Pierce Brosnan (73) and his wife, Keely Shaye Smith, are not among the Hollywood stars most followed by reporters and photographers on the street. That is why their recent appearance caught the attention of the paparazzi. The couple went out to dinner at a restaurant in Beverly Hills dressed in summer attire and very elegant while the paparazzi immortalized them, as reported by British newspapers.
The Irish actor is one of the few big stars who doesn't mind posing with his family at some of their residences scattered on both sides of the Atlantic. He has done so with Keely and their two children together, Dylan (29) and Paris (25), and also with his first wife, Cassandra Harris, his first great love, who died of cancer at the age of 43 in 1991.
With her, he had a biological son, Sean (42), and adopted the other two from her previous relationship, Chris (53), with whom the actor reconciled last year after two decades apart, and Charlotte, who also died of ovarian cancer in 2013 at the age of 41.
If Dylan and Paris are gradually making their way in the industry and their public appearances are more frequent, almost nothing is known about Sean, who has also had addiction problems.
Losing his mother at just 8 years old made him unable to express his grief and pain and seek comfort from his loved ones. Therefore, a few months later, he began to have outbursts of anger. He started to have problems at school and went from being one of the most popular kids to socially isolating himself.
"It was a pretty lonely and isolating experience," he told People magazine. "I never really grieved when I was young. I vividly remember the day my father told me that my mother had passed away... I remember not crying. And I said, 'It's okay, dad.' I was the one consoling him," he recounted on the Inner Space podcast.
He channeled his pain through anger and experimented with some drugs, but nothing serious. Everything changed when he was 16 years old and had a serious car accident that led to a strong opioid addiction to cope with the pain. He had fractured his back, his pelvis and femur were broken into different fragments, and his coccyx was shattered.
Despite the pain and addiction, Sean wanted to follow in his father's footsteps, so he graduated from the Central School of Speech and Drama, did theater with the now-defunct British Shakespeare Company, and even worked in film alongside Val Kilmer.
Through acting, he managed to stay clean for a year and a half, but the death of his sister caused him to also fall into alcoholism. However, in 2014, a great miracle happened when actress Sanja Banic entered his life, whom he married in August of that same year at the Paramount Country Club in New York with about 300 guests in attendance. In 2015, his daughter Marley May Cassandra was born, and seven years later, his son Jaxxon Elijah arrived.
As he explained to Dr. Van Dahlen on the Inner Space podcast, when he met his great love, he did "a lot of amazing things during that year; it was a very spiritual process. It was a healing stage and being alone with myself; then, being with my wife, getting married, and crossing the United States by car, I felt a great sense of freedom."
His personal and mental transformation led him to change his career path to become a residential counselor at a treatment center where he wanted to take a step further into the world of clinical psychology. "Right now, I work in the field of addiction, but I would like to specialize in grief and loss," he told Dr. Van Dahlen.
Finally, Sean earned his Master's in Clinical Psychology from Antioch University Los Angeles and studied psychoanalysis at the Valley Community Counseling Clinic. Currently, he owns his own practice where he works as a psychotherapist and counselor in the healthcare field after overcoming his own addiction problems. Two years ago, he returned to acting with the play Waiting for Godot, which his father proudly applauded.