Irish Eye on
Hollywood
By Tom Deignan
Richard Harris is no longer with us, but another legendary Irish actor is still out there working – and still being wrongly identified as English.
Peter O’Toole is set to star alongside Brad Pitt later this year in the film Troy, based on the famous epic poetry of Homer.
Troy is set in 1193 B.C. That is when Prince Paris (played in the film by Orlando Bloom) famously stole the beautiful Greek woman Helen (Diane Kruger), who was married to the king of Sparta. This set the two nations on the course of war. The Greeks began a bloody siege of Troy, led by the great warrior Achilles (Brad Pitt), also the star of Homer’s Iliad.
Though often referred to as a legend of British stage and screen from the 1950s and 1960s, Peter Seamus O’Toole was in fact born in Connemara, County Galway, in 1932. His bookie father later moved the family to Leeds, England.
After serving two years in the Royal Navy, O’Toole earned a scholarship to the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, where Limerick native Richard Harris was one of his classmates.
O’Toole later starred in Hollywood classics such as Lawrence of Arabia, Becket and My Favorite Year.
In Troy, O’Toole will star alongside two other veterans of Irish cinema, Sean Bean (who appeared in The Field, along with Richard Harris) and the always hard-working Brendan Gleeson, seen recently in Gangs of New York and Cold Mountain.
Given his recent busy work schedule, it’s interesting to note that when Gleeson, now 49, came to the U.S. to try and break into Hollywood, he was not exactly given many encouraging words.
“The first time I went to see an agent in America, he told me: ‘You’re too fat, too old, not good looking enough’ – that I’d never make it basically,” Gleeson recently told an Irish newspaper.
Let’s hope that agent is no longer working. Troy, directed by Wolfgang Peterson, is set to open nationwide on May 14.
Coincidentally, two weeks later, you can see Richard Harris’ up-and-coming son Jared in the sci fi epic The Day After Tomorrow. Also starring Dennis Quaid and Sela Ward, Tomorrow is a big-budget look at a world ravaged by global warming and environmental chaos, which has resulted in multiple hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes and even the onset of another Ice Age.
Aside from earning raves in recent theatrical performances, Harris is set to appear later this year in two more films: The Reckoning (March) and Resident Evil: Apocalypse (September).
Irish American actress Jennifer Connelly did a fine job of breaking the supposed hex on Oscar-winning women (Connelly won a Best Supporting statuette for 2001’s A Beautiful Mind). Her recent turn in House of Sand and Fog earned raves. After appearing in the summer action film The Incredible Hulk, Connelly avoided the bad roles that plagued the likes of Halle Berry and Marisa Tomei. Sand and Fog was based on Andre Dubus III’s best-selling novel about a once wealthy Iraqi (Ben Kingsley) who moves his family to California to start a new life. Barely able to make ends meet in a new country, he tries to make some money by purchasing a home recently seized from its owner and put up for auction.
But the life of the homeowner (played by Connelly) has already been torn apart by addiction. Now she has had her home taken away by what turns out to be an error. She focuses her rage, then, on the Iraqi whom she believes to be responsible for all of her bad fortune, in a story which one critic said was a penetrating portrayal of “the American Dream gone awry.”
On the other end of the American-dream spectrum, February will bring the release of Miracle, the true story of Herb Brooks (played by Kurt Russell), the coach who in 1980 led the U.S. hockey team to victory over the Soviets during the Winter Olympics at Lake Placid. Irish American actor Eddie Cahill will play Irish American goaltender Jim Craig. Though best remembered for draping the American flag over himself after beating the Soviets and scanning the crowd for his dad, Craig also played each game with a four-leaf clover etched into his facemask. Craig is the sixth of eight children born in North Easton, Massachusetts, a blue-collar town located between Boston and Brockton, and it should be interesting to see how Miracle depicts Craig, and other Irish members of that fated hockey team, such as Jack O’Callahan. Patrick O’Brien Dempsey also stars in Miracle, which was directed by Gavin O’Connor.
Having finally brought his semi-autobiographical film In America to the big screen, Jim Sheridan is now talking about his next film, which will also be a deeply Irish product, though again set in America.
“The script of that one is still in its rough stages, but it’s the story of an Irish American political family,” Sheridan recently told an interviewer for American Heritage magazine. “It’s not based on the Kennedys, but nobody will ever believe me when I say that. What I’m trying to do is write a version of Oedipus, set in America. It’s an ambitious project, and it can’t work in Ireland. In order to reconstruct Oedipus, you need a strong, functional father figure, and you don’t have that character in Irish letters. I used to ask this question: Name a good father in Irish literature, before 1980.… But for the Irish in America, that situation was often different. America was where the Irish grew up – where they came of age, where they gained a kind of control of the world for five minutes.”
Speaking of the Kennedys, as we move onto the small screen, the recent spate of Kennedy family programming to mark the 40th anniversary of JFK’s assassination was apparently not enough. ABC is reportedly producing an hour-long weekly series based on America’s most captivating Irish political clan.
There’s no word on when the series might hit the airwaves, but initial reports have the series beginning in 1959, when Jack was on the verge of running for president.
“America’s fascination with the Kennedys is boundless,” one producer involved with the show said. “This series will reach beneath the headlines to explore the forces that still captivate a nation.”
When America’s favorite Italian American family – The Sopranos – returns to HBO on March 7, be on the lookout for a storyline that includes one Ronan Quigley, an actor from Kilkenny. The top-secret nature of Sopranos production has disallowed Quigley from discussing specific plot lines. He did, however, divulge this detail.
“Minor characters normally end up dead in The Sopranos,” said Quigley, who will reportedly appear in several episodes of the controversial, Emmy award winning mob show.
Also be on the lookout for popular, outrageous Irish comedian Graham Norton, who recently signed a lucrative deal with Comedy Central to bring a version of his show So Graham Norton to this side of the Atlantic.
Something to keep your eye out for in the DVD store is The San Patricios. These were the members of the U.S Army’s Irish Brigade whose loyalties were torn during the Mexican-American War of the 1840s. Led by John Riley (played by Kurt Russell), the Irish American soldiers faced anti-Catholic bigotry from within their own ranks. Many believed they should be fighting with their fellow Catholics, against what they saw as naked U.S aggression against Mexico. Many of the “Saint Patricks” were later hanged as traitors. The San Patricios made its premiere at the West Belfast film festival in 1999 but never managed a theatrical release. Critics ultimately saw the film as uneven, but whatever the execution, this is a little-known episode in Irish America history that demands greater attention.
Finally, we know legendary Irish American author F. Scott Fitzgerald was tortured enough in life. Things don’t seem to be getting better. MTV reportedly is set to make a younger, hipper version of The Great Gatsby. The title role will go to Lance Bass, of the boy band N’Sync. And the role of his star-crossed lover, Daisy Buchanan? Well, that will go to that starlet in the making Paris Hilton.
Let’s hope this MTV version of Gatsby is a little better than Paris’ best-known work on film.
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