He's the "name" draw at a charity event tonight called Freeing the Human Spirit, a fundraiser for Sister Elaine MacInnes, the Canadian nun who has pioneered the teaching of yoga and meditation to prisoners.
But lest you think Jeremy Irons is just another proselytising yoga fan, let it be known the actor is not an actual participant in the discipline, even though he devotes much energy to Sister Elaine's charity.
"I am already a fairly free human spirit," Jeremy Irons says drily by way of demurring on the subject. "I have meditated with Sister Elaine, and I wish I had the time to pursue it more intensely. I keep saying I'm really going to start doing it.
"But the important thing is that it is a wondrous remedy for prisoners, one that reduces anger and makes them better able to deal with society upon their release. They have found in prison a sense of their centre, their 'eye,' their self-worth."
Freeing the Human Spirit, at the Jane Mallett Theatre, is billed as "An Evening Of Readings, Stories and Music." The music comes courtesy of iconic singer-songwriter Kate McGarrigle.
The readings and stories, however, are courtesy of honorary patron Irons, who has been performing this service for the cause in actual prisons. In a recent event at England's Wandsworth Prison in November for the Prison Phoenix Trust (a related U.K. organization Sister Elaine headed), he and Neve Campbell gave readings from short stories about imprisonment, and the inmates themselves performed musical and dance numbers.
The 83-year-old Moncton-born MacInnes is a former symphony violinist who joined a missionary order and was introduced to Zen while doing missionary work in Japan. More than three decades of study led to her first attempts in 1980 to teach meditation to prisoners.
"I met Sister Elaine through a mutual friend, and she told me about her charity and I was fascinated," Irons says over the cellphone, en route to the Irish castle in Cork he now calls home. "When she returned to her native Canada (in 1999) we met again in Toronto." (Where Irons was shooting a film) "I think she's a unique person, a person of enormous value and I only wish she was 50 years younger so she could do what she's doing that much longer."
Irons admits programs for prisoner' well-being is politically iffy, particularly in North America, where "the prisons in Canada and the U.S. are much tougher than those in England.
"But we feel the people in prison and not in prison are not all that different. Prisoners invariably have had disastrous upbringings and huge disadvantages. I, on the other hand have had huge advantages. Although I have tended toward an anarchic life, I have luckily avoided crossing that line.
"The point is this is a tremendously economic way to stop re-offenders. It's all volunteer, it isn't a charity that costs a huge amount. And even the most right-wing redneck would have to respond to the dollars and cents of it."
At this stage of his career, the Oscar-winner says he is more fulfilled by charities and time spent with his family than most of "the bagful of scripts beneath my feet." Last year he starred in London in a theatrical adaptation of Sandor Marai's novel Embers ( "a difficult play, but a great experience") and he's waiting on funding for another project, a movie of the Piers Paul Read psychological drama/spy novel The Villa Golitsyn, which would co-star Alan Rickman and Annette Bening.
