Marlborough Express - Weekend Express
One Life: Remarkable and
In 1988, a British TV chat show called That's Life broadcast an episode with a then-little known guest.
The man's name was Nicholas Winton. He was an unprepossessing, quietly retired, former stockbroker from Maidenhead, in the south-west of England.
Winton's parents were German Jews who had emigrated to England before he was born.
In 1938, with war almost certain to break out in Europe, Winton – Nicky to everybody – received a call from a friend in Prague.
She was working to help Jewish families who were desperate to escape Czechoslovakia before the Nazis invaded – and could Nicky come and help?
Winton travelled to Prague and spent the next two months working through the mountains of applications to emigrate, completing them in a way that the German and Czech authorities would approve.
Winton and others – his mother was completely involved by this time – wrote and petitioned politicians across the United Kingdom and the world, imploring them to accept more refugees.
Money was raised, host families were found – and at least some public opinion was swayed. Because of Winton's and his colleagues' efforts, many hundreds – nearly all of them children – were saved.
This was the story that came to light in 1988, when Winton's wife Grete decided to turn his diaries and scrapbooks into a memoir.
She enlisted the help of Elizabeth
Maxwell, who was the wife of the media titan Robert Maxwell. Maxwell knew an incredible story when she read one – and Nicky Winton's life quite quickly changed forever.
During the past few years, the episodes of That's Life – and then This Is Your Life
– that featured Nicky have found a new audience on YouTube. Which, I guess, is why the story of "The British Schindler" (Winton, to his endless credit, hated that sobriquet) has now been made into a feature film.
Veteran TV director James Hawes
(Slow Horses), working from a script by Lucinda Coxon (The Danish Girl) has done a wonderful job of turning the raw material of Winton's story into an easy-to-follow and mostly unadorned narrative that still packs an almighty and honestly earned emotional pay-off.
With a story that is this good and this wrenching, there is no need for manipulation or trickery. The facts are more than enough.
Anthony Hopkins is getting all of the publicity for his portrayal of the older Winton – and quite right, too. Hopkins is a wonderful actor with a phenomenal body of work behind him and he turns in a deft and selfless performance here, that serves the film wonderfully.
Around Hopkins, Johnny Flynn (Lovesick) is terrific as the younger Winton, with a ferociously good Helena Bonham Carter bustling around as his mother, and Romola Garai also great as Winton's colleague Doreen Warriner.
The incredible Lena Olin turns up as Grete Winton in the present day.
One Life is a solid, unflashy and beautifully well-performed retelling of a remarkable and very moving story.
It is a very easy film to recommend.