It’s his finest hour! Oldman plays Churchill
GARY Oldman is preparing to devote his all — ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’ — to portraying Winston Churchill during the early part of World War II, when he battled against strong forces in Britain who wanted to give in to Hitler.
The actor has been contracted to star in director Joe Wright’s movie Darkest Hour, which will detail the period when Churchill returned to the role of First Lord of the Admiralty.
It will show how he became Prime Minister after the resignation of Neville Chamberlain in May 1940, and how he galvanised the country after there was pressure, from opposing forces in Parliament, to capitulate to the Nazis. ‘It’s going to be Gary’s tour de force performance,’ an executive in Los Angeles told me yesterday.
The film, based on a screenplay by Anthony McCarten (who wrote The Theory Of Everything, which helped Eddie Redmayne win his Oscar) will feature some of Churchill’s most famous wartime speeches.
In May 1940, days after his appointment as PM, he told his Cabinet, then the House of Commons: ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.’
Throughout that month, attempts were made to persuade him to sign a truce with Hitler, but he was having none of it. He stormed: ‘If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.’
By the following month, Churchill had declared that the Allied forces would never surrender. ‘We shall fight them on the beaches!’ was one of his famous war cries.
And he followed it soon afterwards with his message to Britain and the Commonwealth to stand firm in ‘their finest hour’. The picture will detail the political infighting, and how Churchill’s spirit took hold in the country when it entered what he would later call ‘the darkest hour’.
THE film is set against the backdrop of the evacuation from Dunkirk, but Wright has already given us great Dunkirk scenes in Atonement, which starred Keira Knightley, James McAvoy and Saoirse Ronan.
And Christopher Nolan will start shooting an epic soon, devoted purely to the forced evacuations. It’s called . . . Dunkirk.
Wright’s film, meanwhile, is well advanced and begins shooting in September. Oldman has told close friends that he ‘relishes’ the chance to portray Churchill at such a vital moment in the nation’s history.
The actor’s a chameleon. Early on in his career he played punk rocker Sid Vicious, and since then he has taken on such diverse roles as playwright Joe Orton (in Prick Up Your Ears), Sirius Black (in the Harry Potter films), Commissioner Gordon (in Nolan’s Dark Knight movies), and George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (for which he was Oscar nominated).
Producers Eric Fellner, Tim Bevan and Lisa Bruce at UK film company Working Title are starting to cast other roles, including Churchill’s wife Clementine, Chamberlain, Churchill’s rival Lord Halifax, and Labour leader Clement Attlee.