Top five performances and thoughs on Jeremy Irons?

He's good in it, the film gets a bit (or more) convoluted as it goes along though ..........like a baffling puzzle.

He's one of the worlds finest actors. People talk BS all the time about actors on here but he had a streak in the 80s-early 90s that was astonishing - it was the Ironsaissance - um, the English speaking male actor of the decade.........he's one of 4 living guys with a Best Actor Oscar and a Best Actor Tony .........he's one of a handful of male Triple Crown Winners too........and he almost has that for lead roles which is even harder. 

Dead Ringers #1 and I'd say Reversal of Fortune, Betrayal, Lolita, Moonlighting but he has a few you could argue for in that top 5. World class actor.....and he worked a vein of acting too which makes him fascinating to watch too - no actor ever said more about male sexuality/obsession than he did in those many roles (M. Butterfly, Lolita, Damage, Dead Ringers, Betrayal etc)

stephen - I'd be curious what your thoughts are on the "link" between British actors - the class between the great 60s group and the 80s/90s Oldman/DDL/Fiennes group to right now.

I don't think we've talked about that specifically before but we do talk about the current crop of actors. Irons and Kingsley are those ones who bridge the 60s UK actors with the 80s then 90s and I see huge influence there in the sense that Kingsley played outside his ethnic group and Irons typified it - so together they did something odd they were British actors who were clearly British - but Oldman and DDL eventually seem closer to the US film method actors - though they weren't at first certainly and not Fiennes (again, in a way, not necessarily "all" the ways).

I see lots more of it now going back to Irons/Kingsley now with Whishaw and Hiddleston and Cumberbatch etc. - what are your thoughts there - these things go in cycles and I see that actually happening right now even though Oldman and DDL just played as British as they could too! 

Also a curveball - do you think Irons could have played Plainview, if not who could have - Kingsley or Duvall? - depending when it was made I mean? I think we've discussed that before but I can't recall what your thoughts were.

I'm not sure about "best" - I don't think I've seen enough of his film work to make a call - but my favorite is definitely The French Lieutenant's Woman. Streep gets all of the credit for that film (I get it), but it's definitely a two-hander, and Irons is just wonderful in it. His first (and only!!!) BAFTA Film nomination. 

That definitely is not it at all. Kingsley can be ridiculously indiscriminate in his choices. Irons while on occasion has held his nose and taken a Hollywood paycheck for something like Dungeons & Dragons and Eragon (which are long forgotten flops nobody judges him by anyway), in general  he has one of the most literary and pretentious filmographies this side of Ralph Fiennes. Irons doesn't do enough money grabbing shit to get judged on that stuff. Since 2004 alone he's done The Merchant Of Venice, Being Julia, Mathilde, Kingdom Of Heaven, Casanova, Inland Empire,Margin Call, The Hollow Crown, The Borgias, Their Finest, Elizabeth I....

Irons bread and butter till this day are prestigious costume dramas and arthouse fare, with the very occasional paycheck studio film.

He's just kind of a one trick pony (a prestigious one mind)  and for lack of a better term there's that "souless" quality that renders him an unrelatable screen presence in much of his work. It's why he's so often cast as autocrats and aristocrats. They don't need to be relatable. His stage honed gravitas and elecution keep him very employable in a certain kind of role, but he lost the element of surprise decades ago. It's become much harder for him to impress as he doesn't have the range of some of his similarly esteemed peers.

W O R L D C L A S S ! ! !

In no particular order

The Merchant of Venice
Reversal Of Fortune
The Mission
Lolita
The Pink Panther 2

(kidding )

It's Cronenberg and it's gay? How have I never heard of this? 

Still, the reviews aren't encouraging. And apparently John Lone is no Jaye Davidson.

Moonlighting
Dead Ringers
Betrayal
Damage
M Butterfly

Looking at his imdb, just hit me I haven't seen any of his TV work and they all look good - Langrishe Go Down, Brideshead Revisited, Fitzgerald, Elizabeth I, Georgia O’Keeffe, The Borgias, etc. Nobody puts these in their Top 5s? Which are the best of the bunch? pacinoyes

My earliest memory of Irons is trying to impersonate his voice after seeing Die Hard with a Vengeance ninety times and Lion King. He does have a way with dialogue, it isn't just his molten cadence, he can wring a helluva lot out of a simple line. There's that....but my favorite quality is how he reacts, with his eyes. You see it all over Betrayal and Damage - with Kingsley and Binoche at the dinner table - how he consumes or retreats, with his looking, carefully aware and "performing" so as not to clue the others (this is merged and challenged in M Butterfly), bc of course what he's feeling, prohibitive desire, is unstoppable. He brilliantly evokes space and a sparring partner in Dead Ringers. But my fav - the one I think about most often actually - such a subtle, detailed, observant performance - is Moonlighting.

I watched the first season of The Borgias and Irons was definitely the best thing about it. In hindsight I probably would have included it in my list but I always forget about the show. At least the first season is pretty unremarkable, but come to think of it I'm pretty sure I got halfway through the second too.

I think M. Butterfly successfully accomplished Cronenberg's aim for the project, and that the casting of John Lone was central to this aim. For whilst Lone has a pronounced femininity as a male, when he portrays a female he has a pronounced masculinity. This really foregrounds the self-deception and self-delusion that runs throughout the film, as mentioned above.
How was it that Irons's character did not see what was right in front of him? How could he not see what the viewer could see. Instead, he saw what he wanted to see, and not what was there in reality; and this desire has deeper cultural-political significance in the film's context, imo.