There they were again, as ever arm in arm and just a little touchy feely, at the premiere of George Clooney’s new Broadway play a few days ago.

The only difference from the usual Pierce and Keely Act was that the former James Bond star and his wife, Keely Shaye Smith, weren’t showering praise on each other but, this time, on Clooney for his performance in the stage adaptation of his 2005 movie, ‘Good Night and Good Luck.’

‘He’s got such class and he’s so gosh darn confident and so handsome,’ gushed Piers Brosnan.

Just a few days after they walked another red carpet for the Big Apple premiere of Brosnan’s new film, MobLand, the outing provided another chance for admirers on social media to indulge one of their perennial obsessions – Keely’s weight loss.

How much is it this time? An estimated 100lb, according to ‘observers’. In other words, a complete guess.

Some will wonder why the ex-model’s full figure is of such abiding public interest and the answer is surely that it is so incongruous in stick-thin Hollywood.

There they were again, as ever arm in arm and just a little touchy feely, at the premiere of George Clooney ’s new Broadway play a few days ago. (Pictured: Keely Shaye Smith and Pierce Brosnan ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’ Broadway Opening Night). 

Just a few days after they walked another red carpet for the Big Apple premiere of Brosnan’s new film, MobLand, the outing provided another chance for admirers on social media to indulge one of their perennial obsessions – Keely’s weight loss .

Certainly, according to those who know the couple best, it is not a subject that preoccupies Brosnan. As one insider told the Daily Mail, ‘Pierce had no role in his wife’s decision to lose weight, but he is proud that she chose a healthy approach through diet and exercise.

‘She made this choice entirely on her own.’

The fact that anyone might think differently only underlines the all too ugly truth that nobody is meant to look like normal Americans in this industry, and especially when they’re the wife of Pierce Brosnan.

For Brosnan’s evergreen good looks – he’s 71 but when he recently told the Today show he thought he ‘could get away’ with returning as Bond, it didn’t seem that far-fetched – only serve to accentuate Mrs Brosnan’s deviation from the Tinseltown norm.

Indeed, one online commenter went so far as to say that Keely, 61, is ‘lucky’ that Brosnan is still with her.

While such a remark says much about the commenter’s own shallow values, it may also reflect the low opinion that many people have of Hollywood marriages.

An opinion – it must be said – borne out by the undeniable fact that so many of them fail, often very swiftly. And often, of course, with stars trading in spouses for a newer model.

By that grim formula, the Brosnan marriage – which has produced two children, Dylan (born 1997) and Paris (born 2001) – should have ended long ago.

Instead, it has proved to be one of Hollywood’s more enduring unions, due to hit 24 years in August. And as for Keely needing to feel ‘lucky’, well, Brosnan repeatedly insists that he is the fortunate one.

Some will wonder why the ex-model’s full figure is of such abiding public interest and the answer is surely that it is so incongruous in stick-thin Hollywood. (Pierce Brosnan and Keely Shaye Smith in 1996).

One insider told the Daily Mail, ‘Pierce had no role in his wife’s decision to lose weight, but he is proud that she chose a healthy approach through diet and exercise. (Pierce Brosnan and Keely Shaye Smith pictured in 1996). 

This week one close to the actor told the Mail that Brosnan’s feelings for Keely ‘remain as strong as they were the day they met.’

They said, ‘To Pierce, Keely is the most beautiful woman in the world and he considers himself incredibly lucky to have her as his wife and soulmate. She has been by his side every step of the way and he loves her with every fiber of his being.

‘He knows he couldn’t have achieved any of this without her.’

Indeed, he has often described Keely as his ‘North Star’, his great guide and protector in his life. He is also a staunch Catholic, say insiders, who believes in the sancтιтy of marriage.

‘Friends offered her surgery to reduce her weight,’ the Irish actor revealed in 2022 after another episode of online criticism of her weight. ‘But I strongly love every curve of her body.

‘She is the most beautiful woman in my eyes. And also because she had our five children.’

He went on: ‘In the past, I truly loved her for her person, not only for her beauty, and now I’m loving her even more that she is my children’s mother.

‘And I am very proud of her, and I always seek to be worthy of her love.’

There’s no small irony in the fact that Brosnan – who played the love’em-and-leave’em spy in four Bond films between 1995 and 2002 – is best known for playing a character who is notorious for taking a very dim view of getting emotionally attached to women.

They have one thing in common, however. Both lost their first wives in tragic circumstances.

A source said: ‘To Pierce, Keely is the most beautiful woman in the world and he considers himself incredibly lucky to have her as his wife and soulmate. She has been by his side every step of the way and he loves her with every fiber of his being.’ (Pictured together in 2017).

Brosnan has often described Keely as his ‘North Star’, his great guide and protector in his life. He is also a staunch Catholic, say insiders, who believes in the sancтιтy of marriage.

Bond’s marriage to Tracy Draco, daughter of a Mafia boss, is cut short on their wedding day by an ᴀssᴀssin’s bullet in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Brosnan’s marriage to Australian actress Cᴀssandra Harris mercifully lasted rather longer – 11 years – before she died of ovarian cancer aged 43 in late 1991.

The marriage produced a son, Sean, in 1983 and Brosnan adopted Harris’s two children, Charlotte and Christopher, from a previous marriage. Harris was also responsible for Brosnan becoming Bond after he caught producer Albert Broccoli’s eye while she was filming the 1981 movie For Your Eyes Only, in which she played a Bond Girl.

