Pierce Brosnan, according to people who work with him, is something of an open book. And in recent months his smile has been wider, and his demeanour more relaxed.
The reason isn’t hard to find – after two decades of on-off contact with his adopted son Chris due to his struggles with drug abuse, the pair have been reunited and spending time together while Pierce is in London.
The father and son were spotted leaving the Michelin-starred Dorian restaurant in Notting Hill on Sunday night. Chris, a tall and handsome man who looks a little weatherbeaten for 53, has been living mostly in London for some time now and, conveniently, Pierce is in town making another series of the crime drama MobLand.
Friends reveal it’s far from their first meet-up. Pierce, together with his son Dylan, 28, had another dinner with Chris in London in September.
And before that, I’m told Chris was on the guest list at early screenings for Pierce’s forthcoming film, Giant, about the boxer Naseem Hamed.
‘They seem pretty close now,’ said one of Pierce’s friends. ‘Chris has been working hard on his sobriety and has reconnected with his dad. Everyone is pleased for him.’
The roots of Chris’s problems surely lie in two shattering experiences of grief. First the death of his mother Cassandra from ovarian cancer in 1991, when he was only 19, and she was 43.
In the years that followed, Chris – one of two children from Cassandra’s second marriage – went entirely off the rails, becoming addicted to heroin and cocaine. This led to an overdose, and even a prison sentence.
He was banned from London nightclub, Browns, after apparently being involved in a brawl.
Pierce with Christopher and Dylan leaving a London restaurant in SeptemberÂ
Actor Pierce Brosnan in 1990 with, from left, son Christopher, late first wife Cassandra and daughter Charlotte
In 2005, Pierce said that he had cut off all contact with the boy he had adopted and later raised as a single dad after Cassandra’s death, telling him: ‘Get busy living, or get busy dying.’
Chris went to rehab numerous times – and, in 2006, he was well enough to appear on ITV’s Love Island.
By 2008, Pierce was saying that Chris seemed to be ‘doing well’.
But then came the death of his 41-year-old sister Charlotte, who had ovarian cancer like her mother, in 2013, when Chris was 40.
People who know Chris well say that the second blow sent him ‘into a very dark place’ and that his substance abuse problems worsened. ‘He and Charlotte were almost like twins… they were really close and in the same social circle as well. It all went completely wonky for him after she died,’ said one friend this week.
As we shall see, Chris’s struggles with drug addiction appear to have pretty much overshadowed his adult life. He’s not worked much, aside from a few minor off-camera roles many years ago – mainly on films starring his father.
There is no sign on his open Facebook account (which he runs under a pseudonym) of a life partner or family of his own. Instead, the account has hundreds and hundreds of posts concerning his number one obsession: Covid vaccinations and lockdowns, which he believes were part of a global conspiracy.
He went to a huge gathering of people protesting against Covid lockdowns in August 2020 in Trafalgar Square.
He has also been exercised lately by the idea of digital identity cards, and believes that ‘chemtrails’ visible in the sky show that we are being poisoned by metals. A picture of world leaders at the G7 summit in 2022, meanwhile, is captioned: ‘Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.’
He also volunteered at the Notting Hill Carnival recently.
A friend says: ‘Chris is a nice guy. He’s not a bad person at all, and he’s not a Hollywood brat.
‘Some of his views are a bit wild but you can only speak as you find, and he’s always seemed like one of the good people. He never traded on the whole ‘My dad was James Bond’ thing.
‘I saw him recently in London by chance. He didn’t look so good but he’s been through a lot. He had a baseball cap on and long hair. He seems to have smartened himself up and straightened out in recent months. His life has been so tragic that you can only wish him well.’
Pierce with Chris at a premiere in 2003. Two years later, Pierce said that he had cut off all contact with the boy he had adopted and later raised as a single dad after Cassandra’s death
Certainly nobody has longed for this turnaround more than Pierce. The Irish star first met Chris’s mother Cassandra Harris, an Australian actress, when he was a handsome 24-year-old and she was a 29-year-old divorcee with two young children. Thunderstruck by her beauty, Pierce married her in 1980.
