Though he hardly fits the archetype, her fascination shades quickly into obsession. In Los Angeles, he is chatted up at dinner by “a heavily bejewelled woman” who had a thing for “Irish fishermen in Aran sweaters”. In a bar in New York, he sits in uncomfortable silence as a young couple try to guess who he is. He comes across as a reluctant film star, born to act but ill at ease with the relentless attention Hollywood celebrity brings. You feel, too, that Byrne’s sense of belonging has been deepened not just by his absence from his homeland, but by the dislocating effects of fame. It is hardly surprising, then, that his recall seems at times elegiac, as if he is mourning not just his lost youth and the loved ones that have passed on but an entire culture. In many ways, the Ireland Byrne evokes no longer exists, its rigid certainties and attendant discontents having been since swept away in the country’s rapid transition from an inward-looking, religiously oppressive society to a more progressive, cosmopolitan and determinedly market-driven one. As his character appeared, “lugging a bale of hay”, his awestruck younger sister Marian uttered a single word: “Jesus.” He describes his family watching his television debut in silent wonderment in their living room. He's a reluctant film star, born to act but ill at ease with the attention Hollywood celebrity bringsīyrne’s prehistory as an actor is well known to Irish people of a certain age, his role as Pat Barry, “a kind of Irish Heathcliff”, in the TV soap opera The Riordans making him, for a time, a household heart-throb. Waiting at the bus stop after his first nerve-racking night of rehearsals for a production of Hamlet, he experiences a moment of profound self-realisation: “I had been so lonely, this new sense of belonging overwhelmed me.” He had stumbled on his vocation. Out of desperation, he turned to amateur dramatics on the advice of a friend. “I felt a failure – a failed plumber and priest.” “They ate their sandwiches away from me,” he recalls of his workmates. He chose, of all things, plumbing, and that, too, ended in ignominy. A seeker and something of an outsider, he spent four years in a seminary in England preparing for the priesthood, before returning to Dublin and embarking on an equally fruitless attempt to master a trade. I had 10 lines in six countries.”īefore he touches on the movies that made his name – Excalibur (1981), Miller’s Crossing (1990) and The Usual Suspects (1995) – Byrne lingers long on the travails of his youth. Or, at least, I’d get to watch them work. “And I would be working with some of the greatest stars in the world: Burton, Richardson, Olivier, Gielgud and Redgrave. “It was money and we were broke,” he writes, neatly summing up the aspiring actor’s lot. The film that took him there was a biopic of Wagner in which he only fleetingly appears. One moment, for instance, he is on the dole and living with his girlfriend in a spartanly furnished flat in London the next he is drinking whisky with Richard Burton in a ritzy hotel suite overlooking the waterfront in Venice. For a start, Gabriel Byrne’s childhood landscape is urban not rural, and his style, though lyrical, is also characterised by the marked shifts in tone that his nonlinear narrative demands.
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