“I’m poorly made,” says Michael Fassbender in his title role as the mercurial tech giant Steve Jobs in Danny Boyle’s latest atypical biopic of the Apple co-founder. The film, simply titled Steve Jobs closed this year’s BFI London Film Festival with Michael attending. can perfect world-altering products yet clearly struggles with people, hence the reference and pivotal piece of dialogue. The film on the other hand is not poorly made, opening to critically-acclaim and talk of awards. It’s early in the season, but Micheal appears to be the frontrunner to collect the giant share of gongs, including the covered Oscar. And the Irish-German actor himself is clearly not poorly made as evidenced by the number of swooning women from all nationalities packed into the pen with me at the premiere at the Odeon in Leicester Square. Three young Italian students …no, three young EXUBERANT Italian students, obviously perm-virgins in particular, hell-bent on getting a selfie with the star, that were proving a potential pitfall in my plans to get Michael’s sig on my sketch. But every crowd has a silver lining, because he wasn’t going to miss them, they were not the ignoring type. It was just a matter of positioning and patience…. oh, yes, and crucially, the placing my drawing in the hands of a fellow, male grapher in the front row. Michael is pretty laid back and very accommodating at these events. This situation was made for such demeanour. In the whirlwind that followed, we all achieved our goals. The young, now over exuberant Italian students squealed with delight, spouting pause-deprived sentences, occasionally punctuated with the word ‘Fassbender’, followed by even higher-pitched shrieks as they worked frantically on their mobiles’ contact lists to send the images to a global audience, while I can quietly head home and post this for you guys.
It’s hard enough to spell ‘Saoirse’ let alone pronounce it. Even as I type it, a red line appears underneath, so even spell-check has concerns. The few drops of Gaelic in my blood composition isn’t enough to enable me to roll it off the tongue. It would be more rogue than brogue. I’m not alone. In fact there’s a YouTube video devoted to correctly pronouncing her name and many an interviewer broaches the subject as a rule rather than the exception. Saoirse herself says it’s pronounced ‘Sersha’ like ‘inertia’, although she said some Irish say ‘Searsha’. Either way it means ‘freedom’. The 21 year-old was born in the Bronx in New York City to Irish parents, but grew up in Ireland’s County Carlow, spending a great deal of it on film sets with her father, so her career path seemed inevitable. She came to prominance as the eccentric 13 year-old aspiring novelist Briony Tallis in Joe Wright’s Atonement in 2007, earning BAFTA, Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations.
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