Tom Wilkinson - Biography

Biography:

The Oscar nominations of 2002 were immensely pleasing for the Brits. Not only were there nods for established stars Ian McKellen, Ben Kingsley, Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Kate Winslet, and Helen Mirren, but two lesser-known stalwarts of stage and screen were also honoured. These were Jim Broadbent and Tom Wilkinson. Of the two, Broadbent was the more noted, due to his comedy work on TV. Wilkinson was a total outsider, most viewers knowing him - if they knew him at all - only as the shamed supervisor-come-stripper in The Full Monty. They were entirely unaware of a successful stage career that stretched back some 25 years. Indeed, such was his unshowy nature and talent as a character actor that most Brits still didn't recognise him when, in 2008, he was nominated for the second time.

Tom Wilkinson was born of the 12th of December, 1948, in Leeds. His father, a farmer, took the family to Canada when the boy was very young, and there they lived for some five years (hence Tom's evident ease with an American accent), before returning, via Cornwall, to Yorkshire. Here Tom would complete his junior education, before moving on to the University of Kent at Canterbury, where he graduated in English and American Literature. The college would, in 2001, make him an Honorary Doctor of Letters.

Earlier, Tom had considered a career in physical education, but at university had tried a little acting and the bug bit. The boy won entry to the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and, on leaving, dedicated himself wholly to a life as a wandering player. He took the "wandering" part very seriously, for the first ten years ensuring that all his property could fit in a single suitcase - anything that didn't fit "had to go".

In the theatre, his progress was gradual but continuous, and his life was hugely varied. Leaving RADA, he was taken on by Richard Eyre, artistic director of Nottingham's Playhouse. Eyre, formerly head honcho at Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum, had taken over at Nottingham two years earlier, in 1972, and was transforming it, taking on David Hare as resident dramatist and boosting audiences at a time when rep was in trouble all over the country. Wilkinson would remain here for two years, appearing in many plays, including Howard Brenton's The Churchill Play (1974) and Trevor Griffiths' Comedians (1975).

1976 would bring travel, Wilkinson joining Birmingham Rep for John Dove's Uncle Vanya (playing Astrov to David William's Vanya) and Eric Bentley's Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been, then taking the title role in Ibsen's Peer Gynt at Edinburgh Lyceum, with Miranda Bell and, again, David William.

There'd be more Ibsen at the Oxford Playhouse when he took the lead in Brand, playing a firebrand preacher taking over a village. Rising quickly through the theatrical ranks, the next year would see him at the National Theatre, playing Marullus and Titinius in John Schlesinger's Julius Caesar at the Olivier in March, 1977, with Gielgud as Caesar and Brian Cox as Brutus. The next month he'd appear in Bill Bryden's the Passion at the Cottesloe, with Brenda Blethyn.

Such was his onstage success, Tom was late coming to the Silver Screen, and did not really pursue screen acting of any kind until in his mid-thirties. He made his filmic debut in 1976, in The Shadow Line, directed by Poland's number one Andrzej Wajda. It was a difficult beginning. Attempting to adapt a Joseph Conrad story about a young man's psychological state while trying to survive on a ship plagued by disease, Wajda pursued the mood of the piece and later admitted himself that the movie ended up "inarticulate, elusive and uncommunicative".

Come 1980, Wilkinson was in no need of screens silver or small, having been taken on by the Royal Shakespeare Company, joining such stage stars as Patrick Stewart, Sheila Hancock, Bob Peck, Brenda Fricker and Juliet Stevenson. During his first season at Stratford, he'd be Corin in As You Like It, alongside Susan Fleetwood and Sinead Cusack: he'd be a callous, homosexual Melantius in The Maid's Tragedy, again with Cusack: with a crew-cut and round specs he'd be Horatio in John Barton's Hamlet, with Michael Pennington as the indecisive Dane, then he'd be Catesby in Terry Hands' Richard III, with Alan Howard as the evil king and both Sinead Cusack and David Suchet in attendance.

