As he navigates an eccentric course to stardom, newcomer Gabriel Byrne is proud yet sensitive about his Gaelic heritage.
Gabriel Byrne's brogue is a touchy subject. The reason Gabriel Byrne's brogue is a touchy subject is that it has a nasty habit of slipping out at the most emotionally charged moments-which is one thing if you're a poet, say, but quite another when you're being paid $200,000 (as Byrne is) to portray the very un-Irish Christopher Columbus in this week's $15-million CBS TV-movie of the same name. "An actor, when he's supposed to play a scene with great passion, cannot take care whether he sounds Irish or not," says the show's Italian producer, Silvio Clementelli. "If he has to redo a line in the studio, it's not a problem."
It's just as well that the 34-year-old, Dublin-borne Byrne isn't around to hear Clementelli's comment. He's spent the past seven months-first in Malta, then in Spain, and now in the Dominican Republic-trying to prove CBS wrong in first pressuring for A Name Actor such as Ben ("Chariots of Fire") Cross for the title role. (Funny how even a network investing $6-million can ease up on the pressure once Faye Dunaway and Nicol Williamson have been cast as Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand.) And while Byrne's being seen by a projected worldwide television audience of 100 million could electrify his career the way such eminently forgettable big-screen films as "Hannah K" and "The Keep" did not, Byrne himself gives the impression that you can stuff superstardom if it means constantly talking about his Irishness. "I'm proud of being Irish--it's made me the actor I am--but I don't want to be known as some kind of clichi," he complains on an April morning last year near his beach-front cabana.
Making a movie in the Dominican Republic isn't exactly like making a movie in London or Paris or New York. When you make a movie in the Dominican Republic, rifle-toting uniformed government-provided security men, looking sinister, lurk around your set during the day and non-rifle-toting undercover government-provided security men lurk around your favorite restaurants at night, looking only slightly less sinister. The purpose of their lurking, according to co-executive producer Ervin Zavada, is to keep people on the desperately poor island from stealing from and selling drugs to the people making movies.
Ordinarily Byrne-who taught himself to swim and speak Italian in preparation, respectively, for the role and the foreign film crew-would have been before the cameras instead of at his cabana. However, his only lines that day had been delivered (sans brogue) as Columbus calmly received word from one of his followers that the New World teemed with gold. ("We shall call this place San Tomas," he had said, astride a horse, once a dozen or so shirtless Dominican kids playing 15th-century natives had been ordered out of camera range in pidgin Spanish, "in honor of all those doubters who said we would never find anything worth our trouble. Thank you. You've done well.")
Being the sort who prefers rereading Tolstoy's "War and Peace" to mixing with the rest of the cast, Byrne insists that the interview take place no closer to his living quarters than the cabana's outside deck. "Gabriel's very self-contained," observes co-star Eli Wallach. "Especially now, when he must feel like a political candidate under a microscope, worried he's going to make the first mistake of the campaign." Besides, his wife may be inside the cabana. Or, rather, the tall blonde everyone assumes is his wife, but who, in reality, as Byrne reluctantly admits, is the same live-in girl friend who dumped her own successful career in broadcast journalism to follow him from Ireland to London four years ago. "I'm secretive," Byrne explains, grinning unexpectedly.
His director agrees. "It's the first time I'm facing a personality not so easy to decipher," shrugs Italy's Alberto Lattuada, who's worked with the likes of Sophia Loren, Anna Magnani, and Marcello Mastroianni. "For example, he tells me the two most important masterpieces of all time are "War and Peace," by Tolstoy, and "Ulysses," by (Ireland's) James Joyce. To say that after "War and Peace" there is "Ulysses..."
Actually, if Byrne comes off as something of an enigma, if he occasionally appears overly sensitive about his heritage, there's probably good reason. Leaving Ireland was a career move that still cuts deep. "I feel like I'm in exile," he says, "because I don't live in the country I was born in." He went from teaching high-school Gaelic to starring in his own series of Irish TV in only a few years. But who outside of the Emerald Isle ever heard of a show about a big-business-hating farmer called Braken? OK, maybe Britain's National Theatre Company, whose offer of a six-month run in "Translations" was what helped convince him to emigrate in search of wider recognition. Only he didn't find it. At leas not until his initial big movie break came in 1981, with "Excalibur."
"After 'Translations,' I was offered 'Irish parts'," Byrne recalls, with considerable distaste. "The guy with a gun in his pocket or his face down in the gutter. Which I didn't do-even though I needed the money-because I didn't want to perpetuate the image of the gun-toting, drunken Irishman."
Speaking of images. Some say "Columbus" plays slightly fast and loose with the agreed facts about the Genoese skipper who stumbled upon San Salvador in 1492 while hunting for the Orient. "Columbus " dialect coach and armchair historian David Mills, for one, hints broadly that there might have been more between Columbus and Queen Isabella than a royal interest in his seagoing venture.
"There was definitely something between them," says Byrne, who came highly touted for the part by "Hannah K," director Constatin Costa-Gavras. "But, you know, I don't see him as a mystic who knew by 'divine inspiration' there was something out there beyond the horizon. He was just an intelligent man, with an overwhelming belief in himself, who was ruthless in the execution of what he wanted."
And what of Byrne's wants now that his name (this week, at least) figures to be a household word? A baby-blue Mercedes to match what "Columbus" actress Audrey Matson calls' his "lethal blue eyes"? A beach house in Malibu with a Jacuzzi in the living room? Apart from jokingly suggesting that he star in an alternate version of the New World's discovery-this one by an Irish saint named Brendan, who all Irish kiddies were raised to believe beat Columbus West by centuries ("a very cheap miniseries: only one actor and a boat")-Byrne longs mainly for two things. First, to get as far away as possible from the Dominican Republic, where he's watched in horror as some of the more brazen folks connected with the movie use the Dominican Republic's impoverished economy as an excuse to pay the natives paltry sums for their labor and food. "I have my own 'understanding' with the local woman who cleans for me," he says. And second, to direct a film exploring the universal themes of "prejudice, class hatred, and religious hopelessness."
It's setting? Ireland. Of course.
by Sharon Rosenthal
