YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeremy Irons

lines on the record: 47
first: 2006-02-05
most recent: 2006-02-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think probably it has to be a large box of packets of Rizzler licorice papers, because I shall be able to grow something on the island which I will be able to dry and smoke, but to wrap it and to give it that really smooth taste I think my Rizzler licorice papers would be necessary.”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quite good at doing things, but one of the things I don't know enough about is rope work. And if I can take a little bit of rope with me or maybe some gets washed up, if I take the Ashley book of knots, then that will help me bind together whatever driftwood branches, whatever, into something which will not fall apart while I'm a hundred yards from land.”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I do need to dance, and I feel even sillier dancing without music, so I think it's probably got to be Clifton Chanier.”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Music's always been a huge part of my life and singers I get very close to emotionally Leonard Coean I think is one of the greatest poets and this is a song it's a poem really it starts a poem and then it goes into a song and I think it's a very wonderfully rousing It would be great to have Leonard growling in my ear on the desert island.”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your main man. Now, it's one of those things that happens. I mean, it happens to women and it happens to men in movies. I think it's tough. We sort of don't. The only thing I do mind is that what I really loved early on in my movie making was that I would play the central character who'd be there all the way through, and one was totally focused and absorbed by it. Now, you know, I go in, I work maybe two weeks, three weeks, and then I leave, and I go back two weeks later.”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It embers about the friendship betrayals loyalty between two men at the end of their lives, and apart from the fact that, of course, I'm massively too young to play it”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I found I was getting bored with it with the process of film acting and being boring as a result, getting not very good performances. And I wanted something which terrified me and which really absorbed me, which is what filming used to do. And so we went into it without a budget. We just thought we'll start and we'll keep going as long as we can.”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I rebuilt the castle in Ireland, one of the things I would do when people came down, because I was the main contractor, I mean, I hired people and paid them and whatever and whatever, one of the things I would do is to ask them what they could play because I found that people who played instruments were better to have around. And the man who made the windows in the castle, Chris, I remember him sitting in the bar one night and playing this song. And I said Where's that song from? And he said it's by a guy called John Martin. I never heard of John Martin and he introduced me to that and so I think it's Chris now when we hear John Martin play May you never.”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They won't discuss around it. I don't think anger and puritanism are the same, I think you can see why something happens or understand why something happens, try and stop it, deal with it, deal with the victims of it, see why it happens. If you understand why something happens, then maybe you have a chance to stop it.”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I think what you say is it is not allowed, it is not on, it is wrong, and it ruins people, it ruins children. I mean, absolutely ruins them.”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I suppose, I think, is what I did right. I think it's a subject, I think every taboo we have to talk about. You know, face why taboos are no use to us. We need to deal with problems and be adult about it.”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't regret making a wonderful film. I think it's a classic book. And I had originally, and I said to the makers, I said, listen, I'm not going to do any publicity on this movie because the film speaks for itself and I don't want to get myself into a corner. And then there was such a sort of puritanical outcry against it that I got cross, and I thought I'm going to bat for that movie.”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bob Dylan has always been a great part of my life. I came across a song about five years ago that I never knew he'd written, and I learned to play it on the piano, and strange enough, I've just recorded it in America, and this is Bob singing Make You Feel My Love”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I said, No, I haven't seen him since the movie. He said, Oh, he said, I understand he's representing Liona Helmsley and Michael Tyson at the moment. I said, Yes, I'd heard that. You haven't been asked to play either of them, have you? That's what Mike Tyson was slightly beyond my range, but that I'd have a crack at Leona Helmsley.”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He said, Of course, he'd seen the film. He used to write me postcards where he would read interviews, and very difficult because when you're playing a character, you feel you are that character and you then give interviews to the press and it comes out, you know, you find you're putting words into his mouth and he would send me these postcards, which I still have closely written, saying, no, no, I didn't say that and I'm not that sort of person, etc., etc. But I met him at Getty's about two years after the movie, three years after the movie, and I had this voice behind me in the pavilion. I was looking out at the cricket, and he said, You see, I'm not fat. And I said, no, no, no. I turned. I said, I never said you were fat. I said, you were bigger than me, and you are. You're a bigger man than me. No. Do you ever see Allan Dershowitz these days, who was the lawyer?”