Pierce Brosnan
Photo: Iceposter.com
He is best known for portraying James Bond in four films: GoldenEye, Tomorrow Never Dies, The World Is Not Enough, and Die Another Day. His fans credit him with reviving the James Bond film series after a six year hiatus caused by the major legal and financial issues of MGM, the distributor of the series.
Born an only child in the Republic of Ireland in Drogheda, County Louth, Brosnan lived in nearby Navan, County Meath. He was educated by the Irish Christian Brothers and would later condemn their brutality. Brosnan’s mother moved to London for work after his father abandoned the family; in 1964, at the age of thirteen, he joined her. His mother subsequently divorced his father and married a Scottish World War II veteran who was quickly embraced as a father figure by his young stepson. When he was 16 a circus agent saw him busking as a fire eater and hired him. He trained as an actor at the Drama Centre, London.
In the early-1980s, he became a television star in the United States with his leading role in the popular miniseries Manions of America, which he followed in 1982 by playing the title role in the high-rated NBC detective series Remington Steele. He was actually offered the job as James Bond before the Remington Steele series could be completed, but Brosnan was unable to break the contract with the producers. In 1992, Pierce shot a pilot for NBC called Running Wilde, playing a reporter for Auto World magazine whose stories cover his own wild auto adventures. Jennifer Love Hewitt played his daughter, but the series wasn’t picked up and the pilot never aired.
Brosnan’s appointment as Bond brought things full circle for the actor, who stated in interviews that the very first movie he ever saw was Goldfinger and that Sean Connery’s performance as Bond inspired him to enter show business.
Aware of the danger of being typecast as James Bond, Brosnan asked EON Productions, when accepting the role, to be allowed to work in other projects between Bond series films. The request was granted, and for every Bond series film, Brosnan appeared in at least two mainstream films, including several he had produced. For a time, rumour was that Brosnan’s Bond contract forbade him from wearing a dinner suit in any non-Bond film; that rumour was false. Brosnan played a wide range of roles in-between his Bond film appearances, ranging from a nerdy scientist in Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! to Canadian conservationist Grey Owl in the biopic of the same name.
Brosnan was signed for a four-film deal and first appeared as agent 007 in 1995’s GoldenEye to much critical praise. GoldenEye more than doubled the gross of Dalton’s previous film in worldwide ticket box office sales. Pierce returned as Bond in 1997’s Tomorrow Never Dies and 1999’s The World Is Not Enough to virtually the same success. In 2002 Brosnan appeared for his fourth and final time as the super suave secret agent in Die Another Day, which, while controversial to fans as being one of the weakest entries in the series, shattered all previous Bond films in terms of worldwide box office gross and is currently the highest grossing Bond film of all time (although not with inflation counted.)
He is a fan of Doctor Who and Monty Python, he told Michael Parkinson in an interview that if you’re not a fan of those two shows you might as well deny your UK heritage.
