I think we shot it about two or three in the afternoon. The love scene was the first I had done on film and I was incredibly nervous. To give you an example of how generous Meryl was. And that was a way we found to delineate between the two couples. Of course that made the sexuality and the passion so much stronger than the modern stuff. “For the Victorian pair we decided to think of ourselves as pressure cookers – all those emotions that we could not let out because of social convention. That kind of chance doesn’t come along very often.” I knew that if I passed that up, by being a gentleman, it would have a huge effect on my career. I made the film in the middle of ‘Brideshead,’ which of course made the other actors livid, because they had to wait for me for four months while I was doing my thing. I was very good casting, despite how I played it. “I told Karel Reisz, ‘The studios won’t let you cast me because I’m not a star.’ He said, ‘Well leave it with me.’ Then he called me during ‘Brideshead’ and said, ‘I’ve got my star, Meryl Streep, so I can have you.’ On being cast in “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” He had to be like a host at a good party, just getting people together and enjoying them, but not playing too much on the front foot.” “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” It needed an actor who was not going to perform, but an actor who was.

Ryder is a sort of very internalized Englishman, not able to show a lot. And I thought, ‘No I want to keep going to the end.’ So I wanted to play Charles Ryder. “They wanted me to play Sebastian Flyte, but he was very similar to a role I’d just played, a man who loved his mother too much, drank too much and fell off a bridge in Episode 8. He started by recalling how, as a guitar-playing schoolboy, he used to busk outside the Leicester Square cinemas, when “I could get £5 in one queue.” A few years later he casually thought he’d give acting a go himself, being told at his acting school audition that, “If I can get you to stand up straight you might look good at the side of the stage.”

At 68 he still cuts a dash, bounding onto the stage in a casual suit and boots, before drifting into a down-to-earth and modest reflection on his career. While his new film “Their Finest” was set to debut in Toronto, Irons was in London as the latest subject of BAFTA’s “A Life in Pictures” series, speaking to the critic and broadcaster Danny Leigh.

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