The Jeremy Irons Show

Jeremy Irons (b. 1948) owns an instantly recognizable voice, a low baritone that he pitches down and slows almost to a drawl. He speaks from the chest. The sound carries weight and a kind of fatigue, as if every sentence costs him something. People call it velvet, smoke, gravel. The truth sits closer to control. He shapes each phrase, holds the vowels, lets consonants land soft.
His diction comes from a particular English training. He attended Sherborne, then the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, and the stage gave him breath control and a habit of full articulation. He clips nothing. He finishes his words. The Received Pronunciation reads as upper class to American ears, though his actual background runs more modest, Isle of Wight, schoolteacher father turned accountant. He acquired the accent the way many English actors of his generation did, through theater and ambition.
The manner is the more interesting part. Irons speaks slowly and pauses where most men rush. He lets silence hang. In interviews he leans back, looks away, and answers as if thinking the matter through for the first time, even when he has said it many times. The effect reads as languid, sometimes as aloof. He sounds bored and seductive at once, and he knows it, and he uses it.
That voice made him the natural choice for Scar in The Lion King and for Claus von Bülow in Reversal of Fortune, the role that won him the Oscar. Directors cast him when they want menace wrapped in charm, intelligence with rot underneath. The voice does half the characterization before he moves. A villain who sounds like Irons does not need to raise his volume. He lowers it, and the audience leans in.
His speaking style favors the long line. He builds clauses, suspends the meaning, then resolves it late. He relishes irony and delivers it dry, with a small lift at the corner of the mouth that you can hear in the tone even on radio. He smokes, or smoked for years, and the habit roughened the lower register and gave it that worn quality people prize.
The whole package can tip into self-parody, and Irons sometimes courts that. He plays the cultured Englishman who has seen everything and judges most of it tired. The voice sells the pose. Strip away the timbre and the man underneath turns out to be more playful and less grand than the sound suggests.