Jeremy Irons
Born: September 19 1948
Where: Cowes, Isle of Wight, UK
The essentially English actor landed a best actor Oscar for his portrayal of wife-murderer Klaus von Bulow in Reversal of Fortune.
Other high-profile appearances include roles ranging from deranged twin brothers in David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers to a German terrorist in Die Hard With A Vengeance.
His first showbis steps were taken as a busker before he joined Bristol Old Vi Theatre School.
His first break came in the musical Godspell when he played John the Baptist alongside singer David Essex.
Irons also served some time as a dungareed children's TV presenter in the BBC programme Play Away.
He went on to a successful early career in London's West End and on TV, debuting as Franz Liszt in the mini-series Notorious Woman in 1975.
He made his big screen debut in 1980's Nijinsky and went on to memorably star opposite Meryl Streep in Karl Reisz's The French Lieutenant's Woman in 1981.
However, the same year it was on TV - in Charles Ryder's sumptuous adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited - that Irons shone.
He'd won a Tony Award for his 1980 Broadway debut in the Mike Nichols-directed The Real Thing, which co-starred Glenn Close.
Irons showed his versatility by going wildly against type in Jerzy Skolimowski's Moonlighting (1982), in which he played a Polish laborer stranded in England.
Roles followed in Betrayal and The Mission, opposite Robert De Niro, until, in 1988, he played the gynaecologist twin brothers in the chilling Dead Ringers.
He delivered an ironic, witty, and self-aware performance as accused wife murderer Klaus von Bulow in Reversal of Fortune, which won him a Best Actor Academy Award.
He went on to star in Steven Soderbergh's sci-fi thriller Kafka and in the big screen adaptation of Graham Swift's Waterland (where he met his wife Sinead Cusack).
His second film with both Meryl Streep and Glenn Close, The House of the Spirits in 1993, found them all miscast as South American aristocrats.
In 1995, he played Bruce Willis' nemesis in the thriller Die Hard With A Vengeance as well as sinisterly voicing Scar in The Lion King.
Subsequent appearances included Adrian Lyne's lacklustre Lolita and Father Aramis alonside Leonardo diCaprio in The Man in the Iron Mask.
He played Profion in Dungeons & Dragons with Thora Birch and also cropped up as the evilly camp Uber-Morlock in the remake of The Time Machine.
In 2002, he played a gay rock promoter in Franco Zeffirelli's lame Callas Forever and in 2004 Antonio in the big screen version of Merchant of Venice.
He also starred alongside Annette Bening as a cuckolded husband in Istvan Szabo's romantic drama Being Julia and in the Ridley Scott blockbuster Kingdom of Heaven.
