By the time last night’s Gary Oldman tribute rolled around to the subject of Winston Churchill, we were fully aware that we were in the presence of a true acting chameleon. Oldman is one of those characters — make that a truckload of characters — in cinema who have so fully gotten “into character” that we can forget the remarkable range of his work. Of course, he’s wallowing in the heaping kudos for his magical transformation into Winton Churchill in The Darkest Hour, but this is also the actor who has played, with brio and depth, Sid Vicious (a very different British icon, or anti-icon), Dracula, Beethoven, in a young Stephen Frears’s brilliant Prick Up Your Ears, the sleek spy number Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and too many more to mention. Other actors build their brand by putting their individual stamp on their work: Oldman understands the time-honored thespian challenge of suspending self and achieving full envelopment in a role, begging the question “Will the real Oldman please stand up?”
The real Oldman, in the flesh (thought not as much flesh as his Churchill) stood up — well, sat down — at the Arlington for his “this is your life” night in the spotlight for the SBIFF’s Maltin Modern Master Award, reeling through a long list of clips (but still missing some important ones, due to the breadth of the Oldman filmography), and speaking in his soft, thoughtful, and well-spoken way.
He talked of the turning point in his life and career when he went viral/commercial, landing in the lucrative Harry Potter and The Dark Knight series. Preceding his entry into that stratosphere, the actor was a single father raising two sons in an apartment in L.A., and he made the decree that, “I want to make the most money for the least amount of work.” That may sound like the mantra of a sell-out, but was, in fact, the mandate of a father wanting to spend more time with his family.