Still Brooding, Reluctantly, in Hollywood.

THIS writer was only a baby in 1978 of course, but I remember Gabriel Byrne as Pat Barry in the Irish TV drama `The Riordans,' swaggering from the distance across a wind-whipped field, hair black as burnt toast and scowling like a man who's just decided the way to a woman' s heart is through her weakness for James Dean and Marlon Brando impersonators.

I remember him too in `Bracken,' a later spin-off built more or less entirely around Byrne's ability to stare moodily into the middle distance, look cool in a black leather jacket and sneer like Elvis at a veggie burger factory.

Gabriel Byrne was sexy and he could act up a storm and Irish television had never seen anything like him. From the moment he rocketed into Maggie Riordan's orbit, jaw clenched like a fist, eyes burning like little dark coals, it was obvious a Sunday night drama series set in rural Ireland would be only a launching pad to bigger things.

And the bigger things came rapidly. Producers and directors were impressed by the newcomer's aura of physicality and intelligence in the seminal sword-rattler, Excalibur, and they formed a long line outside his door. Before the 1980s were out, Byrne had worked with Donal McCann, Jill Clayburgh, Natasha Richardson, Kathleen Turner, Jodie Foster, Albert Finney and future wife Ellen Barkin. Judging by the on-screen company he was keeping and the press he was receiving, the one-time seminary student from working-class Dublin was teetering on the brink of some serious Hollywood stardom.

Cut to 1992. For an actor once tipped as a potential Harrison Ford- type leading player, Gabriel Byrne is doing some curiously un-starlike things. The film is Into the West, and Byrne, barely recognizable in outrageously un-sexy duds, hair Brylcreemed beyond the call of duty, and sporting a thick-as-treacle accent, is in the middle of an itinerant camp somewhere in Ireland. He's dancing around a campfire (if you can call it dancing; he looks like a man trying to reach a bother-some itch), howling like a kicked dog, and generally looking exactly the opposite of how groomed-for-stardom Hollywood properties are supposed to look.

But by now, such off-the-beaten-track roles as `King of the Irish Gypsies' are par for Byrne's course. Reluctant to dive into the celebrity pool beckoning since the mid-1980s, Byrne has bucked expectations throughout his career. For every appearance in a high-profile Hollywood celeb-fest (1987's Siesta featured Isobella Rosellini, Jodie Foster, and Barkin) there's one in a downbeat, low-budget affair (The Courier featured Byrne, a cast of Dublin unknowns, and ex-Pogue Cait O'Riordan). Every visually lush romantic feature (last year's blink-and-you've missed-it flop Little Women) is countered by its grainy, edgy opposite (Jim Jarmusch's upcoming Deadman), and it seems to make little difference to Byrne's performances whether he swaps lines with film stars or film starters.

But while he may have deliberately derailed himself from the fast track to box-office stardom, the 45-year old actor says he's quite content to maintain a relatively low profile.

"I've always felt uncomfortable with the idea of celebrity and power, " he told the Irish Voice in a recent telephone interview from his Los Angeles home.

"Celebrity removes you from the cut and thrust of normal life. In this business there are two realities: how you are yourself, which is something you must treasure at all costs, and how you are perceived. I can't understand that, and I've made a real effort to stay out of the Hollywood celebrity scene. I'm not really one who goes to Hollywood parties - I mean, what would I have to say to Jack Nicholson?"

IN fact, although Byrne lives half the year on the West Coast, he admits his heart lies far from the Hollywood star machine and the movies that derive from it. His primary interests lie with smaller, more personal projects, he says, and during our 75-minute phone conversation, his three films scheduled for U.S. release this year are barely mentioned. (Usual Suspects, a noir-ish thriller set in San Francisco and New York and tipped by industry insiders as a potential late summer smash, will be released next week, with Noel Pearson's Frankie Starlight and Deadman following by year's end.)

