FThere is a common route to fame for British actors: on stage with Shakespeare, on television with a BBC series, and later on to Hollywood. Tom Wilkinson, born on February 5, 1948 in Leeds, completed all of these stages with flying colors.
He graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London in 1973, and his first major stage experience was as Horatio in “Hamlet” – a major supporting role, which essentially became his specialty. In 1994 he played Seth Pecksniff (alongside Paul Scofield and Pete Postlethwaite) in the Dickens adaptation Martin Chuzzlewit. He finally achieved his international breakthrough in “Shakespeare in Love” (1999), where he had a famous scene in which a loan shark creates a new play more or less on the torture chair.
Wilkinson was one of the actors who worked primarily with her voice. He didn't have a particularly striking physiognomy, but you couldn't get him out of your ear. In 2004, he played psychologist Howard Mierziak in Michel Gondry's consciousness thriller Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. At the time, Christopher Nolan was putting together the ensemble for his reboot of the “Batman” series. Tom Wilkinson took on the role of villain Carmine Falcone, a character based heavily on Marlon Brando's legendary boss Vito Corleone from the Godfather films.
A symbolic highlight of his Hollywood career could be seen in the fact that he played the American President Lyndon B. Johnson in “Selma” in 2014 – only a very specific type of character actor can be considered for something like that. And Tom Wilkinson embodied this type to perfection. In 2023 he revisited one of his greatest successes from the 1990s with the series “The Full Monty” (about a group of unemployed people who became self-employed as strippers). Tom Wilkinson was married to actress Diana Hardcastle since 1988 and the couple had two children. He died in London on December 30th at the age of 75.
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