Reason for Living: The Jill Ireland Story

An outstanding performance by Lance Henrikson portraying Charles Bronson (Ireland's husband) fails to move this TV movie out of the mediocre pile, and that's too bad because this story is fascinating. Clayburgh tries hard as the doomed Ireland but there are some basic problems with her performance, namely she's not English (her accent is pretty bad) and she's not that good-looking. The real Ireland was a beautiful, fairly talented actress who gave up a marriage with popular Scottish actor David McCallum ("The Man from U.N.C.L.E.") to be with the fairly unknown Bronson. Within a couple of years, Bronson became one of the most popular actors in the world. Now if the producers would have only combined THAT aspect of her life into this so-so TV movie we'd have a superb story... (updated on 12/6/2016 to reflect the fact that McCallum is Scottish not British to make some tiresome baby-boy happy...this is for reviews, not whining about inconsequential rubbish - see the film if you want to comment, mate)