and walls full of art (some of it by his photographer son, Samuel Irons) create a cheerfully warm and relaxed environment. It is filled with color, with cream-of-tomato and blue-green walls and fabric hangings found in Afghanistan, which form a border around the living room cornice, framing rough hessian blinds. Irons’s London home is, he says, much like his other homes, just smaller. (Quite often, as he tells stories of finding a chemist’s balance in Bucharest or a group of carved musicians in Morocco, he gives the impression that he remembers his movies purely for the interesting object-spotting locations they afforded.) Nevertheless, on a chilly London morning in the middle of an eight-performance week, Irons seems happy to turn his attention away from acting and talk about his adult-life passion for decorating and furnishing his homes. “You have to keep fresh and interested, but that of course is an attraction.” “It’s a marathon of a play,” Irons says wryly. His sympathetic portrayal of the family patriarch alongside Lesley Manville in the Richard Eyre–directed production has garnered glowing reviews from the British critics. Just a few more lines and sporting a slightly military mustache, grown for the role of James Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, which moves from London’s West End to a run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music from May 8 through 27. Tall, with an innate physical elegance, Irons looks pretty much as he did when he shot to fame playing the beautiful young painter Charles Ryder in the 1981 British television miniseries Brideshead Revisited, or Claus von Bülow in his Oscar-winning turn in the 1990 Reversal of Fortune. Then, Jeremy Irons appears, filling most of the door frame of the small mews house in West London that serves as his pied-à-terre in the city. Top: Irons and a team of workers spent six years restoring the 15th-century structure, where, he says, they did “everything from scratch.”įirst comes the dog. Originally published May 6, 2018Jeremy Irons, with his dog, Smudge, at Kilcoe Castle, in Ireland. ![]()
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