From the start, he loved his wife’s young family as he himself had never felt loved as a child.
‘We just clicked as a family,’ he once said. ‘To begin with I was Pierce, then I was Daddy Pierce, and then I just became Dad. Charlotte and Chris have just been amazing in my life.’
His own upbringing had been bleak. Abandoned by his father Thomas Brosnan, a carpenter, when he was a baby, his mother May left him in the care of her parents in order to train as a nurse in London, only visiting her young son in Ireland once or twice a year throughout his childhood.
When his grandparents died, an aunt, and then an uncle, stepped in, before Pierce was sent to live in a boarding house. He met his father only once. The rejection seems unbearably cruel, and it was not a pattern he wanted to repeat.
In 1986, three years after their son Sean was born, Pierce adopted Chris and Charlotte, then 14 and 15, following the death of their father, producer Dermot Harris, brother of the actor Richard Harris. And for a while, it seemed as though their happiness was complete.
But the following year, Cassandra was diagnosed with an aggressive form of ovarian cancer. She suffered for four years, dying in December 1991 with Pierce by her side.
He later said: ‘I was in a helpless state of confusion and anger. She has made me the man I am, the actor I am, the father I am. She’s forever embedded in every fibre of my being. She’s there with me every day. I was so blessed to have met someone like that.’
Pierce was well aware that this formative trauma could be a serious danger to their children, and so it proved.
He said of Chris: ‘I can see the pain in Christopher’s eyes, the absence in his heart for his mother.’
When Pierce landed his big break as James Bond, it seems that he helped Chris get work on three of the four Bond films he starred in.
Chris is listed as a production runner on GoldenEye (1995) and as an additional assistant director on Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) and The World Is Not Enough (1999).
But it was also at this point in his life that Chris’s behaviour started to spiral. In 1997, he was handed a three-month prison sentence for drink driving, while in 2002 he almost died from a drugs overdose and went to rehab.
Pierce Brosnan posts three of his sons on Father’s Day in 2022, from left, Paris, Dylan and Sean. In the caption he mentions Christopher as well saying ‘thank you deeply for your love’
Second wife Keely Shaye Smith and Pierce at the Met Gala in 2023
During this difficult time, he also had to accept his father had moved on and found love with American journalist Keely Shaye Smith.
She and Pierce met at a party in Mexico in 1994 and they married in 2001. A friend told me: ‘It didn’t feel like all that long after his mother had died, and I know he struggled with it a bit.’
Meanwhile, the drug use continued. Chris was arrested for theft at London club Chinawhite in 2004 after allegedly being seen rifling through handbags for mobile phones, but the charges were later dropped. The following year, his then girlfriend Sadie Kaye said he was living a double life. Sadie, an actress and writer, claimed that in the years they were together, Chris had broken into her home, stolen her credit cards and amassed debts of £10,000.
She said: ‘Christopher is a good actor – better than his father, even. No one watching him on TV will suspect he has a problem.
‘But he’s a heroin addict… Chris has spent most of his adult life in rehab.’
After another stint in rehab in 2005, Chris was arrested for possession of heroin in the summer of that year. He then went to Somerset for yet more rehab, this time paid for by an aunt.
It was in an interview in 2005 that Pierce said: ‘You never completely cut them off, but I have cut Christopher off. I had to say: ‘Go. Get busy living, or get busy dying’. He has my prayers.’
The following year, Chris said that his struggles were over. ‘I was in a dark place,’ he said. ‘My dad helped me see how badly wrong my life was going. I couldn’t have got through it without him. I am clean now. I feel like I have been given a second chance and know how lucky I am.’
But then came the heaviest blow of all – the death of Chris’s sister Charlotte in June 2013. It’s not clear whether father and son were able to help each other through the grief which followed.
But time heals and, despite years of turmoil, love endures.
As a friend of Chris said this week: ‘He has been all at sea, but we hope that things are better now.’
