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Surviving Hollywood’s poisoned goldfish bowl.. It would be difficult to find an actor with more integrity than Gabriel Byrne. From the days of his television apprenticeship at the not-too-young age of 29 to his present status as a member of Hollywood royalty and one of Ireland’s national treasures, the soft-spoken Crumlin man has negotiated the tripwires of Hollywood’s poisoned goldfish bowl with his quiet charm. This is partly due to his disenchantment with it: ‘The monster is eating its own tail now. It will eventually annihilate itself.’ Dublin was a good preparation for it: ‘It can be a very bitchy, back-stabbing, gossipy backwater.’ He loves coming back here but doubts he could live here again for a long period. His incredible career has netted him too many accolades to mention. They culminated in a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Irish Film and Television Academy in 2018. He turned 70 last year and his film tally equals that figure. He now sits at the top of the film world like an elder statesman, the wise man on the hill
Aubrey Malone traces the life and times, so far, of Gabriel Byrne delivering paternalistic soundbites to his many acolytes, whether they’re ‘in treatment’ or not. Despite all his Emmys, his Tonys, his Golden Globe and so many other awards and nominations, when you mention Gabriel to people they don’t tend to point to any one film or theatre or TV performance as his signature tune. In other words there’s no one film, play or TV series that stands out as giving us the epitomic Byrne performance. The gems of richness are scattered pell-mell throughout a cavalcade of work that feature different aspects of it. There are very few turkeys in that canon which is unusual for so prolific a career. ‘If you’re in a bad film,’ Richard Burton once advised, ‘Make sure you’re the best thing in it.’ That was often true of Gabriel too.
He acted with Burton in the mini-series Wagner early on in his career and had a very fruitful, if brief, friendship with him. Burton was on his last legs at the time but he was still able to impart some very useful advice to Gabriel about ‘the craft’ which stood him in good stead after he made his name. It was a thankless role for Gabriel. He had only ten lines in it, spread across six countries, but it enabled him to watch his heroes at work. Not only Burton but the heady triumvirate of Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud as well. Another quotation I remember of Burton’s was, ‘An actor is something less than a man. An actress is something more than a woman.’ I beg to disagree. Actors at their best combine the masculine and feminine. We have only to look at someone like Marlon Brando to see the cohesion. Or Gabriel Byrne. Senior Times l March - April 2021 l www.seniortimes.ie 5
