CONNOISSEUR -- October 1990
Writer - Margy Rochlin
The rumpled intelligence that the actor Gabriel Byrne brought to the British thriller Defence of the Realm and Costa-Gavras’s Hanna K. has always been unassailable. His impressive dignity has even withstood the test of arty whoopee cushions like Julia and Julia and Ken Russell’s Gothic. (Should we count the relentlessly pretentious Siesta? After all, that’s how he met Ellen Barkin, his wife and the mother of their baby son, Jack.)
But the wry touch of the brothers Ethan and Joel Coen (writers of the eccentric Raising Arizona), who wrote and directed his newest film, Miller’s Crossing, seems actually to enhance Byrne’s easy style. As Tom, the smarts behind a dim political boss (Albert Finney), Byrne proves himself to be a spectacular Silent type. He knows how to look when he is wordlessly scheming: his square shoulders droop; his dark eyes seem to recede even deeper beneath those furry eyebrows. He knows how to look, period. The cinematographer of Miller’s Crossing, Barry Sonnenfeld, marvels that Byrne’s craggy beauty even plays tricks with the camera lens. “Some actors have soft, roundish faces, and they always look out of focus,” Sonnenfeld says. “Gabriel’s features are so angular and strong that he looked in focus even when he wasn’t.”
Byrne’s articulateness is unusual among Hollywood’s legion of waxy young stars. And, unlike most of his colleagues, he actually can write. In fact, Byrne’s “The Quiet Man” (with a nod to John Ford’s movie of 1952) was included in a collection of Ireland’s best contemporary short stories. But mention the elegance of his pared-down prose style and he starts clearing his throat nervously. “I don’t, um, spend enough time as a writer,” he says, “It’s exhausting. And by that I don’t mean, you know, exhausting because my muse is so demanding. I just hate the drudgery of it.”
He prefer to get going on topics such as his working-class Dublin upbringing. He put in four years at an English seminary, studying to be a priest, before he dropped out at 16. “(The seminary) destroyed my faith, instead of fortifying it,” he says (though perhaps it inspired his dress code of today: black shirt, black pants, black shoes). After graduating from University College, he did a stint he prefers to forget as a Gaelic and Spanish teacher at an Irish girls’ school. “I think all 17-year-old girls are possessed by poltergeists,” he says. “They were unmanageable, uncontrollable, and could home in on any weakness.”
He was 30 years old before he turned to acting. His first part: a no-line walk-on credited in the playbill as The Man from Chicago. It gave him quite a charge. “After a week as The Man from Chicago,” he recalls, “I would walk down the street like they say you do when you’ve had sex for the first time. You think everybody knows.”
At any rate, Byrne’s career switch led him from Ireland’s prestigious Abbey Theatre Company to his starring in “Bracken,” a top-rated Irish television show, to an invitation to work at the National Theatre, in London. As he speaks, a low-flying helicopter starts buzzing the woodsy deck of his rented hilltop home in Los Angeles, and he is up, out of his chair, pretending it is an assault by airborne paparazzi. He dashes toward an open sliding-glass door in a low crouch, with his arms shielding his head like a fleshy pup tent.
“Now, write this down,” he instructs me upon returning, “Ran inside just like Warren Beatty would have…”