Gabriel Byrne

Trivia and Quotes

Quotes (8)

  • Gabriel Byrne: Acting is a very satisfying way to make a living but it's not life. I don't want to spend my life on movie sets and wake up at 70 and say "Where's my life gone?" I know people like that and I don't want to end up like that - the horror of being somebody that the movies sucked dry.

  • Gabriel Byrne: (on the abuse he suffered at 11) I was taken advantage of in a very vulnerable situation where I was being told the facts of life. Physical boundaries were crossed, let's say. (The inappropriate contact involved...) touching and closeness rather than anything more overt than that. I would never have thought to tell my parents because, in the world of a child, I assumed that anything that happened to you was inevitable. What makes this inappropriate behavior so despicable is that the child does not have a choice.

  • Gabriel Byrne: They say that acting is the shy man's revenge and cinema certainly is the refuge for a lot of lonely, shy people. You can be alone and not lonely in a cinema. It's almost like being in church.

  • Gabriel Byrne: Would I have been better off as a teacher in Ireland or Spain? It's a very difficult question to answer. You take the road and you travel along it. I probably would do the same thing again.





Trivia (11)

  • It's true that Gabriel Byrne was trained as a bullfighter in Spain but despite internet rumors, he never came in contact with any bulls. The training entailed classes of ten and he describes the teacher as rather disappointing: "It mostly consisted of him with a pair of fake horns running at us - and we paid a lot of money for this. I was foolish enough to think that you could study bullfighting in 12 weeks with an Englishman who was never in the bullring."

  • Gabriel Byrne has a passion for cinema and was an avid visitor of movie houses as a kid. He always enjoyed the atmosphere, sitting in the dark and following the stories; and he recalls to have seen up to twelve movies in one weekend or up to six movies during the week.

  • At the age of twelve, he left home and went to a Roman Catholic seminary in Birmingham, England, to become an African missionary. He was expelled with 17 since he has only been interested in football and girls, was notoriously late for prayers, and smoked by the cemeteries.

  • Gabriel Byrne loathed his first name as a kid because he was teased with nicknames like Goosy or Gaby Hayes. Gabriel is actually an uncommon name in Ireland but as of now, he considers it to be a cool name.

  • When Gabriel Byrne attended the University College in Dublin, he also studied phonetics. This might be one of the reasons why he is fairly adept in possessing different accents.

  • Social Involvement Gabriel was made a UNICEF Ambassador for Ireland in 2004. Gabriel supports the Irish Hospice Foundation, saying people should have the right to die in dignified surroundings. Gabriel criticized the architecture of new buildings going up in Dublin, calling them ill-suited to their surroundings and their instigators 'architectural vandals'.

  • In 2008, Gabriel Byrne stared as King Arthur in the the concert production Camelot of the New York's Philharmonic Orchestra. His performance was generally well received, although he earned some criticism for his singing and dancing.

  • Gabriel is 5'11" tall.

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