Photograph by Greg Gorman. What makes a good Bond (James Bond)? Like a perfectly balanced martini, Ian Fleming’s iconic literary character demands a specific formula: equal parts confidence and calm; intelligence (sometimes eclipsed by pride); and a vermouth-style wash of mischievousness, wit and sex appeal. Shaken, of course, with the potential to knock you from your seat. And served with a singular roguish garnish.
To expect any mortal to embody all of the above and more on screen is a hefty ask, one that just seven actors have attempted in the 62 years since the release of the first film. Sean Connery planted the cinematic flag for Bond in 1962, with his bone-dry delivery and distinctive brand of cool. Roger Moore played 007 with added humour, and arguably the silliest gadgets. Daniel Craig, the franchise’s most recent Bond, brought a grittier, muscular sensibility to the MI6 Secret Intelligence Service agent.
And then there’s Pierce Brosnan, who imbued Bond with a pitch-perfect mixture of suavity, savagery and a touch of world-weariness throughout his seven-year tenure in the role. He relished the quirks of the series’s scripts. Case in point: after knocking a henchman into a churning newspaper printing press in 1997’s “Tomorrow Never Dies”, he somehow manages to convincingly deliver the line: “They’ll print anything these days.” The character of 007, and the long cultural shadow he cast, seemed to be Brosnan’s destiny.
“When you play a role like that,” he is quoted as saying in a 2007 New YorkTimes article, “you live with it forever.” But in portraying the bad-guy-chasing bachelor, Brosnan was subjected to the professional pigeonholing and public resistance to reinvention that often afflicts Disney stars and franchise actors (Mark Hamill of “Star Wars” fame springs to mind). He wrestled openly over the years with the limitations of 007, calling the role “a straitjacket of apiece” in the same 2007 article. “It did limit one,” he said. “In the same breath, it has allowed me to go off and create my own films, my own work.” Complicating the picture is the fact that Brosnan maintains he never intended to pursue an on-screen career.“I’m always amazed that I am an actor,” he tellsT Australia today. “I’m intrinsically very shy and I find it very difficult, at times, to act. It can be very painful to have to show yourself.”
Here on the set of the T Australia cover shoot, thePacific Ocean lapping beyond the window, Brosnan, now 70, appears both deeply at home and a million miles removed from his Brioni Bond suits. This could be because we are at his real-life beachfront home in Malibu and the photographer, Greg Gorman — a renowned celebrity portrait shooter — has been a friend for three decades. (The two met in the early ’90s, the day Brosnan got the news that he would play the next Bond.) But it is also because we are discussing a subject close to his heart: art.
Brosnan was born in Drogheda, County Louth, Ireland, to a carpenter father and a nurse mother, and grew up in Ireland and, later, South London. He left school in Putney at the age of 16 with a handmade cardboard folio of sketches and a dream of becoming an artist. Lacking any formal training or qualifications, he tried his luck selling artworks (in Brosnan’s words, “hawking my wares”) on Fleet Street, before snagging a job as a trainee commercial artist atRavenna Studios, a boutique art studio tucked beside a brewery. For 20 pounds a week (about $800 in today’s money), he was employed to, as he puts it, “draw straight lines and water the office spider plants”. A fortuitous conversation with a photo lab technician opened the door to the Oval House Theatre in Kennington. It was1969, a golden age of British experimental theatre, and Brosnan, a self-described film buff, enrolled in some workshops and shortly thereafter left his Ravenna Studios job to test the waters in a different facet of the arts. But his dedication to his first creative love never wavered.
Art became a constant companion. When an acting role required Brosnan to travel, he would set up a makeshift workspace in his temporary lodgings. “I find the space and I set up a studio so I have comfort, I have a home,” he says. “If it’s a demanding role and it needs real focus and concentration, then you’ll go to work, you’ll come home, you’ll make yourself some dinner or get some food, you learn your lines, you study, and in between I work on canvases, drawings, and create, just because it’s an outlet.“I just have to draw,” he continues. “I have to keep moving.”
Brosnan’s painting style evokes his Impressionist-era influences — he lists Matisse, Chagall and Picasso as enduring sources of inspiration. Most of Brosnan’s works begin as sketches, which he transforms into abstract landscapes and portraits rendered in vivid, expressive colours. An overwhelming sense of energy pervades his oeuvre. “It’s all in the doing,” Brosnan says.“The constant doing. The repetition, the practice, the line and the form. Being invested in your own life and the world around you.”
Surrealism has also had a large influence on Brosnan’s creative output. “When I was 16 and working at thePutney gallery, I bought my first book at WHSmith, a small copy of [Jean-Paul] Sartre’s ‘Nausea’. It had a Dalí on the cover,” he recalls, referring to the artist’s painting “The Triangular Hour”. “I still have the copy somewhere.” Ever eager to expand his creative repertoire, Brosnan used a filming schedule in Geneva,Switzerland, as an opportunity to procure a fine set of tools for making linocuts. He took them with him to his next film set, in Texas, for the television series “The Son”. “I had days off and I began to do linocuts, and my line and my form has gotten stronger,” he says.
A holiday in Mexico in 1994 brought Brosnan face-to-face with another great love. While on a beach during his stay in Cabo San Lucas, he was introduced to the television producer Keely Shaye Smith (now Brosnan), who was there to interview the actor Ted Danson. “He was captivating,”Keely said of meeting Brosnan in a 2001 People interview. The couple welcomed their first son, Dylan, in 1997, and their second, Paris, in 2001, before marrying later that year in Ireland’s Ball in tubber Abbey. Even a short time in the couple’s presence reveals Keely’s grounding influence on his life. On the day of the shoot, she is the consummate host, serving an elegant family-style lunch for the crew.
