by Hugh Dougherty
It is a revelation which will leave women the world over shaken but, thankfully, not stirred. Pierce Brosnan, who plays a spy who could safely be considered the world's most resolutely heterosexual man, has admitted he once thought he might be gay.
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'Sexiest man alive': Pierce Brosnan was once confused about his sexuality |
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"I was young, frivolous and full of abandon - a hippie with long hair down to my shoulders and a little goatee beard," he says in a new biography.
"Why? Because I thought I was gay. But no, I'm not gay." Photographer Colin Curwood recalls in the book how he photographed the future action hero taking part in a street carnival dressed in the kind of outfit even Q could not persuade Bond to get into: ballet tights and a tutu.
Brosnan was picked on by bullies for his artistic temperament and Irish accent as a teenager in London when he wrestled with his sexuality, and seemed unlikely to perform the death-defying feats which are run of the mill for 007.
One former schoolfriend said: "He wasn't the least bit athletic. I'd say he was naturally artistic." But he did have one of the attributes of a super-spy already, as he kept his confusion a secret from his friends.
"If he did question his sexual orientation, he never let on," said one. The book, by York Membury, also reveals that even when he got over the dilemma, it was to be a long time before he was to become a ladykiller.
Rebecca McKenzie, a former girlfriend he moved in with when he was 21, said he was hardly a legendary lover.
"I don't think he was a 'man of the world' when I met him," she said in the updated book, Pierce Brosnan: The Biography.
"I got the impression he hadn't had many girlfriends. He certainly was no Don Juan." Brosnan, who was born in the small Irish town of Navan, County Meath, had a fractured childhood with his father Thomas walking out on his mother May when he was a baby, and then being left by her at the age of four to be brought up by his grandparents.
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Family Bonds: Pierce with wife Keeley and sons Dylan and Sean |
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It was when he saw Goldfinger in a cinema in Putney that he decided he wanted to be an actor.
He also suffered tragedy later when his first wife Cassandra Harris, whom he married in 1977, died in his arms on their 14th wedding anniversary.
Brosnan, 49, has found love with Keely Shaye Smith, whom he married last year and with whom he has two children, Dylan, five, and one-year-old Paris.
In the new Bond film out later this year, Die Another Day, 007 beds the first black Bond girl, Oscar-winner Halle Berry.
But in spite of setting millions of women's hearts fluttering every time he appears on screen he still has something of the shy Irish schoolboy in him.
"I don't see myself as the hunk of the month," he said when told that an American magazine had voted him "sexiest man alive".
Brosnan first became a pin-up playing American spy Remington Steele, a role which prevented his becoming Bond the first time it was offered to him in 1986.
He had to wait until 1996 to become the fifth big-screen Bond in GoldenEye and has since taken the franchise to new heights with Tomorrow Never Dies and The World Is Not Enough. Die Another Day marks the 40th anniversary of the series.
The film will feature the most daring Bond nude scenes - although even Brosnan's charms will not persuade Berry to go topless.
"I actually have a clause that says, 'I will not be topless in this movie'. Even James Bond can't change that," she said.
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© Associated Newspapers Ltd., 29 August 2002
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