Rising star Jack seeks Benediction for war hero

SIEGFRIED SASSOON, whose poems about World War I captured the horror of trench warfare, will be portrayed by Jack Lowden in a new film to be made by acclaimed director Terence Davies, who’s often considered a visual poet himself.

Davies’s film, Benediction, will shoot this spring. Lowden, 29, told me he was captivated by Davies’s screenplay, which follows Sassoon’s wartime service, during which he won the Military Cross.

‘He wrote that incredible letter,’ said Lowden, referring to the famous protest Sassoon penned and sent to the war department, which declared: ‘I believe that this war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.’

Sassoon (below left) hoped the letter would provoke public debate, but he was effectively silenced by being sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh. ‘The authorities tried to make out he was suffering from shell shock,’ Lowden (above right) said.

He studied the WW1 poets at school, but said he learned much more from Davies’s script.

Lowden splits his time between stage and screen. He portrays Ian Macdonald, the QC who helped some of the defendants in the 1970s Mangrove Nine court case, in an episode of director Steve McQueen’s BBC drama series Small Axe.

He also produced — and appears with Tamara Lawrance and Fiona Shaw — in the film Corvidae. He said he and Shaw play ‘really creepy bastards’ in the movie, which has ‘hints of Rosemary’s Baby’.

The actor, who appeared in Dunkirk and Mary Queen Of Scots, also has a role in Fonzo, in which Tom Hardy plays Al Capone.

No wonder he’s a contender for this year’s EE Rising Star Award at the Baftas. You can vote via ee.co.uk/ bAFtA. The winner will be revealed at the ceremony on February 2.