1981 would see Wilkinson rise to play Antonio in The Merchant Of Venice, with Cusack as his Portia and Suchet a memorable Shylock. The troupe would then move to London, where Wilkinson would appear once more in As You Like It, The Maid's Tragedy and Richard III, as well as playing Pavel Gai in Solzhenitsyn's controversial prison tale The Love-Girl And The Innocent.

With the RSC on his CV and a wealth of experience behind him, Wilkinson would now begin his screen career in earnest - though he was keen to concentrate on projects that might have a genuine social impact. He began in the miniseries Spyship. Its theme performed by June Tabor, this concerned weird events in northern waters when a British vessel goes missing. Then came more Cold War action in Sakharov, starring Jason Robards and telling the tale of Russian dissident Andrei Sakharov. Then yet more in Squaring The Circle, directed by Mike Hodges, and written by Tom Stoppard about Polish people's hero Lech Walesa. Next Came Wetherby, starring Dench and Vanessa Redgrave, and written and directed by David Hare, Wilkinson's former cohort at Nottingham Playhouse. Here a Yorkshire school-teacher has a brooding youngster arrive at her house and promptly commit suicide.

It was a dark, dark movie, with all the characters weighed down by the mean-spirited social engineering of Thatcher and Reagan.

. By the mid-Eighties, Tom was getting into the swing of this TV lark, and began to broaden into lighter fare. He appeared in the Jeffrey Archer miniseries, First Among Equals, then in The Woman He Loved, where Jane Seymour played the 20th century king-breaker Wallis Simpson. There was a Ruth Rendell thriller in Shake Hands Forever, and Attic: The Hiding Of Anne Frank which, despite its absurd title (imagine the man from the Denim ads portentously announcing "ATTIC!") featured great performances from Tom, Paul Schofield (another brilliant Lear) and, particularly, Mary Steenburgen.

Since leaving the RSC, Wilkinson had concentrated mostly on screen work. He had, though, also kept up his theatrical reputation with a short string of hits. In 1984, he'd originated the role of TS Eliot in Tom And Viv at the Royal Court, with Julie Covington as his disturbed, frustrated and ill-treated first wife. The production would transfer to New York the next year, without Tom, and he'd miss out on the 1994 screen version, too, his place being taken by Willem Dafoe. 1986 would see another hit in Ghosts, directed by David Thacker at the Young Vic, then moving on to Wyndham's. Here Wilkinson's recent co-star Vanessa Redgrave would play Mrs Alving, with Wilkinson as Pastor Manders. Being elected Best Supporting Actor by the London Critics' Circle, Wilkinson later admitted that's he'd foolishly thought he'd now cracked this theatre lark - and was promptly unemployed for 18 months. Luckily, this wandering player is "temperamentally suited to the business of acting", and took up golf to pass the time before the roles inevitably started up again. When he returned, in 1988, it was with a bang. Reuniting with director David Thacker, he took on more Ibsen in An Enemy Of The People, again at the Young Vic. Playing the lead, Dr Tomas Stockmann, in Arthur Miller's 1950 adaptation, he was sensational, transferring to the West End's Playhouse in November and being named Best Actor by the London critics. He'd close the decade with Peter Brook's adaptation of The Cherry Orchard. This had played at the Majestic in New York with Brian Dennehy, Stephanie Roth, Rebecca Miller and Kate Mailer, the latter two both being daughters of famed writers. Wilkinson would replace Dennehy as Lopakhin when, in March, 1989, the production moved on to Moscow's Taganka Theatre, Dennehy dropping out due to film commitments.

This stage success would continue on into the Nineties. 1990 would see him deliver a brilliant John Proctor in Miller's The Crucible, directed by Howard Davies at the Olivier and featuring Zoe Wanamaker and Claire Holman. The next year would see him reunite with Richard Eyre at the Cottesloe for the first production of Christopher Hampton's White Chameleon, an autobiographical work concerning Hampton's youth in Egypt.