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I didn't want to meet him because I felt he's not going to tell me, is he? I met him afterwards. Metamart was a poor guess, said”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I did. I took a view that That this man was not a murderer, but that he lived with a woman who wanted out if she'd already gone into overdose once and he'd brought her back and she was not grateful for that. So I thought, well, I think I know what happened. I think maybe I will play it, certainly, I don't want to judge Klaus, because he may be listening. But I will play it that perhaps he left his wife on the floor for a little bit too long when she was unconscious, in the hope that she would slip away as she clearly wanted to do. Now is that a murder or not? I don't know.”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and I watched all those recordings of him in court. I had initially not wanted to do it, because I felt there was something rather tasteless about dragging all that up when he was alive and his children were alive, for the kids I thought I just thought it was rather tasteless. But anyway, they asked Glen Close to play Sonny von Bulo, and she was a great matern and, you know, she said, listen, love, if you don't play it, someone else is going to. And I said, well, I can't get inside him somehow. And then I found a way of getting into him, which is I thought, well, if my father had really messed up and had got into a difficult situation and was found himself in court, how would he have dealt with it? And I thought he would have dealt with it with charm and elegance and maybe a bit of enigma.”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“common humanity and we need to support each other and the kids are not getting that and I worry about that. Well, we've had American and Irishmen, Englishmen, Canadian, and now Barb Younger, who is a fantastic English singer, and I was just amazed by her voice and particularly by this song, the song called I Want You. And maybe on my desert island I can focus that towards an approaching ship.”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to talk it through technically. I mean, it's interesting that everybody always talks about the sex scenes as being the hardest, but in a way what you're doing in those scenes is showing physically the nakedness which hopefully in other stories you show emotional nakedness. You're trying to allow the audience in and say that's right, I feel that and you felt that, haven't you? And it's a sort of sharing of humanity. I mean, that's when drama works at its best, I think. And I worry hugely that with the modern generation, modern youngsters, they're not getting that. They're getting these awful, violent computer games and easy movies of special effects, and they're not sharing in that ritual of realizing that we're all the same, we're all frightened of the same things, we're all excited by the same things.”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was very different. I had a great argument with David Hare because he wrote the adaptation and he wrote sometimes during the script they make love. And I said, that's like Lerner and Lowe saying they sing. You know, what do they sing? Their relationship happens when they make love and that's that they were lovers and they met only to make love and that was when their relationship grew and changed. And he said, oh, you can work that out with Louis and Juliet”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's all part of how you do it. You see in film is a collaboration you are part of this vast patchwork of talent which finally creates the story.”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“English actors, I think, have probably the best technique as actors of any nationality, and there is a danger always that you rely on your strengths. If you have strong technique, you tend to Use that and it shows”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exhilarating, exhilarating. I remember at the end of the day being helicopted back to the hotel, and getting into a hot bath eating a steak and going to sleep for fourteen hours. I just think everybody should listen to Madeline Peru. I think she's a fantastic singer. Her version is, I think, even better.”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mr Punham. So anyway, I did it. I had a lot of support, I had climbers hidden, sort of round the bluff and I was roped on but it”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it was a Sunday and I said to Roland, what are you doing tomorrow? You've got a day off. He said, no, no, we've got to film the climb. I said, I'm not called. He said, no, no, we'll do it with stunts. I said, no, for goodness sake, use me. He said, We can't insurance. I said, Where is our producer? He said, Well, he's in London. I said, Absolutely.”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I got to know a wonderful American Jesuit piece called Daniel Berrigan, one of the Berrigan brothers, and he came out with us and we went into a retreat together. He described me as a leaky balloon that he was trying to fill full of the air of faith. But I would sit and I remember one scene was a tough scene, and I remember I fasted the day before because it clears the mind wonderfully. And I remember praying before the scene.”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a part that I felt had been written for me, the real thing. I thought I didn't know Tom Stopper that he's now a dear friend, but I thought he knows me. We're obviously very similar.”