Brosnan speaks effusively of Keely’s impact on his life. “I wouldn’t be here talking to you if it wasn’t for her,” he says. “She’s always just genuinely being graciously supportive of my work as an artist, as a painter. And she has a voice and an opinion about it. She’s got a great sense of colour herself.” He gestures around the Malibu home they share — a tropical-style villa affectionately dubbed “Orchid House” — as proof of Keely’s aesthetic influence. “She created this home that we live in,” he says. “You walk through it — it has an energy, it has a flow, it has a grace, it has a dignity.”
It also contains evidence of Brosnan’s artistic practice at every turn. Keely shares that he will do his linocuts and printing in the kitchen, while the garage has also been converted into a studio space, sketch-filled notepads sit beside the telephone and Keely has surrendered her office, adjacent to the main bedroom, to Brosnan so he can act on bolts of late-night inspiration. “He’s taken over every surface,” says Keely, “and happily so.” Keen eyes might also spy replicas of famous paintings originally created for Brosnan’s 1999 art-heist film, “TheThomas Crown Affair”. Says Brosnan, “I was so worried about the making of the movie that I never even thought about the paintings, and then [Keely] said, ‘We have to get these paintings. They’re flying off the wall.’ ” Today, a“Monet” that featured in the film takes pride of place in the guest powder room, while a “Gauguin” hangs in the couple’s bedroom.
Brosnan was also a producer on the film. “I knew I wanted to steal a Monet or a Matisse,” Brosnan says, referring to the daring museum thefts his character, the billionaire playboy Thomas Crown, pulls off in the movie. He also personally chose René Magritte’s surrealist masterpiece “The Son of Man” to feature in the film, according to a 2021 interview withGentleman’s Journal.
As Brosnan’s muse and collaborator, Keely — whose CV now spans director, producer, documentarian, activist, philanthropist and organic gardener — has played an integral role in steering Brosnan’s artistic career. In 2018, she was invited to the Cannes FilmFestival to screen her film “Poisoning Paradise”, a documentary exploring the Hawaiian pesticide crisis(the couple purchased a home on Kauai in 2002). For the same festival, Brosnan was invited to submit a piece of work for amfAR’s 25th annual Cinema Against AIDSevent. Brosnan retrieved from his garage a portrait he had drawn of Bob Dylan and began painting it. “It came out rather well,” he says. “I brought it to Cannes Film Festival and we went to this beautiful gala, star-studded occasion.” At Keely’s insistence, they listed the portrait for $US30,000 (about $AU46,000) an unfathomably large sum in Brosnan’s view. The hammer would eventually come down at $US1.4 million ($AU2.13million), paid by the Ukrainian producer and venture capitalist Marina Acton. “It was one of those nights where we just skipped the light fantastic going home, and it made world headlines the next day,” Brosnan says. “If it could be like that every day, then I wouldn’t have to act. But no, I understood the chemistry of Brosnan-Bond-Dylan. It had a wonderful sense of embroidery and story to it.”
From there, Keely encouraged Brosnan to exhibit his works publicly, offering fans the chance to see another side of their beloved Bond. “She curated about 250 drawings,” Brosnan says. “She got a photographer here one day and we spent the whole day photographing the work. Then it was like, ‘Let’s go find a gallery.’ ” They settled on Control Gallery on North La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles and got to work staging an exhibition of 50 of Brosnan’s paintings, many of which were pulled out of storage, alongside a curation of lithograph and silk-screen prints, about 100 drawings and a collection of Brosnan’s film scripts illustrated with sketches. The exhibition, titled “So Many Dreams”, opened on May 13,2023, with an opening-night guest list that included actors, sports stars and musicians. “There’s so much life and pain and joy in his paintings — it’s very emotional and so moving to see his art,” Brosnan’s “The Thomas Crown Affair” co-star Rene Russo told Vanity Fair at the reception. “I can feel it in the room. It’s powerful. I came in and burst into tears.”
Brosnan turned 70 three days later (“I just got in under the wire,” he jokes). But Keely insisted there was more to be done. “[She] was always saying, ‘You should go to Miami,’” says Brosnan, whose work was previously selected for a one-day showcase alongside his son Paris, a prolific artist in his own right (the father and son love to occasionally paint side-by-side), at the 2021 Miami ArtWeek. In 2023, Brosnan was invited to collaborate with the art collection management platform OLEA — co-founded by Billy Pressley and Jose Baltazar — for that year’s Art Miami fair on Biscayne Bay. Brosnan showed five works, including acrylic portraits of Picasso and the late chef and presenter Anthony Bourdain (a friend of Brosnan’s), a 1989-era Matisse-inspired interior scene and a blue-themed abstract painting titled “Fishhook”.
Brosnan recognises the opportunities that acting has afforded his artistic pursuits — the“starving artist” schtick need not apply when you’re already a global icon. “This old mug got me in the door,” he says of his seemingly made-for-close-up profile, “and it’s kept me going.” Brosnan starred in three films in 2023, with another three currently in post-production. “I’ve had some talent as an actor and a belief in myself, and a courage within myself and my own destiny,” he says. But he adds that the additional role of visual artist has been a “necessary comfort of late”. Could Brosnan ever choose between these two parts of himself? “I don’t want to have to make such choices,” he replies.“I hadn’t really thought about age that much,” he says at one point. “Then you go, ‘70’, and it’s really time passed.“Time — present and future,” he continues. “And what mark do you want to leave? What do you want to be remembered as? Will you be remembered? Everything changes. Everything falls apart. So you enjoy it and celebrate it. And that’s why the art has become more meaningful now than ever.”