He does, however, talk about a new direction his career has taken - that of published author. Pictures In My Head, a sort of anecdotal autobiography covering his life from childhood in Dublin up to the making of Into The West in '92, will be published by Roberts Rinehart in September. While the book's sale potential is not likely to worry Tom Clancy or Michael Crichton, Byrne's literary debut is a revealing, endearing book, brightly written and often quite moving. Unusually for a star-penned volume, it's also commendably free of self-aggrandizement.

"I had written on and off for [Dublin magazine] Magill when I was in Ireland," Byrne says, his accent undiluted even after years of flitting between Dublin and L.A. "When that [magazine] folded, I thought it was the end of it. Then I did a few things for RTE radio that were well received - I got a lot of letters saying I should put them into a book - but I never took the idea of writing seriously until the kids came along. I thought I'd try to put something on paper to let them know about the world I came from, just in case I never got a chance to tell them myself."

Pictures In My Head tells a lot about Byrne's early days, from stealing wine as an altar boy and his years in a British seminary through his beginnings as an actor, his eventual breakthrough with `The Riordans, ' and his introduction to Hollywood. But don't expect a tabloid style page-turner: Byrne is flexing literary muscles here, and discreetly glosses over anything remotely steamy, diplomatically (and maddeningly! ) blurring the identities of an alcoholic film star and a frantic director behind single letter pseudonyms in one chapter.

"I could have written a Hollywood kiss-and-tell without much trouble, " he says, "but I don't think anyone deserves to have me write about them in that way. People have written untrue things about me and it' s a terrible invasion of privacy."

There's that reluctance to play the celebrity game again. Byrne's easygoing, down to earth manner is a rarity in glamour-obsessed Hollywood, and he admits the demands placed on him by the industry have occasioned thoughts of abandoning the idea of being part of the film industry.

"I've considered quitting a lot of times, but I keep doing it to get better at it. I have to make a living as well, of course, but I have this vision of myself sitting in my house in Kilkenny, just writing books and not caring if they sell. Something like a guide to the inland waterways of Ireland, maybe!

"I'm working on a novel at the moment too, but there's no great satisfaction to be got out of writing. People think it's glamorous, like they do with acting, but you give up part of yourself, and it's a real slog, like studying for the Leaving Cert, permanently. But I do have a compulsion to finish it."

A Gabriel Byrne novel is unlikely to hit the stores soon; his movie schedule is busier than ever. If Byrne ever does turn his back on Hollywood, he's got more than a few cushions to fall back on. Coming after his success with films like Defense of the Realm, Julia and Julia, and Gothic, Byrne's appearance as a vicious drug dealer in the independent Irish film The Courier signified a willingness to involve himself thoroughly in the then-fledgling Irish film industry (a move considered far riskier in 1988 than it would be today). His dedication to the development of Irish film has continued alongside his acting career.

In 1992, he formed his own production company, Mirabilis Films, and produced and starred in Into the West, a film that would probably have remained unmade without his involvement. In 1993, he executive produced seven-time Oscar nominee In The Name of The Father. Byrne regularly returns to the country to produce and act - by the time you read this article, he'll be in Ireland completing pre-production work for The Last of the High Kings, a film he co-wrote with Ferdia MacAnna, and he has several other Irish projects on the back burner.

As a sort of elder statesman of Irish filmdom as well as an active participant, Byrne maintains a close eye on the development of the industry there. He welcomes the recent surge in production in Ireland, but he also urges caution on the part of film makers.

"I keep going back to Ireland not just because I feel a responsibility for putting something back," he says, "but because it's very important for me to keep in touch with the place. But in Ireland right now there' s this ruthless arrogance in the film industry, and I don't like it. It's great that movies are being made, but we have to look at the quality of those films, and to be quite honest, some of the movies are s - and wouldn't be made anywhere else. I think we all know which films I'm talking about.

