Brosnan is breaking the Bonds

You may know that at the end of last year Pierce Brosnan was voted the Sexiest Man Alive by People magazine. At the time this seemed like another of those meaningless poll findings. OK, so his Bond has a certain flinty-eyed charm, his Thomas Crown was cool as a vat of cologne and, in the Tailor of Panama, he proved that, at the age of 48, he's still got a torso to rival Hollywood's best (Brad Pitt excepted).

But, none the less, Pierce is sexy like St Bruno rough cut, like Dormeuil man - sexy if your definition of sexy involves driving gloves and three-piece tuxedos. Given that the dinkiest of actors bulk up on screen, in reality Brosnan is guaranteed to be neat, manicured and a little bit naff, right?

Actually, wrong. For a start, Pierce Brosnan is 6ft 1ins. For another, he is perfectly ordinarily dressed in loose jacket and black jeans (not a tasselled loafer or suede blouson in sight). The thick, dark hair which, in pictures, looks suspiciously as if it might be dyed, is greying at the temples and the voice, which could be on the transatlantic side, what with him living in Malibu and being married to American eco-journalist Keely Shaye Smith, has a seductive Irish lilt - more pronounced, perhaps, because we are on Dublin soil, where he is currently filming 30 miles from the town where he was born.

In short, Pierce Brosnan is, contrary to the laws of celluloid, a lot better in the flesh. But then, this image has been steadily worked at and refined over a couple of decades, since Brosnan was cast as Remington Steele in the early Eighties. "I went to America to do edgy filmwork and I got this goofy, lovely TV show and I used it to the best of my advantage," says Brosnan, giving me the twisted smile that M is so often on the receiving end of, narrowing his eyes in that special way, as if the light is troubling him.

"Remington could be anybody, so I created this look. I said it should be three-piece suits and French cuffs and played it with pace. There wasn't anybody like me at that time."

Long before he created the smooth Remington style, Brosnan's first and biggest challenge was reinventing himself as a local boy when his mother brought him over to London in 1964:

"Oh, yeah, I was one of the lads, I was sarf London, y'know, but somehow I felt different. All my mates were going off to be painters or plumbers, but I kind of invented myself to be a commercial artist, and then I found acting and invented myself to be ..." Brosnan tails off at this point, as he has a habit of doing. Another habit is running through his mental thesaurus ... "When I found acting I found a certain refuge ... sanctuary ... home ... sense of belonging," which tends to spiral into epic voice-over territory "the joy and pain of growing up in an environment such as Ireland in the mid-Fifties - I could put that to good use."

What he invented, of course, was the suave image that was to make him a natural candidate for Bond (some would say that Brosnan's steely interpretation is the more effective and true to the original than Connery's). This month he starts shooting his fourth Bond film, seven years after his first outing in Goldeneye. "Is it my last? I don't know, I'd like to think not." Of course, there's always Robbie

Williams who has expressed an interest in stepping into Bond's shoes. Brosnan laughs a heh, heh clipped laugh. "I dunno - you do have to do a bit of acting in it, there are a few moments when you have to look as if you know what you're doing." Still, what both performers share (Robbie with his recent attempt to ape Frank Sinatra) is the desire to be an iconic class act, and Brosnan has cultivated the charisma to make it happen. It's tempting to wonder how much of an overlap there is between Brosnan's image and that of his most famous character.

"I have a couple of BMWs and many sharp suits, but they stay at home in the wardrobe in mothballs," he says. "I live much more simply than that." But he admits that the role of the smooth operator Thomas Crown in the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, which he co-produced, was consciously remoulded for him - merging his history and Bond's style (in his version, Crown started out as boxer in Ireland). "Steve McQueen was great in the original - but there was a slight chink in the armour in the sense that McQueen never really sat well in suits, and that world."