Robaird O’Cearbhaill
Hong Kong Correspondent
Pierce Brosnan knows he has had a wonderful life and still has, but his faith has been his “constant” support. “God has been good to me. My faith has been good to me in the moments of deepest suffering, doubt and fear. It is a constant, the language of prayer,” he stated in Irish TV RTE’s Late Late Show.
“To be an actor, to get away with it, and to have fun and to be able to create a meaningful life for my family and support them, well, that’s pretty darn good,” he stated in an interview by Laura Scheffler in Haute Living magazine.
“Fate for me has played many good hands. There’s been a few devilish ones along the way, too. That’s just life; everything happens for a reason.” However God is crucial.
“It always helps to have a bit of prayer in your back pocket. At the end of the day, you have to have something and for me that is God, Jesus, my Catholic upbringing, my faith,” Brosnan added.
He also advised: “work hard and dream hard, and you have to really, consistently do that.”
Brosnan agreed with Scheffler that “precious time is the greatest luxury in life.” Expounding on that he said: “Time lived, time past and present, and good health, those are luxuries. Spending time playing nine holes of golf in the morning, having a beautiful lunch with my wife, a swim, spending the late afternoon in the studio painting, having a cocktail as the sun goes down — some tequila, that’s the best day I can dream of. Peace, nature, being by the ocean. Simple things. That’s joy.”
But faith, Brosnan told the Late Late Show, has always been there even in tragic times. “(Prayer) helped me with the loss of my wife to cancer and with a child who had fallen on tough times ( his son successfully survived a very serious car crash but his daughter died of ovarian cancer like her mother). But the positivity of prayer he acknowledges well.
“Prayer helps me to be a father, to be an actor and to be a man,” he said on RTE.
But despite having good Catholic education and strong bonds to the Church, Brosnan had a tough and challenging childhood and early adult life. His father left when he was two. He admitted to Chutkow that his teachers were “dreadful, dreadful human beings. Just the whole hypocrisy. And the cruelness of their ways toward children. Bitter. I have nothing good to say about them and will have nothing good to say about them. It was ugly. Very ugly. Dreadful.”He left Ireland at ten years old to the UK where in London as Irish he had “deep feeling as an outsider” as he told writer Paul Chutkow. On the other hand, as he said on RTE: “…there is one thing that the people of Ireland know how to do and that is to survive. You have to keep your faith and stay optimistic.”
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