Then, in 1993, Wilkinson would be an exceptional King Lear at the Royal Court. In a riding coat and breeches, sporting a walrus moustache and much younger than Lears usually are, Wilkinson was exploring the Colonel Blimp aspects of the character, seeing him as a man old in mind rather than body. His performance would grow ever darker, though, as he punishes Cordelia and is betrayed by Regan and Goneril (played by Cara Kelly, Saskia Reeves and Lia Williams respectively), and audiences would be horrified by his long, agonized death.

. The early Nineties saw a real upturn in Tom's screen career. First he played Helen Mirren's long-suffering partner, Peter Rawlins, in the superior drama Prime Suspect: then a real doctor beside Paul McGann's pretend one in Paper Mask: and then he starred as DI Charlie Resnick in a couple of very popular TV movies. Finally his onscreen fortunes would be turbo-charged by the miniseries Martin Chuzzlewit, where he delivered a superb performance as Seth Pecksniff, being duly nominated for a BAFTA. Amazingly, it was the first time he watched himself and thought he appeared as he intended to - "I thought 'I can act, there's no question'." Then would come Eskimo Day where he and Maureen Lipman played the parents of a kid struggling with entrance exams. There'd be a follow-up, Cold Enough For Snow, where his daughter actually makes it to college and Tom becomes painfully over-protective, getting another BAFTA nomination for his efforts. Before this, though, there was Crossing The Floor where he brilliantly starred as an incompetent and thoroughly immoral Home Secretary.

In the meantime, his career in cinema had begun to slowly burgeon. After the Hamlet adaptation Prince Of Jutland (again with Mirren), came Antonia Bird's Priest. Here a gay priest is struggling with a faith that frowns upon that sort of thing but his superior, Father Matthew (Tom) is perhaps not the one to ask for moral guidance as he's shamelessly engaging in an affair with housekeeper Cathy Tyson. After this, Tom proceeded to Ang Lee's Sense And Sensibility, where he played the father of Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet (yet another fellow Oscar nominee) whose death forces them to seek the elusive "good marriage". Now he stood alongside some big American stars in The Ghost And The Darkness, playing the tough and snobby boss of Val Kilmer, a bridge builder in Africa who's suffering from a bad case of man-eating lions.

Now, in 1996, came the single most important point in Wilkinson's career. He decided to ignore his stage-work for a while and concentrate full-time on trying to make it to Hollywood, "where the big boys are". He had to keep the movies coming and so turned down a TV series that would have placed him in nearly every scene in order to appear in a small film being shot in Sheffield. His friends told him he was insane, the series would have made him a household name. But Tom's ambition was for more than that.

So, he took on The Full Monty, about a disparate group of unemployed steel workers who, desperate for money, become a troupe of strippers. Tom was superb, playing an ex-supervisor who's so ashamed of his redundancy he has not told his wife about it, leaving the house every day as if he were going to work. He battles continually with his far more bohemian ex-workman Robert Carlyle (they'd earlier appeared together in Priest) and despises the stripping idea but, as a ballroom dancer, the lads think he'll be able to choreograph their moves. So, this emotionally repressed snob, ever mindful of what people might think, has to reveal, onstage, what he's hiding downstairs. This time, the BAFTA was his.

. A few other prime roles in classy productions popped up. He made an excellent Marquess of Queensbury in Wilde, dragging Stephen Fry's Oscar Wilde into court and breaking him in Reading Gaol for daring to sleep with his son Bosie, played by Jude Law. Then came the extraordinary Oscar And Lucinda, where Cate Blanchett attempts to build a glass church in the Aussie outback. Then there was The Governess, where Tom played a 19th Century photography pioneer who engages in an affair with the mysterious Minnie Driver.

But however classy these movies were, Tom's ambition was to get to Hollywood, at least once. And so he took the part of the archetypal English villain in Jackie Chan's Rush Hour. Here crime lord Tom has millions of pounds-worth of stolen goods confiscated by copper Chan so, in revenge, he kidnaps the daughter of the Chinese consul in America. Chan must fly over to sort it out, in partnership with US cop Chris Tucker. It could have been a bomb, but Rush Hour proved to be the film that broke Jackie Chan in America, and it raised Tom's stock too - stock that was already high as, during the filming of Rush Hour, The Full Monty has grown into an outlandish and wholly unexpected worldwide smash.

