Leary's funny life

Denis Leary is standing in the corner of a hotel suite puffing away on a cigarette. He’s six foot three, wearing a black leather jacket, black tee-shirt, black and grey striped trousers and, you’ve guessed it, black boots. As first impressions go, he’s somewhat intimidating.

That daunting impression is not helped by what is generally known about Leary. The Irish-American comedian first shot to fame in the early 1990s with his one-man show, No Cure For Cancer, a general rant about America, politics, eating meat and of course, smoking.

However, in recent years Leary has given the impression of having softened. He’s become a father, a bona fide movie star and is godfather to Elizabeth Hurley’s son, Damian.

In person, there’s little sign of that softening. Instead Leary is straight talking, hard smoking (only about a packet a day now, he says) and still foul mouthed. But how close is that persona to the real him?

“It’s a big part of me,” he says, with surprising honesty. “It’s probably me when I’m in my living room, especially when I’m bitching or moaning about a sporting event that’s not going as I’d like it to.”

He’s promoting Double Whammy, a film in which he stars opposite close friend Elizabeth Hurley.

The couple have real chemistry between them in the film and Hurley proves that she can be funny, even when it’s not opposite Mike Myers.

“She gets no credit here (in the UK),” says Leary, stubbing out yet another cigarette. “My perception of it is that people thought she was like the eye candy on Hugh Grant’s arm, when in fact she’s very bright and she’s a great comedienne.”

Hurley and Leary met through mutual friends in New York and immediately clicked. She has since appeared in Leary’s American television series, The Job, and he says he’s now writing a sitcom especially for her.

“We actually have a lot of stuff in common,” he says, adding rather oddly. “In essence she’s much more Irish than she is English. She’s like a lot of the girls I grew up with, the Irish Catholic girls.”

Leary – whose distinctive rasp has been the voice of Diego in Ice Age and Francis in A Bug’s Life – says that he and Hurley share the “same exact sense of humour” and the same sensibility. They like the same music (“good old fashioned rock and roll”) and have the same approach to films.

“We kind of hit it off from the moment that we met,” he says. “Also, we had a couple of shared experiences when we met. My cousin, who was a fireman had just been killed, and my father had died young, and her father had just died young, so that was sort of like a mitigating factor.”

Leary takes his godfather duties very seriously.

“When Damian’s in New York, which he is quite a bit, I’m sort of in charge of him,” he says. “I baby-sit, I take him out to the park, I hang around with him, play ball with him, whatever.”

And baby Damian, who’s now 15-months-old, says Leary, is “cute as hell”.

“He’s a really bright kid, he’s way ahead of the curve,” adds Leary. “That’s probably the Hurley genes. He’s talking way ahead of what boys normally do. He’s just the happiest, healthiest kid ever.”

It was an unanticipated stay in the UK which first put him on the path to superstardom.

Leary was to do a television show called Paramount City, and expected to stay for just one weekend. But the weekend stay became somewhat prolonged when Leary’s wife, Ann, went into unexpected labour. Jack Leary arrived almost three months early,

“You can only go by what hand you were dealt by fate and the truth is if I hadn’t been stuck here because Jack was born premature, I probably wouldn’t have ever written No Cure For Cancer,” says Leary.

“I’d been talking about writing a one-man show for a long time and then I had no choice other than to do it, because I had no other way of making money.”

He had met fellow comedian David Baddiel while appearing on Paramount City and subsequently became good friends with him, Frank Skinner and Eddie Izzard.

Their encouragement (and contacts) led to him taking No Cure For Cancer to Edinburgh where it became a hit. The four are still friends, all of them now famous.

“We’re still very close,” says Leary. “And I still think they’re very funny. I’d never seen a comedian like Frank before, Dave was in a double act, but I thought he was really funny and when I first saw Eddie, I just thought I’d never seen anything like it before.”

Still, Leary returned to New York as soon as he could and he continues to live in the city. However, he spends weekends – and most of the summer – with his wife and children on their Connecticut farm.

“It’s much better for the kids living in the country and it’s what they prefer,” he says of aspiring actor son Jack, now 13, and daughter, Devin, 11.

He doesn’t do much stand-up these days, concentrating more on films and also the foundation he set up for firefighters after the death of his cousin, Jeremiah Lucey in 1999.

The Leary Firefighters’ Foundation charity then came into its own after September 11, when New York’s firefighters needed all the support they could get.

Leary’s family is obviously very important to him. His parents, Nora and John, were both Irish, he has three siblings, and numerous cousins, in Killarney, Co Kerry.

He’s not even the only one in his family who’s in showbusiness – one of his cousins is American talk-show host Conan O’Brien, and their Irish roots are something he’s proud of.

“I still go over to Ireland every summer,” he says, adding that his blond son’s “got Irish written all over him”.

Leary says he’s happy with his career at the moment. He’s keen to stay in independent films, explaining that he’s glad to have made a number of big budget pictures (including The Thomas Crown Affair and Wag The Dog) “because it’s a great way to learn and make money,” but that he now no longer wants to do so.

“Life’s too short,” he says. “I’d rather get paid less money and do more of what I want.”

It’s true that time’s moving on for Leary, but at 46 he looks great. His hair’s still blond, and he says he doesn’t even dye it. But he adds with a laugh “I’ve had cosmetic surgery though. This is not my original head...”