Free Agent.(Mamma Mia!)(Movie review)

Byline: Adam Green.

In his latest post-Bond incarnation, Pierce Brosnan serenades Streep in Mamma Mia!

Last summer, Pierce Brosnan found himself at Pinewood Studios, outside London, reporting for work on the same soundstage where he had shot 2002's Die Another Day , his fourth and final outing as James Bond before hanging up his dinner jacket and covering his Aston Martin in tarp. "I had returned to the scene of the crime," Brosnan recalls. "I drew the drapes in my dressing room, looked in the mirror, and there was 007--only he was getting ready to expose himself to possible ridicule by starring in a movie musical called Mamma Mia! One of my daydreams was that I'd be strutting across the parking lot in sequined tights and cape, and I would bump into Mr. Daniel Craig, looking very Bond-like. It never happened, I'm pleased to say."

Still matinee-idol handsome at 55, Brosnan has gone out of his way lately to show that he can do more than shoot bad guys, bed women, and save the world while tossing off bons mots. He earned a Golden Globe nomination for his seedy, skimpy black brief--wearing hit man in 2005's The Matador and critical murmurs of approval for his grizzled fugitive in last year's Western Seraphim Falls. And yet, like the 007s who preceded him, he can probably never fully sever his bonds with Bond. "It's a mighty mantle to shrug off, but I've made my peace with it," Brosnan says. "I am, and always have been, a working actor."

As a shy, reserved boy in County Meath, Ireland, Brosnan had no ken that such a career even existed. After his father left the family and his mother moved to London to study nursing, he spent several years living with his grandparents. At eleven, he joined his mother in London, and at sixteen, he dropped out of school to apprentice at a graphic-design firm. One night, he went along to an acting workshop with a friend as a lark and found his calling. "I liked the attention--it's that simple," he recalls. "Years of concealment and buried emotions were waiting to come out, and I felt a great release as I got to put myself into different situations and explore myself for the first time."

Brosnan first made a splash on the West End in the mid-seventies, in Tennessee Williams's peculiar The Red Devil Battery Sign . But it was his gift for suave unflappability that made him a star when he landed the role of the urbane, tuxedo-clad ex-thief on the early-eighties American TV series Remington Steele . Since then, he has made a point of mixing it up between playing the amiable rogue, as in the upcoming sequel to The Thomas Crown Affair , and parts that show more darkness and complexity, like the ...