Pierce Brosnan‘s personal tragedies have permanently influenced his outlook on life.
The actor, who grew up in Ireland, lost his first wife Cassandra to ovarian cancer in 1991. In 2013, 22 years later, the same disease took his daughter Charlotte. So when it comes to his outlook on life, the actor admits he’s not one to always look for the positive.
“I don’t look at the cup as half full, believe me,” Brosnan, 63, tells Esquire. “The dark, melancholy Irish black dog sits beside me from time to time.”
The actor has a son, actor Sean Brosnan, 33, with his late wife and adopted her two children, Charlotte and Christopher, 44. After Cassandra’s death, Brosnan married his current wife Keely Shaye Smith, with whom he has two sons: Dylan, 20, and Paris, 16.
Brosnan also had a challenging, unconventional upbringing. The Irish actor’s father left the family shortly after he was born and his mother left for London for work. This left the former James Bond virtually orphaned as he lived with relatives and later in a boardinghouse where he had a “metal bed with a curtain around it.”
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Though the actor did finally meet his father for the first time in 1984, while filming Remington Steele in Ireland, he says that he would’ve liked to know him more.
“My fatherly instincts are purely my own. They relate back to no one, because there was no one,” he says. “I only met Tom the once, I had a Sunday afternoon with him. A story about this and that, had a few pints of Guinness, and we said goodbye. I would have loved to have known him. He was a good whistler and he had a good walk…. That’s as much as I know about him.”
Brosnan’s new show The Son premieres Saturday at 9 p.m. on AMC.