Gary Oldman has joined a long list of actors who have portrayed Winston Churchill — no fewer than 35 of them in movies and 28 on television. He is one of the best three. ‘I knew I didn’t look like him,’ Oldman has said. ‘I thought that with some work I could approximate the voice. The challenge in part was the physicality, because you’re playing someone whose silhouette is so iconic.’
We all have our own mind’s-eye view of what Churchill should look and sound like, and his personality was so strong and sui generis that it is almost impossible for an actor to impose himself on the role. He is therefore almost always left with either mere impersonation or caricature. Oldman avoided this in Darkest Hour through research. ‘I went to the newsreel,’ he says, ‘and what I discovered was a man who had this very athletic tread. He would skip around at 65 like a 30-year-old, he had a sparkle, the eyes were alive, he had a very sort of cherubic grin.’
This is an insight that a number of actors who play Churchill — who came to power in 1940 aged 65 — have missed, and who thus play him as a man in late middle age. Sir Jock Colville, Churchill’s wartime private secretary, who was 41 years younger than him, wrote of how exhausting it was to keep up with the Prime Minister as he bounded up staircases, climbed bombsites and marched quickly down corridors. Oldman catches this. Others have played what Oldman calls ‘this sort of rather depressed grumpy man with a cigar’, but he wanted to ‘give him a bit of a twinkle in the eye’.
Churchill was depicted on the silver screen half a decade before he even became prime minister.
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