Pierce Brosnan

Brosnan was born on 16 May 1953 in Drogheda, County Louth, the only child of May (née Smith) and Thomas Brosnan, a carpenter. He has the same name as his grandfather, Pierce Brosnan, whose first name was in honour of his mother Margaret Pierce. For 12 years, he lived in Navan, County Meath, and said in 1999 that he considers it to be his hometown. His father abandoned the family when Brosnan was an infant. When he was four years old, his mother moved to London to work as a nurse. From then on, he was largely brought up by his maternal grandparents, Philip and Kathleen Smith. After their deaths, he lived with an aunt and then an uncle, but was subsequently sent to live in a boarding house run by a woman named Eileen. He later said, "Childhood was fairly solitary. I never knew my father. He left when I was an infant. [...] To be Irish Catholic in the 1950s, and have a marriage which was not there, a father who was not there [...] the mother, the wife suffered greatly. My mother was very courageous. She took the bold steps to go away and be a nurse in England. Basically wanting a better life for her and myself. My mother came home once a year, twice a year." Brosnan was brought up in a Catholic family, and educated in a local school run by the De La Salle Brothers while serving as an altar boy. He left Ireland on 12 August 1964 and went to Scotland to be reunited with his mother and her new husband, William Carmichael, at their home in Longniddry. Carmichael took Brosnan to see a James Bond film for the first time (Goldfinger) at the age of 11. They later moved back to London, where Brosnan was educated at Elliott School in Putney, now known as Ark Putney Academy. When discussing his transition from Ireland to England, he said, "When you go to a very large city, a metropolis like London, as an Irish boy of 10, life suddenly moves pretty fast. [...] And you're Irish. And they make you feel it; the British have a wonderful way of doing that, and I had a certain deep sense of being an outsider." His nickname at school was simply "Irish". After leaving school at 16, Brosnan decided to be a painter and began training in commercial illustration at Saint Martin's School of Art in London. While attending a rehearsal for a workshop at the Ovalhouse, he saw a fire eater teaching people how to eat fire and decided to join in. He trained for three years as an actor at the Drama Centre London. Describing the feeling of becoming an actor and the influence it had on his life, he said, "When I found acting, or when acting found me, it was a liberation. It was a stepping stone into another life, away from a life that I had, and acting was something I was good at, something which was appreciated. That was a great satisfaction in my life."