Despite thinking it would be, like The Full Monty, a smallish production, Tom moved on to yet another monster, playing the meanie money-lender who finances Geoffrey Rush's production in Shakespeare In Love (another BAFTA nomination). Then he was back to America, once more with director Ang Lee, to play Orton Brown in the Civil War drama Ride With The Devil. Next came more US history - though perhaps not quite as accurately presented - with Mel Gibson's The Patriot, where Tom played General Charles Cornwallis. He was an excellent choice for the part - turning a character who might simply have been aristocratically cruel and bullish into a complex, troubled and wholly sympathetic fellow.

Tom now had Hollywood weight, and could pick and choose. So, of course, he came back to England to star as the menacing Mr D, drug dealer and all-round beast, in Essex Boys. Here he threatened ex-partner Sean Bean and had sex with the former Moll Flanders and now ER star Alex Kingston.

And there'd be more work in Blighty when, in 2000, he returned to the Royal Court stage for My Zinc Bed, yet again by David Hare. This would see him as a successful businessman taking poet Steven Mackintosh under his wing as a promo writer. However Mackintosh was, like Wilkinson's young wife Julia Ormond, a recovering alcoholic, and their shared experience drew them into a deeper relationship, as Wilkinson's life and business crashes around him. As with all of Hare's work, it was a complex piece, covering temptation and dependency as well as cults and socialism.

. In America, 2001 proved to be a golden year for Tom. But it didn't start promisingly. In Black Knight, Martin Lawrence played an employee at a mediaevally-themed amusement park who gets knocked out and wakes in the real Middle Ages, where Tom is a drunken, penniless knight, shamed by his failure to protect the Queen. Together, of course, they find redemption. It wasn't a great film, but Tom enjoyed making it, despite having to ride horses. Tom is one of the very, very few British people who don't like horses - and he liked them even less after one of their number insisted on tossing him onto his horse-hating behind.

But quickly the Big One arrived. In The Bedroom paired Tom with Sissy Spacek as the parents of a young college kid who embarks on an affair with older woman and mother Marisa Tomei. Spacek disapproves entirely, but Tom, as ever is far more complicated in his reaction. He wants the boy to do as he pleases, doesn't want to cause a scene and, anyway, he kind of fancies Marisa himself. So he says nothing and, when his son is shot dead by Tomei's ex-husband, his relationship with Spacek becomes fraught with guilt and recrimination. Will he act NOW?

Wilkinson was immense in In The Bedroom, out-shining his co-stars. And a well-deserved Oscar nomination came his way, putting him in a tough group with Russell Crowe, Sean Penn, Denzel Washington and Will Smith. Tom was completely taken aback. "It's such an honour to be nominated," he said "and it is a reward for my going to Hollywood and taking a chance... The competition in my group - oh, my goodness. I think I know who is going to win it, and his name isn't Tom Wilkinson".

He was right. The winner's name was Denzel Washington. Nevertheless, Tom Wilkinson had made it. He no longer lived out of a single suitcase - he shares a Muswell Hill flat with actress wife Diana Hardcastle and their two kids, Alice and Molly - but he did still travel. Only now he travels further afield. His next effort was Another Life which followed a real-life Edwardian murder-case where Natasha Little discussed with her lover the possibility of murdering her dull and repressed husband Nick Moran. When he actually does it, she's on trial for her life, her infidelity at the time being wholly unacceptable. Wilkinson would play her milliner boss, a man who encourages her ambitious nature, inadvertently setting up the traumas to come.

2002 would bring another raft of releases.