Brosnan was still grieving for her when Brosnan and Keely met at a beach party in Mexico in 1994. A former model who had appeared in a pop video with the band Huey Lewis and The News for their single Stuck With You, Keely was working as a TV presenter and interviewing the Cheers star Ted Danson. She found Brosnan ‘captivating’, recalling the ‘mischievous sparkle in his eyes’.

They went on their first date a few days later and talked until 3am. ‘I understand why women find him Sєxy because he is an appealing man,’ she said later. ‘He really likes and appreciates women.’

His wife’s illness had left him devastated and he praised a ‘compᴀssionate’ Keely for encouraging him to mourn.

Brosnan was cast as Bond the same year they met and, as his career took off, he sent her air tickets to wherever he was working so they could spend more time together. ‘We just seemed to fit,’ he said.

They didn’t marry until 2001 (six months after Paris was born). At their lavish wedding reception in Ireland, the couple embraced beside an ice sculpture of Rodin’s The Kiss and were showered with rose petals as they cut a six-tiered cake.

So many Hollywood marriages fail because stars spend so long away filming. In the Brosnans’ case, mutual interests must surely have helped bond them together.

They share a pᴀssion for animal welfare and the environment. Another is for art. Brosnan studied to be a commercial illustrator before switching to acting.

He still paints prolifically and in 2018 his painting of Bob Dylan fetched $1.4 million at a charity auction in Cannes. 

More crucial to the strength of their marriage, friends say, has been Keely’s ability to provide emotional support to a man who admits that at times he has struggled with depression.

She was reportedly less sympathetic when his older children came off the rails with drink and drugs problems some two decades ago.

She was said to have told Brosnan to stop indulging them, as she didn’t want their younger children to be influenced by their bad behavior.

In 2013, Brosnan’s daughter Charlotte died at 42 — like her mother, from ovarian cancer – and a third tragedy came three years later when Beau St Clair, his long-time producing partner, was also claimed by the same disease.

The same year, he told an interviewer of his marriage: ‘We seem to do well at being together and being in love and, more importantly, liking each other. The like factor is a great thing. Love cannot burn constantly.

‘It’s very hard for it to be so intense. But it’s wonderful. I tell her I love her every day. It’s important to say that.’

Brosnan is stoical and talks about ‘just getting on with life’ although he’s confided it hasn’t been easy.

‘I don’t look at the cup as half full, believe me,’ he said in 2017. ‘The dark, melancholy Irish black dog sits beside me from time to time.’

Brosnan’s difficult childhood provides another reason why he may crave the security of a loving and stable marriage.

His father left his mother at their home in Navan, County Meath, when Brosnan was two. She moved to London to work as a nurse, leaving him to live with relatives and later share a room with two factory workers in a boarding house.

He wasn’t reunited with his mother until she remarried when he was 11. At school in England, he was bullied for his Irish accent.

His Catholic faith has been a source of strength for him, even though at his school monks used to beat the boys daily.

He says: ‘I was raised as a Catholic and I will always be one… I pray and go to Mᴀss. I also believe in life after death.’

The couple divide their time between homes in California and Hawaii. They insist they prefer the simple pleasures in life and having ‘quality time’ together.

Asked in 2017 to describe his perfect day off, he said: ‘It was yesterday. I painted in my studio, then I went down and sat on the beach, read and did some drawing. Then I had lunch with Keely.

‘Around five o’clock, I went out and watched the sun go down. Keely sat beside me, we had a glᴀss of champagne and talked about the day.’

And the following year he told Closer magazine he still felt ‘weak’ around his wife, saying: ‘We were meant to find each other. I thank God for her every day. When Keely looks at me, I go weak. I love her vitality, her pᴀssion. She has this strength that I wouldn’t be able to live without.’

Brosnan’s marriage to Australian actress Cᴀssandra Harris produced a son, Sean, in 1983 and Brosnan adopted Harris’s two children, Charlotte and Christopher, from a previous marriage.

Brosnan told Closer magazine he still felt ‘weak’ around his wife, saying: ‘We were meant to find each other.

Describing his ‘perfect’day, Brosnan said: ‘It was yesterday. I painted in my studio, then I went down and sat on the beach, read and did some drawing… Around five o’clock, I went out and watched the sun go down. Keely sat beside me, we had a glᴀss of champagne and talked about the day.’

Celebrating Keely’s 60th birthday in September 2023, Pierce wrote in his online birthday post: ‘Sixty roses for my brown eyed girl on her 60th birthday.’

Harking back to their meeting he said: ‘Forever happy and blessed was I to be sitting there when you walked around the corner early one morning in Cabo San Lucas.’

Can their lovey-dovey public relationship get a little cloying at times? Quite possibly, yes, but at least, in a showbusiness world riven by insincerity, it smacks of honesty.

Two years ago, he said that being a conventionally married man was simply ‘the way I like it’ and he fools around with other women only on screen in his acting roles.

‘I’m one of those guys who believes you need a strong woman in your life. I found a great woman in Keely. Not if I searched a million times over would I find one as good.’

It appears that whatever importance others attach to his wife’s current status on the scales, Pierce Brosnan couldn’t care less.