If you are confronted as a child with the fact that your accent leads to social exclusion, you can either fit into the outsider position or develop a talent for mimicry. Pierce Brosnan did both. When the Irishman, who was born in Drogheda in 1953, moved in with his divorced mother in London at the age of eleven, where she earned money as a nurse, his classmates teased him because of his Irish pronunciation of English. The outsider role taught him not to be intimidated.
Maria Wiesner
Coordinator "Style".
- Follow I follow
In his early 20s, he had already earned a reputation on London's stages, which led playwright Tennessee Williams to choose him for the English premiere of his play "The Red Devil Battery Sign" in 1977. The success was remarkable. In 1982, Brosnan moved to Los Angeles, where he was offered a seven-year contract for the television series "Remington Steele".
In the leading role of the impostor who becomes a private detective, he was able to shine as a pure speaking performance due to his talent for changing roles: Already in the first episode he introduces himself with a broad accent as an agent from South Africa on the hunt for stolen diamonds, but immediately drops the language coloration when he tells the investigator, whose identity he has borrowed, – he greets him with a handshake and a genuine West Coast American.
A Bond for the nineties
The audience loved the dizzying detective, but Brosnan had a bigger dream, and it was named Bond. He would have liked to take on the role of the British secret agent directly after Roger Moore, but contractual ties prevented it. The British Shakespearean actor Timothy Dalton became Bond. After the wall fell, Brosnan was accepted, but the stakes had increased. Brosnan now had to bring this spy of the Cold War into the nineties.
To Tina Turner's theme song "Golden Eye" in 1994, the silhouettes of female bodies were seen smashing Soviet monuments with sledgehammers. The image of the secret agent was similarly tarnished. In the MI6 office, Judi Dench was waiting in the executive chair: "I think you're a sexist, misogynistic Cold War dinosaur relic whose boyish charm is wasted on me." How do you play a role in the face of so much (internal) criticism? Brosnan dusted off Bond; his secret agent is less macho, but no less self-confident. He showed that working with competent women does not detract from virility (in "Tomorrow Never Dies", for example, he left part of the action show to kung fu fighter Michelle Yeoh).
As clever as in the design of his roles, he also proceeded in the further career planning. In 1996 he founded a production company, shot John le Carré's "The Tailor of Panama" and the remake of the "Thomas Crown Affair".
And he fulfilled a few acting dreams after Bond, singing alongside Meryl Streep in the ABBA musical "Mamma Mia!" (2008) and played a choleric British ex-prime minister for Roman Polanski in the political thriller "Ghostwriter" (2010). In 2022, he conquered the superhero cinema universe as the clairvoyant magician "Dr. Fate" in "Black Adam", which is critical of colonialism – a shift in emphasis in the choice of roles towards comic book adaptations, in which he is no longer an outsider among recognized people, but the star on set. Today Pierce Brosnan turns seventy years old.