IT’S BEEN 20 YEARS SINCE THE HANDSOME IRISH ACTOR PLAYED JAMES BOND. BUT EVEN THOUGH HE’S IDENTIFIED BY HIS MOST FAMOUS ROLE, HE HASN’T LET THAT DEFINE AN ON-SCREEN CAREER THAT SPANS MORE THAN FOUR DECADES

BY JOEL KELLER

In a way, it seemed to be destiny that Pierce Brosnan would play James Bond. While he was more debonair than Ian Fleming’s rough-hewn vision of 007 think Daniel Craig but with darker hair Brosnan was the closest to how fans of the movie franchise came to see the character. He was suave, he had a sense of humor, and he looked damn good in a tux.
Bond and Brosnan were so meant to be that he was offered the role after Roger Moore was done with it in the mid-1980s, which would have returned the character to its youthful roots. But Brosnan couldn’t get out of his contract with NBC for the series Remington Steele, ironically because news of his casting in The Living Daylights led to renewed interest in the detective series.

“I’d done all the photos with the iconic gun pose, and my late wife [Cassandra Harris] and I were about to toast our new life with a bottle of Cristal when my agent called and said, ‘‘It’s fallen through.’ It was because I couldn’t get out of Remington Steele,” he told the Guardian in 2019.

Of course, nine years and two Bond films with Timothy Dalton later, Brosnan took his rightful place in the hugely successful 1995 film Golden Eye. After four films as 007, all of which were box office successes, he was ready to do it again when the franchise’s producers told him they wanted to go in a new direction.

Though he was shocked by the decision, Brosnan has never let Bond define his career, despite the fact that he was associated with the role going all the way back to those heady Remington Steele days. Even though many people know him as Bond, many remember him just as fondly for playing Sally Fields’ boyfriend in Mrs. Doubtfire or singing his heart out in the film version of Mama Mia! He has refused to be typecast, which has led him to an eclectic four-decade career of memorable roles both big and small.

In his latest film, The King’s Daughter, which was released on January 22, he plays King Louis XIV of France, who steals the life force of a mermaid in a quest to live forever. But when his illegitimate daughter, Marie-Josephe D’Alember (Kaya Scodelario), finds the mermaid, a family struggle ensues.

In the past three years, he’s played an unethical fertility doctor in the film False Positive, a renowned thief in The Heist, Will Ferrell’s Icelandic father in Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, and 1800s Texas oil magnate Eli McCullough in the AMC series The Son. His career since Bond has been full of roles like this, roles that don’t necessarily depend on his classy manner or sliver fox good looks.

“My job is to act,” he told Esquire in 2019. “My job is to go find work as an actor, paint, get on the stage, get off the stage, and hopefully do something that’s entertaining.”

Brosnan was born in 1953 in a small town outside of Dublin, and his childhood was marked by constant transition. His father left for good and his mother moved to London when he was four in order to make a better life for her family. He lived with various relatives and in boarding houses until he joined his mother in London at 12, an experience he feels fueled his acting aspirations.

“I’m very grateful that I didn’t have the shackles of parenting, so to speak, and really cleaved my own path in life,” he told the Guardian in 2020. “When, as a young teenager, I told my mother that I wanted to be an actor, she was extremely supportive of that. She wholeheartedly said, ‘Follow your dreams.’”

In his first stage role, he worked with none other than Tennessee Williams on the playwright’s production of The Red Devil Battery Sign. Despite this fast start on stage, “I always dreamed of the movies,” he told the Guardian. “The stage, as exhilarating as it was, always terrified me. I wanted to be up on the silver screen.”

Remington Steele was his breakout screen role, where he played a smoothed-down ‘80s TV version of James Bond. He was the not-very bright face of an agency whose real detective was played by Stephanie Zimbalist. It was then that he moved with Harris and their children to California.

Brosnan’s life has been marked by tragedy; Harris died of ovarian cancer in 1991, and their daughter Charlotte died of the same disease in 2013. While Harris was ill, Brosnan took up painting as a method of stress relief and expressing his emotions.

“I started painting in 1987 when my late wife had cancer,” he told a charity auction in Cannes, France, in 2018. “I had been painting out of pain, and now the pain sometimes comes through in color.”

A portrait he painted of Bob Dylan sold at that auction for an amount that astonished him. “I am deeply proud, humbled, and plain old over-the-moon joyous following the sale of this painting for 1.2 million euros at last night’s auction for am fAR,” he wrote on Instagram. The proceeds from the auction went to the AIDS research organization.
Although he’s said that a woman should play the next James Bond, he’s been reluctant to talk about Craig and the current run of Bond films, other than to praise his successor in the role. That’s been especially true since he criticized the direction the franchise has gone during a 2018 interview.

Currently enjoying life in Hawaii with his second wife Keely Shaye Smith and their two adult sons, Brosnan, who turns 69 in May, knows that his near future will be a busy one.
“I have no desire to retire,” he told the Guardian. “The parts that will come to me will be the parts of the elder, the parts of the comedic turn. At this point in life, I don’t know what else to do but act and paint.”