InStyle, March 1997
By Hilary de Vries
For actor Gabriel Byrne, it’s a home filled with family heirlooms and personal mementos that recall his Irish homeland.
The address is a good one, and there is the requisite massive Mercedes parked in the driveway, but that’s as far as the movie-star-in-L.A. look goes at Gabriel Byrne’s house. In fact, the modest Tudor, tucked under a canopy of maple trees, is far closer in spirit to Byrne’s native Ireland than to sun-kissed Beverly Hills. Beyond the Gothic arch of the front door, the book-crammed home---you’d swear that’s a lump of peat, not a pressed log, smoldering in the fireplace---is more evocative of, say, William Butler Yeats or Samuel Beckett than one of Hollywood’s sexiest leading men.
Which is precisely how the 46-year-old actor prefers his home away from home. One of the few members of Ireland’s renaissance to actually live in Los Angeles, Byrne moved into this Beverly Hills house three years ago, after the breakup of his marriage to Ellen Barkin, with whom he has two children, Jack, 7, and Romy, 4. Now, after their amicable divorce, they live within a few minutes of each other in this stylish, comfortable neighborhood. That Byrne has imbued his new home with more than a bit of the old country---think hot tea, not hot tub---reflects the realities of his life today as Hollywood star (Miller’s Crossing, The Usual Suspects, Into the West), expatriate Irishman, and divorced dad; it is a home designed as much for the soul as for the body.
“Because I live outside my own culture, I bring with me things that mean something to me, so there isn’t anything in here that doesn’t tell a story,” he says, nodding at the books piled into corners---mostly volumes of Irish poetry, Beckett, Joyce, Yeats---and the reams of old family photographs and oil paintings of Irish landscapes lining the deep jewel-toned walls. “It’s like that old movie with John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara where he’s going to marry her and he says, ‘I’ll take you just as you are,’ but she says, ‘No, I must have my things about me.’”
And have them he does. Although the house betrays its inhabitant as a Hollywood player---the whirring fax machines, the piles of scripts---what catches the eye are the evocative talismans of Byrne’s past: his diploma from Dublin’s University College class of 1972; the old family accordions; the antique Irish ventriloquist’s dummy that holds court in one corner, its tiny velvet weskit updated with a baseball cap worn---very L.A.---backward.
But then again, Byrne has been carrying a torch for his native land ever since he burst onto the Hollywood scene seven years ago as the darkly handsome Irish mobster in the Coen brothers’ Miller’s Crossing. Now, with more than 30 feature films to his credit, including 1995’s cult hit The Usual Suspects, Byrne has seen his passion for all things Irish propel him in some new career directions. In addition to his acting duties---he stars in two films this year, Smilla’s Sense of Snow, with Julia Ormond, and Polish Wedding, with Lena Olin, as well as in HBO’s Weapons of Mass Distraction---Byrne develops and produces films about Ireland, including In the Name of the Father, which earned several Oscar nominations; Into the West; and the up-coming Last of the High Kings, [Summer Fling] which Byrne also wrote. In fact, Byrne has proved himself to be more than a budding writer. The author of a memoir, Pictures in My Head, about his Irish childhood, Byrne has also written a novel, Lark in the Clear Air, which he hopes to make into a film.
“I find writing desperately hard work,” says Byrne, waving off any discussion of himself as an Irish man of letters. His passion, he insists, “is to do movies that are about Ireland.” Hence a work schedule that has meant filming in Ireland every summer for the past several years---a professional commitment that has meshed nicely with his other passion, to raise his children with an active appreciation for their father’s native land.
“It is very, very important that I take them back to Ireland every year,” Byrne says emphatically, nodding toward his pool-less backyard, outfitted instead with a child’s swing and full-size trampoline. “It’s so easy to get caught up in the mass culture here. It’s important that they know they have another tradition and a heritage that is a gift to them.”
The oldest of six children, Byrne spend his childhood in a tidy, lime-washed cottage outside Dublin, where his father worked as a cooper at the local Guinness brewery. “We lived at the edge of the countryside,” he recalls, “where we had to walk two miles to get our milk, where we picked blackberries, and in summer there would be hay carts.” There were also lots of books, novels that fueled the actor’s imagination and helped define his sense of place. “My ideal rooms were born out of the books I read,” Byrne says. “I loved to read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s description of where Sherlock Holmes lived, the rooms at 221 Baker Street, and how he would inevitably wind up in a first-class compartment pulling out of St. Pancras station. I always fancied that world, a world of cluttered coziness.”
That sense of coziness now defines the house, which is furnished almost entirely with objects and furniture from the actor’s past. In fact, walking through the house with Byrne is a Proustian exercise. Here are the shoes he wore as a schoolboy (“done the same way they did shoes for horses, meant to last; not the age of quick consumption.”); here is an autographed photograph of James Drury, the star of the old western TV series, The Virginian (“the first Hollywood star I ever wrote to”); here is the antique leather-topped desk that was a gift from Barkin (“my favorite piece of furniture”)-a house that plainly reflects its reference for a richly personal and contemplative lifestyle. “I can never understand people who buy a thing to put on a coffee table because it’s decorative,” he snorts. “Or people who hire somebody to buy them things. I have to feel comfortable and that it’s homey for me.”
Emphasis on the “me.” With the exception of his children and a few close friends (Byrne has been romantically linked of late with Julia Ormond), not many have actually seen Byrne’s lair firsthand. But those who have visited have seen, and heard, proof positive that his Irish roots are more than decorative. It is the accordions, the ones piled in the living room that belonged to his grandmother, his uncle and his father, that really tie the actor to his past. “My dad played a button-key accordion, and I learned to play on that,” says Byrne, who played with his uncle in a local pub when he was 8 years old. Even today, he finds himself reaching for the heavy, loopy
instrument. “Sometimes I just come in and pick it up and play for something like two hours, go through my entire repertoire,” he says. “I’m not as good as I should be, but it’s very relaxing.” It does seem to be the rare piece of his past that
does not translate well. “Oh, everybody runs when I take it up,” Byrne says, laughing. “The kids are, like, ‘Daaaad! Not the accordion!’"
