Churchill’s ghost story inspires Oldman
After winning an Oscar for Darkest Hour, actor is to bring wartime leader’s story The Dream to life
Gary Oldman has said he plans to reprise the role of Winston Churchill, following on from his Oscar-winning performance in Darkest Hour. Oldman has adapted The Dream, a short story written by the wartime prime minister – published by The Sunday Telegraph a year after Churchill’s death – and intends to turn it into a play. In the story, Churchill’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill, appears from beyond the grave to speak to his son.
FOR his Oscar-winning performance in Darkest Hour, Gary Oldman portrayed Winston Churchill as he led the nation in wartime.
Now he plans to reprise the role but this time show a lesser-known side to Churchill: that of a son who yearned for his father’s approval. Oldman has adapted the former prime minister’s own short story, The Dream, in which Lord Randolph Churchill appears from beyond the grave.
In life, Lord Randolph had little time for his son, dismissing him as a layabout with scant academic potential. He directed Winston towards a military career and died in 1895, shortly after his son left Sandhurst.
The Dream is set in November 1947 and is by turns poignant and funny, as Churchill runs through some of the developments his father has missed in the preceding 50 years – from the Second World War to women getting the vote.
Churchill never tells his father, himself a Tory politician and chancellor of the exchequer, that he achieved greatness, and is silent as Lord Randolph dismisses him as a child who was always bottom of the school and not clever enough for the bar.
But, after listening to Churchill recount the horrors of the Second World War and Britain’s victory, Lord Randolph tells his son: “I never expected that you would develop so far and so fully. Of course, you are too old now to think about such things, but when I hear you talk I really wonder you didn’t go into politics. You might even have made a name for yourself.”
Oldman has adapted the story with the approval of Churchill’s family, and plans to turn it into a two-hander stage play. He told the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 that he may also bring the story to film or television. “I’ve only scratched the surface. I think that there’s another chapter here,” the actor said of his Churchill portrayal.
The Dream was first published in The
Sunday Telegraph on Jan 30 1966, the first anniversary of Churchill’s funeral. It begins with Churchill in his studio on the Chartwell estate, painting his father’s portrait. Lord Randolph suddenly materialises, seated in a red leather armchair. When told it is 1947, he asks: “Does the monarchy go on?”
Reassured that it does, he inquires after other institutions: the Church of England, the House of Lords, the Carlton Club and the racing at Epsom.
There follows a discussion about suffrage. “Even the women have votes,” Churchill explains. “Good gracious!” exclaims his father. “You don’t allow them in the House of Commons?”
“Oh yes. Some of them have even been Ministers. There are not many of them. They have found their level,” Churchill says. It is said that, in 1993, Baroness Thatcher “roared” with laughter at that particular passage.
Churchill’s son, also named Randolph, wrote an accompanying article in 1966 explaining how The Dream came to be written 20 years earlier.
He and his sister, Sarah, were in the dining room at Chartwell with their father. “Sarah recalls that there was a pause in the conversation and that I suddenly asked, pointing to an empty
‘When I hear you talk I really wonder you didn’t go into politics. You might have made a name for yourself ’
‘Some women have even been Ministers. There are not many of them. They have found their level’
chair: ‘If you had the power to put someone in that chair to join us now, whom would you choose?’” Churchill thought for a moment and said: “Oh, my father, of course.” They urged their father to commit the story to paper. The early draft remained locked away for a decade, but Churchill returned to it a couple of years before his death. Randolph said his grandfather had often seemed “cruel and utterly unconscious of any ability in his son”. He wrote: “I well remember my father telling me when I was 15 or 16 after the summer holidays just before I went back to Eton: ‘Do you know, I have had more talks with you during these holidays than I had with my father during the whole of his life.”