First there'd be the TV biopic The Gathering Storm, where Albert Finney and Vanessa Redgrave played Winston and Clementine Churchill as war approaches in the late 1930s. Tom would appear as Sir Robert Vansittart, Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs, who wishes to remain loyal to his government but is deeply disturbed by a growing belief that Churchill's warnings about the re-arming of Germany may have horrifying substance. Wilkinson would stay in period guard for his next outing, a remake of The Importance Of Being Earnest that saw Rupert Everett and Colin Firth swapping Wildean witticisms and they bumbled their way into the hearts of Reese Witherspoon and Frances O'Connor. Tom would pop up as Dr Chasuble, the meek vicar mooning over Anna Massey's Miss Prism, Witherspoon's frumpy tutor.

. The year would also bring two other projects, both of lower profile. First there'd be Before You Go, otherwise known as The Memory Of Water, where Patricia Hodge dies and her three very different daughters reunite to forge a new view of their mother and themselves. The eldest daughter, who has been the carer of the sick old lady, would be played by Julie Walters, with Tom as her husband, attempting to be supportive as the sisters unleash their rivalries and discover a new balance. Following this would come An Angel For May, financed by the Children's Film And Television Foundation, where an unhappy young boy is magically transported back to 1941 and a farm in war-time Yorkshire. Wilkinson would be the farmer, who seems to know more about the boy's sudden appearance than he's letting on, while the boy himself helps out in the rehabilitation of a semi-feral young girl discovered in some bombed-out ruins. Neither Before You Go nor An Angel For May would see a cinematic release, despite the former being directed by Lewis Gilbert, maker of Alfie and Educating Rita, and this - bizarrely, given Wilkinson's current popularity and industry weight - would become a ridiculously common occurrence over the next several years.

First, though, would come more success, both on small and silver screen. For HBO he would make the TV movie Normal, starring as a father of 2 with a 25-year marriage to Jessica Lange and a job as foreman in a mid-west tractor-making firm, a family man and pillar of the local church. So how strange it is for his family, his community and himself when he reveals that he's a woman trapped in a man's body and decides to liberate himself, dressing in wigs and skirts as he prepares for the big operation. This was a classic Wilkinson performance - pained but decent and brave, and not remotely camp - and he'd deservedly be nominated for both an Emmy and a Golden Globe. He'd follow this with Girl With A Pearl Earring, a fine piece where his Importance Of Being Earnest co-star Colin Firth was famed painter Vermeer, involved in an intense platonic affair with Scarlett Johansson, a house-maid with a natural artistic ability.

Tom, meanwhile, would appear as Vermeer's patron, a more openly passionate fellow who lusts after Johansson and demands Vermeer paint her portrait for him (for what purpose one shudders to imagine).

. By now Wilkinson was in his cinematic prime and hugely busy but, as said, it was appalling how little of his work was to make it to general release. Piccadilly Jim, adapted from PG Wodehouse by Oscar-winning Julian Fellowes, was the first to fall off the map. This would see Sam Rockwell as a debauched playboy who takes an interest in a volatile crime-writer (Frances O'Connor, again) but has to pretend to be someone else as a fellow writer of the Piccadilly Jim newspaper column has slagged off her poetry. Wilkinson would play Rockwell's father, a failed British actor who's been dragged back to London by his American wife, a rabid social-climber. An ambitious update of Wodehouse's wacky world, the film would feature modern cars and pop songs but, unfortunately, it would lack the author's original charm. Hence the lack of release. And a similar fate would await If Only, where young Paul Nicholls magically gets a chance to relive the day where he's argued with his musician girlfriend Jennifer Love Hewitt and she's subsequently been killed in a car accident. He tries to ensure that the argument and accident don't take place, but events conspire against him - Wilkinson making a show as a cab driver who urges the boy to really appreciate the girl he's got.

Thankfully, 2004 wouldn't just be about the slow burial of Wilkinson's fine work. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind would see him back on top, propelled by another scorching script by Charlie Kaufman. Here Jim Carrey would discover that his ex-girlfriend Kate Winslet has undergone a revolutionary new operation to have her memories of him removed. In revenge he decides to do the same, only to change his mind in mid-process and have to battle to save his disintegrating memories. Wilkinson would play Dr Howard Mierzwiak, the scientist who's invented the mind-wipe, a seemingly nice guy who nevertheless places his own ambitions above other people's feelings and, as it turns out, hides a thoroughly unpleasant secret.

