English icon of theatre and cinema and twice Golden Globe winner Jeremy Irons shared with us his passionate love for music. “I try and travel always with a guitar so I have a way of making music if I don’t have a piano about,” he told us when we met recently in London. “So, how close is music and acting for you,” we asked. “And does music help you to get you into the characters you play?”

“I think they’re very close. I have just done (as the narrator) (Leonard Bernstein’s) Kaddish Symphony with the New York Philharmonic in the Lincoln Centre and we took it up to Ann Arbor and I’m really happy working closely with music.

Do I use music to help me get into character?  Sometimes.  Sometimes I’ll have a particular artist playing or a particular song. I’m doing Long Day’s Journey Into Night at the moment at the Wyndham’s Theatre (in London) and when we started, at the beginning it feels like we’re starting this great symphony and with its different movements. And as we bring it to an end it has that dying fall at the end of a piece of music. There’s pace, there’s rhythm, there’s pitch, many things are similar in theatre more than in film because film is so fragmented. Anyway, I love that music is a very, very big part of my life.”