Hopkins poem at her funeral, where he was one of the only people there who was not a family member. He’s sober now but he’s still got that naughty glint in his eye and I think that must have been what attracted the woman whose great love was Richard Burton, one of the most infamous hellraisers of all time.
As to why men like Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Colin Farrell and those who blazed a trail of destruction and staggering acting ability before them end up as tabloid headlines, the best place to look is at the beginning of their stories. For Meyers, it was in Dublin city that a premature baby named Jonathan Michael Francis O’Keefe was born and kept in hospital for seven months before being allowed to go home to his mother, Geraldine, on Valentine’s Day 1978. Within three years, the family had moved to Cork and Jonathan’s parents had separated. Abandoned by his father, he stayed with his mother in a council flat. Unhappy at school, Jonathan Rhys Meyers abandoned education – or, rather, education abandoned him when he was expelled at fifteen years old for truancy. His story around this time is one of poverty and neglect. Geraldine O’Keefe had a serious drink problem and whatever money came in from the state swiftly found a home in the local pub: ‘She drank her dole money all the time. The reason she had no money was that she was going out with a lot of other women who had no money, and you start buying drinks all round and it’s gone. So you have a lot of friends on Thursday when you have money, and it’s all happy. And Friday morning you wake up and have nothing.’
With little else to do, Jonathan headed for the local pool hall and it was there his life changed dramatically in every sense of the word as casting agents happened upon the sultry-looking young man with movie star looks and an attitude to match. An audition followed, he met a director, and within months he was starring in a commercial for Knorr, got paid £500 and thought: ‘What boy is not going to say, “I’ll do this”? I wanted to act because it was soft money.’ Soon afterwards, and by now a fully fledged aspiring actor, Jonathan arrived on the set of Neil Jordan’s biopic Michael Collins (1996), in which he played the assassin of the Irish revolutionary, and felt very much at home: ‘It was just the whole atmosphere, the whole buzz about it, the big cameras and, suddenly, it was kind of like, this is a pretty f**king cool job.’
Success didn’t come easily or quickly and Jonathan had to graft to get good parts. Countless auditions were coupled with ‘talk’ of major parts in films like Minority Report and Spider Man (and at one point, the next James Bond!), none of which came to pass – but there was good news as the roles started to trickle in. His presence was required and lauded in television projects like Gormenghast (2000) and movies that include Bend it Like Beckham (2002), Vanity Fair (2004), Matchpoint (2005) and Mission: Impossible III (2006). Jonathan’s star was on the rise, but as he has said himself, ‘Overnight success takes about ten years.’
A major break came when Jonathan was cast as Elvis in a CBS mini-series (2005). Not only could he transcend the Irish accent and take on a plausible American one but he got the pelvic moves and facial twitches dead on. A Golden Globe quickly followed and the future looked bright. However, within a year, his mother Geraldine died aged just fifty. It was a traumatic time for the young actor and there were stories of dramatic bust-ups with his girlfriend and drinking bouts that ended badly. In a move that distances him from the old-school hellraisers, at the age of just twenty-nine, Jonathan checked into rehab. At the time, he told reporters, ‘I am not a hellraiser. I drank for a year and then realised it didn’t work for me any more.’
For a while, he replaced the pub with the gym but admitted it was hard to give up drinking, especially when filming in Dublin. He was a man in mourning, in the public eye and in trouble and in some ways there’s a deeper tragedy underlying Jonathan’s hellraising, one that lacks the sheen of the boozed-up glamour of O’Toole or Harris. Since then there have been a few messy and troublesome scraps in airports and more stints in rehab, but I can tell you that when he came on my show he was slurping nothing more intoxicating than the coffee. He was very calm and a proper gentleman in the Peter O’Toole mould, rather than the tabloid creature that has been created around him. He’s got money now but rather than investing in the fancy cars and bling, he’s bought himself homes in London, Dublin, Morocco and LA – which all sounds eminently sensible for a poor Irish lad made good.
It should be noted that throughout the whole torrid time, Jonathan was keeping the acting show on the road with arguably his most acclaimed performance to date as Henry VIII in the phenomenally successful mini-series The Tudors, a role that won him an Irish Film and Television Academy Award in the Best Actor in a Television Series category, 2008. It’s a role that he appeared to relish and one he was more than proud of: ‘People have said Henry VIII didn’t look like me. Fair enough. But no critic can tell me that how I play Henry isn’t right, because I play him a hell of a lot closer to history than people admit. He was an egotistical, spoilt brat, born with the arrogance that everything he had was his by right.’
Meyers was following in the footsteps of Charles Laughton, Richard Burton, Robert Shaw and Keith Michell but he took the role by the scruff of the neck and did it his way – including all the sex scenes, which he said were ‘like having sex in a Walmart on a Saturday afternoon’.
Jonathan’s own life story couldn’t be further removed from that of the most married monarch of them all but you can tell there’s plenty more to come from him. Although he’s already shown his versatility in going from the King of Rock’n’roll to the King of England, I personally think this actor’s best years lie ahead of him if he can keep the demons at bay.
He rejects the hellraiser label, saying: ‘I kind of like people having this idea that I’m this wild rebellious guy. But the reality is that I’m not, and I’m not quite sure I want to reveal how boring my life is. Of course, as a young Irish actor you’re tarred before you start. It’s the enduring cliché.’
What I think he’s got in common with the other Irish hellraisers is the ability to play edgy, troubled and explosive characters – perhaps because he’s got all that Celtic rage bottled up inside him. Let’s park this one for now as ‘work in progress’.
* * *
It’s curious that all three of the hellraisers I’ve featured here came from difficult backgrounds and fought to achieve their success. They’ve got an irrepressible, restless spirits and boundless raw talent. Perhaps that self-destruct gene can be channelled into creativity, supplying the high-voltage electrical power that each of them possesses as an actor. Of course, you don’t have to have an intense love affair with liquor to be a great actor – there are loads who don’t, some of whom I’ve featured in Chapter 7. But the drinker’s unpredictability gives them an edge and makes you feel you don’t quite know what they’re going to do next – even when they’re sober.
IF YOU WANT TO SEE how much Anglo-Irish attitudes have changed over the last decades, just take a look at the humour. The Bernard Manning era when every paddy was an idiot and ‘How many Irishmen does it take to change a lightbulb?’ jokes were ten-a-penny have long gone. It would be like doing a joke about a Pakistani or a black woman or a gay man: it’s not only politically incorrect but can be illegal and every right-thinking person considers them bad taste. Of course, in Ireland we’re allowed our own self-deprecating humour but it’s got to be on our own terms. We’ll crack a joke about ourselves and call ourselves paddies – but the British are not allowed the paddywhackery now, and some Irish people even got a bit hot under the collar in the 1970s when Dave Allen dipped into it.