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did. I saw it as a highway to nowhere. As at that time, I saw Noel Coward and all those sort of very English dramatists being a highway to nowhere for me. I knew I was dirtier inside than that. I was messier, and I wanted to explore that area.”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I've been asked to do both at the same time, but Brideshead was supposed to be over by the time we made friendship tennis”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've always felt very close to Eric Clapton. We're of similar age whenever we meet we like each other. And he sings one particular song which I think when I'm on my desert island will be very apt and it's something when you have success you have to remember what comes to you through the success and how it will be different without that success. And this is what this song is about. Nobody knows you when you're down and out.”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've been doing that when I was working social work in Peckham, where I was getting paid practically nothing. I got my bed and board in about two pounds a week. And I'd cycle up to Leicester Square with my guitar strapped to the back of my bike, and I could get five pounds on one cinema queue. So”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was wonderful. I'm the second son, and so by the time I went to him on a walk on Hamstead Heath, I remember, and I said, I think I want Try working in the theatre, and he said, Well, he said, I wouldn't recommend it. It doesn't look very secure profession. Have a look, if you don't try it, and I don't support you'll never know, you'll always regret it, and you'll always resent me for not helping you. So see if you can get a job. And I went up and got a job off the back of the stage newspaper at the Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury. As a sort of walking ASM, they call it”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was, I suppose, although they did it very well, and strangely enough, I think the week or the two weeks before they did. My dog was run over, and I remember huge emotional crisis about that, and very little when my parents divorce is very interesting how different things get you in different ways.”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now I live in Ireland, and I have an Irish wife, and one of the great things is that I've been introduced to Irish music, and one of the great voices in Ireland is Dolores Keen. And this is a song, a Beatles song she's singing, which I think says an awful lot about how we deal with all the things that are wrong. We just let what comes come. Let it be.”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I loved it. But I didn't then leave wanting to be an actor,'cause it's too far away from my sort of consciousness about what one did with one's life. My dad was an accountant, trusted accountant. So I left and I did some social work in South London, in Packham, and I had some of the bullshit kicked out of me. I used to run a youth club on a Sunday night where we'd have a bit of dancing, and I remember I'd been keeping out rival gang out because they were going to come in to make trouble. And as I was lying outside under these kicking boots, I thought now I have to find another way to deal with people. This is not working.”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always thought somebody came up to you and asked you because they saw an innate talent. And finally, somebody did say, Did you know you had an innate talent? No, of course I did. Right, okay. My last year when I was taking my A-levels, they came along and they said, Would you play Mr Puffin, the critic? And I said, by the way, you know, no one's asked me before to do this. They said, what do you mean no one's asked you? I said, no one does ask you. You put your name on a list at the beginning of the year. I said, where's the list? They said, it's in the cloisters. It's round that corner on the wall there. So anyway, I did the play and I enjoyed it. I played it on no talent but just personality didn't know what I was doing. And it felt right? It felt fine. It felt fine and I failed my A levels as a result.”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it gives you a very specific system and you look at that and you think, can I deal with this or can I not? And it's a bit like life. And you think that is what is. How am I going to make the way of life I want around that? And that's what I did. You rose to the top in the cadet for Cisi. Yeah, because this is the only place to be. It's a terrible place to be if you have these idiots telling you what to do. Place to be is to be the idiot who's telling others what to do. So it's a sort of cynical ambition, you're completely cynical. But you must have been in the school plays. You must have shone in those. Only in the last year. I never knew how to get in them. I always thought.”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then I started worrying and of course kept thin, and it was only a few years later that I started smoking which helped me keep thin. You've been smoking ever since? Ever since. Have you ever tried to stop? Oh, I stopped once or twice, yeah, a couple of years. Missed it hugely. Tell me about school because as I read about it, there's a kind of contradiction there because there's a suggestion that you are unhappy and you turned into this rather repressed buttoned up person that you mentioned just now. But at the same time you seem to have been achieving all of the things you're supposed to achieve. Prefect and you've got the silk lining and the blazer and you've got a rugger blue or whatever. Yeah, I was very happy at school. I mean, I think it. What it taught me was how to play the system.”