Brian Cox on playing Churchill

Brian Cox on Churchill’s finest hour

I’m standing in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, in front of Sir James Guthrie’s portrait of Sir Winston Churchill and Brian Cox is telling me a story. It’s about his Uncle Geordie and the war leader, who from 1908 to 1922 had been the less than popular MP for Cox’s home town of Dundee.

“Churchill, who was invariably ill, is being carried into the city square on a chair on two poles, by four men. My uncle shouted to these guys ‘how much did he pay ye?’ and one of them shouted back, ‘a quid’. My uncle said, ‘I’ll gie ye twa if ye drap ‘um.’

“So that was the impression that I had of Churchill and my Uncle Geordie used to say he was a chancer, a terrible man. He was unpopular in Dundee because he changed parties, from Liberal to Tory, and for his handling of Ireland, which didn’t go down well, especially with the Irish community, which included my family. He put Edward Carson and Michael Collins in a room together to get the deal whereby Northern Ireland was created and most of the indigent population of the city felt that was a bad compromise. They were agin that.”

We’re talking about the wartime leader because Cox has taken on the role in Jonathan Teplitzky’s film, Churchill, which covers the three days running up to the D-day Landings in 1944. It’s a different take on the man we are accustomed to seeing, and Cox gets under his skin to portray a different side to the national hero, revealing a more fragile, fallible, flawed character. Scarred by guilt over his responsibility as First Lord of the Admiralty for the slaughter of thousands in the beach landings at Gallipoli in the First World War, Churchill is desperate to stop a repeat in Operation Overlord.

“After he had lost thousands of troops at Gallipoli in the First World War, he resigned and went immediately to the front in France with the Royal Scots Fusiliers. That was a penitent act and he didn’t want the same thing to happen again,” says Cox.

Cut out by Eisenhower and Montgomery, he’s shown as a man also plagued by ill-health and the black dog of depression, but one who rises to the occasion with a show of oratory that gives hope to the masses.

Playing the part of Churchill, all of it filmed in Scotland, has seen Cox reassess his appraisal of both the man and the politician and discover a newfound respect.

“What got me about him was he was complicated. He was an astonishing human being: a soldier, poet, painter, strategist, politician,” he says. “He wasn’t universally liked, but he was a maverick and stood up for what he believed in so he had this ability to reach his moment finally, at the age of 65, becoming prime minister and doing this extraordinary job. But that all came at some cost, and he was amazingly human.

“At the time of the D-day Landings, he had had pneumonia, probably a heart attack, and he’s coming up for 70. He was frail, drank a ridiculous amount of champagne and whisky, and slept for only three or four hours a night. How he lived to 90 I have no idea.

“But he had clarity of purpose in relation to the rise of fascism, in a time of appeasement, and he saw that war was the only way to stop it. This was his third war and he’d seen concentration camps – the British invented them in the Boer War – so he knew what Goering was up to, and that they were getting away with murder.”

Where Cox says Churchill came into his own was through his mastery of language and ability to turn words into inspiration through his speeches. “He was a master of the English language and his writing was almost Shakespearean. It was his oratory that got him through, that made him at that moment a man of destiny. He became the conscience of the UK and a bolsterer with these incredible speeches. He really stepped into his destinal position, like Mandela or Napoleon, through believing in his principles.”

The film also makes great play of how the Churchill we are used to seeing was in fact a construct, aided by the props of cigar, Homburg hat and V-sign, created by Churchill and his loyal wife Clemmie, played by Miranda Richardson – “phenomenal,” according to Cox, “one of the best actresses I’ve ever worked with, so inventive and present.”

Just as Churchill donned the round glasses and puffed on a cigar, so Cox adopted the persona by piling on two stones and shaving his head. “They filled in my dimple too,” he says, sticking a finger in his trademark cleft chin. “Putting on weight wasn’t a problem. I like food, and I didn’t want to do fat suits and prosthetics.” Once he’d perfected Churchill’s shambling gait, the transformation was complete.

But it was sitting watching TV with his young sons at their home in Brooklyn that Cox really found his way into how to play Churchill. “My boys said you have to watch Family Guy with us, you’ll love it, so I did. And there he was, Churchill, in the character of Stewie Griffin, the baby. Incredibly bright, articulate, with parents who don’t understand him, he communicates with his best pal, Brian the dog. I realised this is Churchill in embryo. And of course every baby looks like Churchill and Churchill looks like every baby.”

Cox made a deliberate decision not to do the strident Churchill voice we are used to from wartime speeches, apart from a rallying broadcast made shortly after the invasion, because it wasn’t in fact his day to day voice.

“He had a rather soft voice in private when he wasn’t giving a speech, so I didn’t do it apart from then. The voice was all part of the show for the British people and it was through the speeches that he gained his sense of purpose. Even my parents finally admitted Churchill did a great job.

“At the moment we need leaders like this, desperately, and they’re just not there. Look at this whole Brexit thing and you see chancers, the horrific Little Englander mentality of that idiot Farage, the appalling opportunism of that clown Bozo Johnston and the namby-pamby ambition of Michael Gove; these are not good guys. Theresa May? She’s just a dullard. And Trump? There’s nothing to be said about Trump, the guy’s an idiot.”

Aged 71, with his blue eyes, cheekbones and dimpled chin, Cox has presence and he’s a great raconteur when we chat over afternoon tea. When he talks about being inspired by the idea of props as enablers for Churchill, with a story about the cancer-ridden Yul Brynner being transformed from frail old man to proud dancing monarch by the opening bars of Shall we Dance , he