Hollywood favourite Pierce Brosnan has opened up in a rare interview about his past and the family tragedy that came back to haunt him.
Speaking with Esquire, Brosnan said that losing his wife and daughter to ovarian cancer caused him to have a negative outlook on life.
“I don’t look at the cup as half full, believe me,” he told the magazine. “The dark, melancholy Irish black dog sits beside me from time to time.”
Brosnan, 63, lost his first wife Cassandra to ovarian cancer in 1991. Her death left him as a single father raising their son Sean, and Cassandra’s two children Charlotte and Christopher, whom Brosnan adopted.
He remarried 10 years later, tying the knot with Keely Shaye Smith. The couple are still together and have two sons, Dylan, 20, and Paris, 16.
In 2013, Charlotte sadly passed from the same disease that took her mother, leaving Brosnan to grieve all over again.
He said his own tough childhood has made his role as a father all the more important to him, recalling how is father walked out on his family when he was just a baby.
Soon after his mother left to work in London, effectively leaving him as an orphan.
He said he was shipped between relatives before being sent to a boarding house, where he slept on a “metal bed with a curtain around it.”
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“My fatherly instincts are purely my own. They relate back to no one, because there was no one,” he said.
“I only met [my father] 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.”