Pierce Brosnan - a Profile of the Matador and the Last James Bond

He played one of the biggest movie icons in four hugely successful films, but in his latest film, a black comedy called The Matador, he plays a hitman who has really hit the skids.

“I think that all the films I’ve ever made are personal, even James Bond, because it's so much of myself, so much of who I am as a man and as an actor. You have to invest yourself in every character that you portray”.

Born in Drogheda, County Louth and bought up in Navan, County Meath, Pierce Brendan Brosnan is one of the most famous Irishmen in the world today. He could also be one of the smartest, because his production company – the aptly-named Irish DreamTime – has several big-budget movies in development.

Most keenly-awaited is probably the Topkapi Affair, a follow-up to The Thomas Crown Affair, the film that really saw him emerge as a full-blown movie star outside the world of 007. Also on their slate is Butterfly On The Wheel, a kidnap thriller in which Brosnan really throws away the rulebook and plays the villain, a kidnapper who terrorizes a family after snatching their young daughter.

Since Brosnan and Beau St. Clair formed Irish DreamTime in 1996, they have regularly returned to Ireland to roll the cameras: in their first production The Nephew, Brosnan co-starred alongside veteran Irish actors Donal McCann and Sinead Cusack, and in Evelyn, where Brosnan played a single father fighting to keep his family together, he again picked the cream of Irish acting talent in Aidan Quinn, Stephen Rea and John Lynch.

Even though she works more behind-the-scenes, Beau St.Clair has been with Brosnan all the way, and worked on films such as The Mosquito Coast and as production supervisor on the musicals Threepenny Opera and Shogun before joining him at DreamTime.

As most people remember, it was the television series “Remington Steele” that first bought Brosnan to the public eye, although the more sharper-eyed had already spotted him in a cameo as “First Irishman” in the classic The Long Good Friday, starring Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren in 1980.