Now, incredibly, would come, or rather NOT come, a run of four films that received either a very limited release, or no release at all. First would be Stage Beauty, another period piece, set just after the Restoration and directed by Wilkinson's former employer at Nottingham Playhouse, Richard Eyre. Here Billy Crudup would play an actor famed for playing women (women not being allowed on the stage at the time). Tom would appear as a theatre owner who oversees the collapse of Crudup's career when King Charles II (Rupert Everett, again) allows Claire Danes to tread the boards, with considerable success. Next would come A Good Woman, another Oscar Wilde remake, this time adapting Lady Windermere's Fan.

Here Helen Hunt would play a saucy socialite who flees her bad reputation in New York and arrives on the Amalfi coast where she latches onto the rich husband of Lady Windermere (Scarlett Johansson, once more). As the ex-pat community is stirred up by these semi-sexy shenanigans, and misunderstandings and red herrings abound, Tom would pop up as Tuppy, a grand, likeable and lonely old gent who sets his own sights on the glamorous Hunt. Despite the stellar cast, the movie would not see the light of day till late 2005, and then only because of the burgeoning success of Johansson.

. More problems would befall Separate Lies, the directorial debut of Piccadilly Joe writer Julian Fellowes, also known as A Way Through The Woods. This one would disappear completely, even though it featured one of Wilkinson's more powerful performances. Here he'd be a high-powered lawyer seemingly happily married to a much younger Emily Watson, only to have their countryside idyll smashed by the appearance (yet again) of Rupert Everett. White lies and tragic accidents would then lead to an emotionally crushing finale with Tom at his finest since In The Bedroom. Rather different, but equally unseen, would be Ripley Under Ground. Here the notorious Ripley would take on the ID of a recently deceased and newly famous artist, colluding with gallery owner Alan Cumming to sell fake pictures to the unwary. One such mug is collector Willem Dafoe, who suspects Ripley and therefore must die, Wilkinson appearing as Detective Webster, a cop investigating Dafoe's disappearance and tracking Ripley between London and the French countryside.

Of course, Wilkinson's run of bad luck could not continue. 2005 would see him back in full view in Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan's thrillingly gloomy take on the harsh genesis of the Caped Crusader. Tom would here play Carmine Falcone, wise-cracking boss of a Gotham crime syndicate, who has Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne beaten up and later attempts to muscle in on the Scarecrow's efforts to smuggle a fear toxin into Gotham. Sprayed with the very poison he hopes to control, Falcone loudly loses his mind and is consigned to the infamous Arkham Asylum. The same year would also bring another interesting project, The Exorcism Of Emily Rose, a horror film set mostly in a court-room. This would be based on the real-life tragedy of Annaliese Michel, a German student who, in the mid-1970s, was thought to be possessed by demons. With the full permission of the Catholic Church, a priest (here played by Tom) would attempt an exorcism, with the girl dying in the process. The priest would then famously be put on trial for negligent homicide, to the frustration of lawyer Laura Linney refusing to plea bargain and receiving no help from the Church.

2006 would begin with the odd, supposedly teen-friendly The Night Of The White Pants, where Tom would play a poor sod who's losing his wife, his home and his business and has only just survived a heart attack.

Somehow he ends up out on the town with young Nick Stahl, the drug-dealing punk boyfriend of his daughter Selma Blair and learns to open up as he comes into close contact with loud music, cheap drugs and cxheaper women. After this would come The Last Kiss, based on the 2001 Italian hit L'Ultimo Bacio. Directed by Paul Haggis, writer of Million Dollar Baby and director of the Oscar-winning Crash, this would concern a group of young male friends and their attempts to avoid the suburban normality of a nice wife, house and kids, Zach Braff having made girlfriend Jacinda Barrett pregnant (Barrett having appeared with Wilkinson in Ripley Under Ground). But the movie also considered this so-called trap from the view of an older couple, Wilkinson playing Barrett's father, a dry-witted psychotherapist who gives Braff advice and delivers the movie's one shocking revelation.

