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Tag Archives: Jeremy Irons


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Birth of Irish Actress Sinéad Cusack

Sinéad Moira Cusack, award winning Irish actress, is born Jane Moira Cusack in Dalkey, County Dublin, on February 18, 1948.

Cusack is the daughter of actress Maureen Cusack and actor Cyril Cusack. She is the sister of actresses Sorcha Cusack, Niamh Cusack, and half-sister to Catherine Cusack. Her father is born in South Africa, to an Irish father and an English mother, and had worked with Micheál Mac Liammóir at Dublin‘s Gate Theatre.

Cusack’s first acting roles are at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. In 1975, she moves to London and joins the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) starring in Dion Boucicault‘s London Assurance in the West End. Her work with the RSC continues with an award-winning performance as Celia in As You Like It which includes the Clarence Derwent Award and her first Laurence Olivier Award nomination. She secures a second Olivier Award nomination for her performance in The Maid’s Tragedy by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher in 1981, followed two years later with a third Olivier Award nomination as Kate in The Taming of the Shrew.

Cusack makes her Broadway debut in 1984 performing in repertory with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Starring opposite Derek Jacobi, she plays Roxane in Anthony Burgess‘s translation of Edmond Rostand‘s Cyrano de Bergerac and Beatrice in William Shakespeare‘s Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Terry Hands. Much Ado is first produced at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1982–83, then moves to London’s Barbican Centre for the 1983–1984 season where it is joined by Cyrano, before both plays transfer to New York‘s Gershwin Theatre from October 1984 to January 1985, for which Cusack received a Tony Awards nomination for her performance as Beatrice, and costar Derek Jacobi wins the award for his Benedick. The production of Cyrano de Bergerac is later filmed in 1985.

During this period, Cusack and her husband, Jeremy Irons, appear in a Shakespeare Winter’s Eve, a major fundraiser for the Riverside Shakespeare Company in New York, along with other members of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Following the Broadway run, the plays tour the United States, making stops in Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles. Her connection with the Royal Shakespeare Company continues with a series of leading roles include Portia in The Merchant of Venice opposite David Suchet, Lady Macbeth opposite Jonathan Pryce in Macbeth and Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra in Stratford-upon-Avon and at London’s Theatre Royal Haymarket in the West End.

In 1990, Cusack, in the role of Masha, joins two of her sisters, Niamh (as Irina) and Sorcha (as Olga), and her father, Cyril Cusack (as Chebutykin) for a well-received production of Anton Chekhov‘s tragicomedy Three Sisters in a new version by Frank McGuinness, directed by Adrian Noble at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, before transferring to the Royal Court Theatre in London. The production also features Niamh’s husband, Finbar Lynch, as Solenyi and Lesley Manville as Natasha. The production wins the three real-life sisters the Irish Life Award in 1992.

One of Cusack’s best known stage roles is Our Lady of Sligo by Sebastian Barry in 1998, in which she plays the principal role of Mai O’Hara in performances in Ireland, on Broadway and at the National Theatre. For this she wins the 1998 Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Actress, the 1998 Critics’ Circle Theatre Award for Best Actress and her fourth Olivier Award nomination for Best Actress. In 2006-07 she stars with Rufus Sewell in Tom Stoppard‘s Rock ‘n’ Roll at the Royal Court Theatre in London which transfers to the West End and Broadway, winning Cusack her fifth Olivier Award nomination and her second Tony Award nomination.

In 2015, Cusack returns to Ireland’s Abbey Theatre, where she begins her theatre career. She appears in the world première of Mark O’Rowe‘s play Our Few and Evil Days, acting opposite long-time collaborator Ciarán Hinds. She wins the Irish Times Irish Theatre Award for Best Actress.

Cusack stars with Peter Sellers in the film Hoffman (1970). She guest stars in an episode of The Persuaders! (1971), a TV series starring Tony Curtis and Roger Moore, as Jenny Lindley, a wealthy heiress who suspects that a man claiming to be her dead brother is in fact an impostor. In 1975, she makes three appearances in the TV series Quiller as the character Roz.

Cusack and her husband appear together in the film Waterland (1992), in a television adaptation of Christopher Hampton‘s Tales from Hollywood (also 1992), and again in Bernardo Bertolucci‘s Stealing Beauty (1996). Further film work includes Passion of Mind (2000), V for Vendetta (2005), and Eastern Promises (2007), a thriller directed by David Cronenberg. Her performance in The Tiger’s Tail (2007) wins her a first Irish Film & Television Academy (IFTA) Award nomination for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. She wins the IFTA Award for her performance in The Sea (2013), adapted from the novel by John Banville. She is nominated once more for an IFTA Award for her performance in John Boorman‘s drama film Queen and Country (2014), which premières at the Cannes Film Festival.