"Of course there's no such thing as a completely Irish film, but many productions just use the country as a backdrop, and are made without a particularly Irish voice. That's something we have to consider. How we're perceived as a nation is based on the movies people are seeing, and we should be careful of the cost of that."

But Hollywood has always chewed up resources, from landscapes to stories to individuals, without fretting over the representations that it spits out (think of all the Westerns shot south of the border featuring stereotyped Mexicans). Isn't Byrne assenting to that process in Ireland by contributing to the Hollywood machine?

"In an ideal world, the director, the actors, the money in Irish films would all be Irish, but that ideal world doesn't exist," says he. "And yes, Hollywood is a business that plunders, and there's a real danger of films being made by people who don't know Ireland. But I' ve made very deliberate moves not to belong to that. I work as much as I can with Irish writers. Into The West was actually one of the very few genuinely Irish films. I think it's important to try to develop something that comes out of the country itself.

"But I don't share the careless optimism of the industry at the moment. There's a perverse obsession with celebrity in Ireland right now, and the media are in a feeding frenzy. Look at the way they treated Marlon Brando - the country is in danger of becoming little more than an offshore Hollywood. But the goose can only lay golden eggs for so long. The film industry in the UK, Canada, and Australia fell apart after a fairly short time, and we really have to be careful with the industry in Ireland."

WITH upwards of twenty features scheduled to begin shooting in Ireland in 1996, it's unlikely that the industry will nose-dive in the near future. Yet Byrne's concerns are legitimate.

The recent shutdown of Divine Rapture - a film Byrne was offered, but passed over, he says - may be only the first twitch of a future tremor. But even if the industry continues to thrive, Byrne believes that unless indigenous film makers develop specifically Irish projects, the essentially Irish nature of films produced in Ireland will be diluted even further. The implication is that as the country becomes simply a scenic backlot for international film producers, Irish themes and stories themselves will be lost.

It's a threat he tries to remedy in yet another aspect of his career: documentarist. Byrne is a partner in EMG Television, a production company currently wrapping up work on A Road to Remembrance, a film about the procession organized to commemorate the Choctaw Nation's 1846 donation of $170 for Irish famine relief. Byrne calls the walk, organized by don Mullen of Concern, "the most moving experience of my life," and hopes the film, which will be aired in the U.S. as a National Geographic special early next year, will help Irish people realize further the tragedy of the Famine.

This month Byrne also begins work on a documentary about the father of actress Kathy Moriarty (who played Robert DeNiro's wife in Raging Bull), a Kerry native who left Ireland in the 1950s to work as a doorman in New York. The 73-year-old is returning to Ireland for the first time in 40 years, and Byrne and a small crew will be there to record it.

"Both films actually tie in to one of the themes in Pictures In My Head," he says. "That notion of being an immigrant and a stranger, and the idea of leaving and returning, or going and coming back - it's the kind of thing almost everyone can identify with.

"I think there's a new burst of self-esteem in Ireland right now, and Neil Jordan's film [Michael Collins] ties into that," he continues. "I'm shooting things I'm passionate about, and I'm getting to the stage now where I'm not afraid to go for it. [Director] Jane Campion said something to me once that at the time I brushed off, but now it seems particularly wise: `I am not afraid to fail.' Often that' s more important than wanting to succeed. It's the doing of the thing that's important."

FOR someone who has been in the business for nearly 20 years, Byrne' s attitude to the film industry - or at least to its more hype-filled aspects - remains remarkably laid back. Perhaps his singularly cool- headed stance can be traced to his childhood. In Pictures In My Head, he writes of the terror he felt at his first visit to a cinema - the film was Darby O'Gill and The Little People, the year 1960 - and of the wisdom with which his grandmother soothed his fears: "There' s nothing to be afraid of," she said. "It's only the pictures."

Ethnic NewsWatch © SoftLine Information, Inc., Stamford,
CT>Colin Lacey, Still Brooding, Reluctantly, in Hollywood.,
Irish Voice, 08-15-1995,