. 2007 would bring two more releases. First there'd be Dedication, a reunionm with Stage Beauty star Billy Crudup. Here Crudup would play a misanthropic author whose career is kept afloat by aunexpected success with a book for kids. When his illustrator and only friend Wilkinson dies, he's ordered to collaborate with young Mandy Moore as the movie mutates into a rom-com, Wilkinson reappearing occasionally as Crudup's spectral conscience. Far more impressive would be Michael Clayton, a tight legal thriller where Wilkinson would play a top lawyer sent to Milwaukee to defend a giant corporation against a multi-billion law-suit for wide-scale pollution. Suffering from bi-polar disorder and under enormous pressure, Wilkinson loses it, stripping off and running through the streets, forcing the firm to send George Clooney to silence the now righteous Wilkinson and fix the problem. Much-lauded, the movie would see Wilkinson, Clooney and Tilda Swinton all nominated for Oscars.

In 2008, scheduling would make Wilkinson ubiquitous. Filmed in 2006, Woody Allen's Cassandra's Dream would see Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell as brothers in need of cash, Farrell due to gambling debts and McGregor due to a new high-maintenance girlfriend. With no other source available, they turn to Wilkinson's rich Uncle Howard, a wealthy Hollywood plastic surgeon in London for a birthday. Wilkinson agrees to pay but is far from generous, demanding that they kill a man in return. His later explosion of rage would be the film's emotional highpoint. Following this would come a joint BBC/HBO production of Caryl Churchill's A Number, originally a hit at the Royal Court for Michael Gambon and Daniel Craig. Here Wilkinson would play Salter, a man who lost his wife many years before and duly abandoned their child, after the kid's been cloned in a genetic experiment. Now Tom's revisited by the boy, now a man, and also meets the clone he raised himself, and another raised by others.

Difficult yet fascinating questions would be raised about family, choices, generation gaps, nature, nurture and the hypocrisy of our self-justifications.

. Wilkinson's next project would be the epic miniseries John Adams, covering the first 50 years of the United States by concentrating on the life of the early president. Adams would be played by Paul Giamatti, the movie also featuring Wilkinson's former co-star Laura Linney as well as Rufus Sewell and Sarah Polley, Wilkinson himself appearing as Bejamin Franklin - founding father, inventor, scientist, diplomat, satirist and abolitionist, perhaps the most important American in the nation's early years. After this would come Guy Ritchie's RocknRolla, the director's attempt to rediscover the form he'd shown with Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels. The backstreets of london would once more be in chaos as the Russian mob, English gangsters, drug lords, rock stars, politicians and petty crooks all attempted to nab the proceeds from expensive artworks and dodgy land deals, Wilkinson playing a gang boss attempting to keep control of his local empire.

Next would come Recount, a TV dramatization of the 2000 Presidential election in Florida where, with the help of his brother, Governor Jeb, George W Bush cheated both rival Al Gore and the American public, shaming his nation in front of the whole world with his seedy coup d'etat. Kevin Spacey would play Ron Klain, general counsel on Gore's recount committee with Wilkinson as his arch-rival James Baker, former Secretary of State and Bush's chief legal advisor, a man keen to see that justice is not done. Only slightly less vile would be Wilkinson's next character, Goebbels, whom he'd play in the action figure animation Jackboots On Whitehall, featuring former co-stars Ewan McGregor and Alan Cumming as well as Rosamund Pike. A satire, this would see the Scots save the English from the Nazis. And there'd be more from the Nazis in Wilkinson's next feature, the far more serious Valkyrie, a Tom Cruise vehicle concerning the attempt on Hitler's life by Claus von Stauffenberg. Wilkinson would take his rightful place amid a strong Brit cast featuring Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh and Terence Stamp.

Awarded an OBE in 2005 for his services to Drama, Tom Wilkinson's efforts have at least been recognised by the Establishment. Now a stage star and a double Oscar nominee, it's about time the general public woke up to the fact that he's one of Britain's great cinematic character actors.

Dominic Wills