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was apparently I was a potty little baby And you smiled a lot Apparently I did which you went on you said you stopped smiling aged eight Is this when you were sent away? I think probably I certainly stop getting podgy.”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and one step at a time music you came across when you were filming Lolita, you say, now there's an enigma, humber, humber. But we'll come back to him. Let's go to the Isle of Wight and Cows where you were born late forties. What sort of family? What did your father do? Father's a chartered accountant. He worked for Saunders Row whom developed the hovercraft, but at that point they were making most torpedo boats to attack German submarines, and so he never actually fought in the war, but he was in cows making the equipment. My mum. During the wardrobe of an ambulance around there, and by the time I was born in forty eight the war was over. I remember we had those tins in the larder with brown paper round them, the rationing tins. And you were called Smiler and Parch. So you were fat?”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I'm known and because I'm sort of older than you should be when you dance. I rarely dance in public, but on my island I will be on my own unlistening to Clifton Chenier I will dance.”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I remember a slight look of surprise from him, and ever since then I did it always did it, and we used it, but it was the first time I ever had. Because you'd been away at school since you were so you haven't sent your own boys away? No, they asked to leave, actually, when they were eleven. They said, can we get out of this household and go and have a fairly civilized existence at school? Well, obviously this is all part of why you like secrets and why you like characters who are kind of enigmatic. It's all in there. So I want to exploit some more, but let's pause and have your first record. Tell me about that. Well, when I made Lolita, we shot in New Orleans. And I remember being introduced to Cajun music. And I remember having a tea dance one day when I wasn't working in this big hall and there was occasion band and we danced and we drank. And now one of the great Casian players is Clifton Chenier. And one of the things I think I'm going to have to do on my island because it's something I love doing is dancing.”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I went to private school, public schools we call it. I've always believed that public school, at the time I went, was designed to create people who would cope in the colonies, keeping their emotions themselves, hanging onto their wives, behaving well, and keeping everything buttoned down. Of course, nothing in that is useful as far as being an actor is concerned. That's the sort of person you've been trying to escape from being ever since, is it? That's right, and as soon as I got to drama school, I started getting rid of all of that. And I remember coming back when I was at drama school to have a weekend with my father and stepmother. And I remember embracing my father.”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are going to do it they're using my house, and I read it. fell in love with Charles I thought fantastic roll and then I wrote to them and said would you consider me But he's cold and he's quite closed You said, haven't you that that's why he felt you could play him? Yeah, he was the Englishman I think I was educated to be which hopefully I've been slowly sort of sloughing that skin but what do you mean when you say that?”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“an adornment to a whole string of films and television dramas, and he's just started rehearsals for his return to West End Theatre after an absence of seventeen years. What I like, he says, are characters with secrets, characters who don't give away who they are. He is Jeremy Irons. It was a director at the Bristol Old Vick Theatre School, I think, Jeremy, who predicted your lack of success. Presumably he thought you were going to end up doing endless Noel Coward roles, did he? Yes, he said, you know, if only you'd been born in the 30s, you would have had a fantastic career, but you've got your faces the wrong shape. And your diction was too good. Yeah. And then along came Bride's head. Did you actually tout for the job? You discovered, didn't you, that Granada were going to dramatize it for 10 years? George Howard, who owned Castle Howard, was a friend of Schenerd and mine. And he came to see a play I was doing in Greenwich and he said to me before the show when we were talking, have you read Bright's head? And I said, I haven't. He said, we'll read it because Granada.”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My castaway this week is an actor. He epitomizes Englishness, refined elegance with a touch of coldness. Curiously enough the qualities that have made him a success were once identified as disadvantages. When he left theatre school he was told that his demeanour was all wrong for modern acting. The gloomy prediction seemed to be coming true during the first long difficult years of his career, but then a part appeared which was made for all the qualities he possesses. Charles Rider, in the television series Bride's head revisited, suddenly refined Englishman and the actor who could play them were all the rage. He followed up his success in bride's head playing opposite Merrill Streep in the French Lieutenant's woman. He won a Tony Award for his part on Broadway in Tom Stopard's The Real Thing, and two years after that an Oscar for his performance as Klaus von Bullo in reversal of fortune. He's an actor in constant demand, his effortless style.”
2006-02-05 · Desert Island Discs · Jeremy Irons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source