Further starring roles include lead roles in Oliver’s Travels (1995), Have Your Cake and Eat It (1997) for which Cusack wins the Royal Television Society‘s RTS Award for Best Actress and Frank McGuinness’s The Hen House (1989) for BBC Television. She stars in the title role of George du Maurier‘s Trilby (1976), in an adaptation for the BBC’s Play of the Month, with Alan Badel as Svengali. She also stars in the BBC mini-series North & South (2004, from the novel by Elizabeth Gaskell) as Mrs. Thornton. She stars in the BBC sitcom Home Again (2006) and appears in the TV series Camelot (2011), which runs for one season. She has featured roles in the mini-series The Deep (2014) and the series Marcella (2016), an eight-episode murder mystery.

Along with other actresses, including Paola Dionisotti, Fiona Shaw, Juliet Stevenson and Harriet Walter, Cusack contributes to a book by Carol Rutter called Clamorous Voices: Shakespeare’s Women Today (1994). The book analyses modern acting interpretations of female Shakespearean roles.

Cusack marries British actor Jeremy Irons in 1978, and they have two sons, Samuel James and Maximilian Paul. Prior to marrying Irons, she gives birth to a son in 1967 and places the boy for adoption. In 2007, a journalist for the Irish Sunday Independent, Daniel McConnell, reveals that Cusack is the mother of left-wing general election candidate and now member of Irish parliament Richard Boyd Barrett. The two have since been reunited.

Cusack is a patron of the Burma Campaign UK, the London-based group campaigning for human rights and democracy in Burma. In 1998, she is named, along with her husband, in a list of the biggest private financial donors to the British Labour Party. In August 2010, she signs the “Irish artists’ pledge to boycott Israel” initiated by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

(Pictured: Sinéad Cusack reciting poetry for the British Library in October 2021)


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Birth of Richard Boyd Barrett, People Before Profit/Solidarity Politician

Richard Boyd Barrett, Irish People Before Profit/Solidarity politician, is born in Dublin on February 6, 1967. He has been a Teachta Dála (TD) for the Dún Laoghaire constituency since the 2011 Irish general election.

Boyd Barrett is adopted as a baby and is raised as a Roman Catholic in Glenageary, County Dublin, by his parents, David Boyd Barrett, an accountant, and his wife, Valerie. He attends St. Michael’s College in Dublin. He holds a master’s degree in English literature from University College Dublin (UCD). His birth mother is Sinéad Cusack, with whom he is later reunited in public. Since their reunion, he has had a good relationship with Cusack, her husband Jeremy Irons, and his half-brothers, Sam and Max. In May 2013, he reveals that theatre director Vincent Dowling is his biological father.

Boyd Barrett contests the 2004 Irish local elections for Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown County Council but is not elected. In 2009, he is elected to Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, winning 22.8% of the vote and topping the poll.

Boyd Barrett stands in the Dún Laoghaire constituency at the 2002 Irish general election for the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and at the 2007 Irish general election for the People Before Profit. This switch of identification is intended to increase his support from non-socialist voters. He loses to Ciarán Cuffe of the Green Party, by 9,910 votes to 7,890 votes on the 10th count.

Boyd Barrett again contests the Dún Laoghaire constituency at the 2011 Irish general election as part of the United Left Alliance. On the ballot paper, he is named a member of People Before Profit, because the United Left Alliance had not yet been registered as a political party. Following a “nail-biting two days” of counting and recounting votes, he is elected on the 10th count without reaching the quota.

As a TD, Boyd Barrett, supports protests against cuts to Dublin Bus services. In Dáil Éireann, he condemns the 2011 murder of PSNI officer Ronan Kerr as “an utterly brutal action, which leads back down a road which has failed.” Marie O’Halloran in The Irish Times describes his “consistently passionate outrage and opposition to the Government’s handling of the financial and banking crisis.”

Boyd Barrett speaks at the Dublin location of the October 15, 2011 global protests, inspired by the Spanish “Indignants” and the Occupy Wall Street movements. The same month he says Enda Kenny‘s government is engaging in “spin and disingenuity” to cover up its austerity policies, decrying the closure of hospital emergency departments around the country for “health and safety” reasons.

On November 2, 2011, Boyd Barrett leads the United Left Alliance TDs out of the Dáil, in protest against the government’s decision not to hold a debate on the payment of more than €700 million to Anglo Irish Bank bondholders. On December 15, 2011, he helps launch a nationwide campaign against a proposed household charge being brought in as part of the 2012 Irish budget. He is part of an Oireachtas delegation that meets the Bundestag‘s Budgetary and European Affairs committees in Berlin in late January 2012.

