For Pierce Brosnan (Drogheda, Ireland) it was enough to wear a nice suit to land the first role that would make him famous. The eighties had just begun and he and his first wife, Australian actress Cassandra Harris, took out a second mortgage on their home in Wimbledon, London, to try their luck in Los Angeles, California.
The year of their marriage, 1980, Brosnan made his film debut with an uncredited role in The Long Good Friday, where he played Irish No. 1, an IRA assassin who turned a gun on Bob Hoskins. A year later, he had a lead role in The Mansions of America, a miniseries about Irish immigration drama during the Great Famine.
With that resume he planted in the City of Stars and Brosnan rented an old lime green AMC Pacer for $50 a week to go to his first audition. The car broke down on the way. Brosnan tucked down the hills of Laurel Canyon, an idyllic Los Angeles neighborhood with tree-lined cabins just five minutes from Hollywood to the casting site. He came and he participated. The suit was everything.
It was not about James Bond, the character that stuck with him for generations, but rather the television series Remington Steele, where he played a young adventurer who worked for a peculiar spy agency, And that made him a star both inside and outside. United States, where the series achieved great success. It is now inevitable to see promotional images of this fiction, in which Brosnan is seen dressed in a black tuxedo adorned with a bow tie, and bears no resemblance to the eternal 007, although 13 years have elapsed between one role and the next.
At that time, his wife and mother of his three children also died, the woman with whom he moved to Hollywood and who introduced him to the producer of the films that would make him an icon. Unlike the wayward secret agent and what his later image of an Old Hollywood heartthrob might suggest, Brosnan is a family man who has had solid and long-lasting relationships and who prefers to stay quiet for the spotlight.
