Pierce Brosnan enjoys life after Bond

< Prev | 1 | 2

Movie video

Inside ‘The Morgans’
Dec. 2: Go behind the scenes with Hugh Grant, Sarah Jessica Parker, director Marc Lawrence and the rest of the cast of the new romantic comedy, "Did You Hear About the Morgans?"

Stars honor Clint Eastwood

‘Up in the Air’ L.A. premiere

'New Moon' nearly Blind Sided at box office

A look at 'Avatar The Game'

Slideshow

December movies
James Cameron’s spectacle “Avatar” hits theaters, along with George Clooney, who is “Up in the Air,” and Robert Downey Jr. as “Sherlock Holmes.”

more photos

‘It was good to be mad’
Born in Ireland, Brosnan was raised by relatives after his father left while he was still an infant. Reunited in England with his mother by 11, he quit school by 16.

He eventually found sanctuary with people he could identify with (“crazy, mangled, artistic, funny”) especially after coming from an “Irish, cloistered, Catholic, repressed” background of the ’50s and ’60s. A community of actors served as his university while he voraciously read Sartre and Dostoyevksy.

“And I realized I wasn’t alone,” he says, laughing heartily for the only time during the interview. “I realized it was good to be mad; it was good to feel conflicting emotions.”

Story continues below ↓

advertisement | your ad here

Even though he had gotten roles in West End productions by Franco Zeffirelli and Tennessee Williams, he felt typecast and longed for America and the movies.

“Thank God for my late, dear wife, who was the one who said, ‘This is what we should do. We should go to America,”’ Brosnan says, referring to Cassandra Harris — a Bond girl (in 1981’s “For Your Eyes Only”) who died of ovarian cancer in 1991.

In the early ’80s, they took out a loan and booked a cheap flight.

“I just felt lucky. I got to America and I felt reborn — brand-new. I thought anything is possible.”

Life as an American citizen
And in 2004, he became a U.S. citizen — after being disturbed by the disputed presidential election of 2000.

“I went to the polling booths four years prior with my wife (Keely Shaye Smith), who’s American, and by the time we got back on our bikes the world had changed. We’d been scammed, shimmied. Right before our eyes. In the most arrogant way.

“I thought Reagan was a joke. When I was in England, I thought, ‘No, they’re not going to elect an actor. This can’t happen. This is outrageous.”’

Now, he says: “Give me Reagan. Give me anyone but Bush.”

While maintaining he’s not a political animal, he says he wanted to have a voice and ensure a better life for his children (five, all told: two young sons with his second wife, and one with his first, whose two children he adopted).

In between — and even during — acting jobs, Brosnan likes to paint, a talent that dates back to his first job at a commercial art studio, where he recalls his main responsibilities were watering the spider plants and making tea for senior staffers. (Examples of his work, including a self-portrait of his character in “The Matador,” are on his Web site.)

Though mainly self-taught, he now has a teacher and likes to paint in his Hawaiian getaway. “A bottle of wine, a good cigar, a couple of beers, whatever ...” And he’s ready to put brush to canvas.

It might be a creative outlet later in life, he says, when he doesn’t want to or have to work — “or nobody will employ me.”

< Prev | 1 | 2