On March 10, 2016, at the first sitting of the 32nd Dáil, Boyd Barrett is one of four candidates nominated for the position of Taoiseach, all of whom fail to reach a majority. Ruth Coppinger nominates Boyd Barrett for the role, but the nomination is defeated by 9 votes to 111. As well as the six other AAA–PBP TDs, he also has the support of Séamus Healy of the Workers and Unemployed Action, Tommy Broughan of Independents 4 Change, and Independent TD Catherine Connolly.

At the 2020 Irish general election in February 2020, Boyd Barrett is again re-elected, having topped the poll.


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Birth of Actress Sorcha Cusack

sorcha-cusackSorcha Cusack, Irish actress, is born in Dublin on April 9, 1949. Her numerous television credits include playing the title role in Jane Eyre (1973), Casualty (1994–97), Coronation Street (2008) and Father Brown (2013–present).

Cusack is the second daughter of the actors Cyril Cusack (1910-1993) and Maureen Cusack (1920-1977). Her elder sister is actress Sinéad Cusack and her younger sister is actress Niamh Cusack. She is a half-sister to Catherine Cusack. Through her sister Sinéad, she is the sister-in-law of actor Jeremy Irons and the aunt of actor Max Irons and his brother, former child actor Samuel Irons.

Cusack has made many film and television appearances including The Bill, Casualty (as Staff Nurse/Ward Sister Kate Wilson from 1994 to 1997), the 1973 BBC adaptation of Jane Eyre, and the film Snatch (as the traveller mother of Mickey, played by Brad Pitt). In 1998, she plays Mother Duck on the cartoon The First Snow of Winter in UK Version. She also acts for radio, including a guest appearance in the BBC Radio 4 series Baldi and starring as Juno Boyle in the 2014 BBC Radio 3 production of Juno and the Paycock. She plays Helen Connor in Coronation Street in 2008, but because of her other acting commitments the role is played by Dearbhla Molloy when the character returns in July 2009.

In 2011, Cusack plays Mrs. Nicholson in two episodes of the first series of Mrs. Brown’s Boys. Susie Blake takes over the role for the second and third series. Despite this, she plays the part of Justice Dickie in the 2014 film Mrs. Brown’s Boys D’Movie. Since 2013 she has played Mrs. McCarthy, the housekeeper and parish secretary, in the BBC adaptation of the Father Brown mysteries. In 2015, she plays Bridie Stevenson in the BBC television series River.


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Birth of Actor Liam Neeson

Actor Liam John Neeson is born on June 7, 1952, in Ballymena, County Antrim. Raised as a Roman Catholic, Neeson is named Liam after the local priest. He says growing up as a Catholic in a predominately Protestant town made him cautious. At age nine, he begins boxing lessons at the All-Saints Youth Club and later becomes Ulster’s amateur senior boxing champion.

Neeson first steps on stage at age eleven after his English teacher offers him the lead role in a school play, which he accepts because the girl he is attracted to is starring in it. He continues to act in school productions over the following years.

Neeson’s interest in acting and decision to become an actor is also influenced by minister Ian Paisley, into whose Free Presbyterian church Neeson would sneak. Neeson says of Paisley, “He had a magnificent presence, and it was incredible to watch him just Bible-thumping away… it was acting, but it was also great acting and stirring too.”

In 1971, Neeson is enrolled as a physics and computer science student at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, before leaving to work for the Guinness Brewery. At Queen’s, he discovers a talent for football and is spotted by Seán Thomas at Bohemian F.C. There is a club trial in Dublin and Neeson plays one game as a substitute against Shamrock Rovers F.C. but is not offered a contract.

In 1976, Neeson joins the Lyric Players’ Theatre in Belfast for two years. He then acts in the Arthurian film, Excalibur (1981), alongside Helen Mirren. Between 1982 and 1987, he stars in five films, most notably alongside Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins in The Bounty (1984) and Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons in The Mission (1986). He lands a leading role alongside Patrick Swayze in Next of Kin (1989).

Neeson rises to prominence when he stars in the title role in Steven Spielberg‘s 1993 Oscar winner Schindler’s List. He has since starred in other successful films, including the title role in the historical biopic Michael Collins (1996), the film adaptation of Victor Hugo‘s 1862 novel Les Misérables (1998), Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace as Qui-Gon Jinn (1999), the biographical drama Kinsey (2004), the superhero film Batman Begins as Ra’s al Ghul (2005), the action thriller series Taken (2008–2014), the fantasy adventure film Clash of the Titans (2010) as Zeus, the fantasy films in The Chronicles of Narnia series (2005–2010) as Aslan, and the thriller-survival film The Grey (2011). In 2016 he narrates the RTÉ One three-part documentary on the Easter Rising, 1916.

Neeson has been nominated for a number of awards, including an Academy Award for Best Actor, a BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role and three Golden Globe Awards for Best Actor in a Motion Picture Drama. Empire magazine ranks Neeson among both the “100 Sexiest Stars in Film History” and “The Top 100 Movie Stars of All Time.”