Pierce Brosnan opens up about heartbreak: 'I don't look at the glass as half full'

— -- Pierce Brosnan has experienced his fair share of heartbreak in life, and he recently opened up in an interview with Esquire about the sadness he battles.

"I don't look at the cup as half full, believe me," Brosnan told the magazine. "The dark, melancholy Irish black dog sits beside me from time to time."

Ovarian cancer is the cause of much of Brosnan's pain. He's lost three women in his life to the disease -- his first wife, Cassandra Harris, in 1991, his daughter, Charlotte Brosnan, in 2013, and his producing partner, Beau Marie St. Clair, last year.

He also touched upon what he went through growing up with an absent father.

"I know what it's like to bring up sons," Brosnan, 63, said. "And it can be a very arduous road. My fatherly instincts are purely my own. They relate back to no one, because there was no one."

Though his father later came back into his life in 1984, it was only for a brief moment.

"I had a Sunday afternoon with him," he said. "A story about this and that, had a few pints of Guinness, and we said goodbye. I would have loved to have known him. He was a good whistler and he had a good walk ... that's as much as I know about him."

Despite these past hardships, the actor has finally found peace. He remarried Keely Shaye Smith in 2001, and spoke about his time at home with her.

"My days are full in a leisurely sort of way," he said. "This morning I worked out, read The New York Times, enjoyed watching my wife in the editing room," he said.

And he doesn't need much more than that.

"You don't need a big home," he said. "You need a good table to sit at, a good bed to sleep in, a view, and a great bottle of wine."