Tributes to Tom Wilkinson

As the firm’s fixer, George Clooney is the star of Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton (2007), but the movie is nearly snatched away from him twice, first by Wilkinson’s Edens and then by Tilda Swinton’s Karen Crowder, a legal advisor for an agricultural conglomerate up to no good. Michael Clayton opens with Edens, who is heard but not seen. As the camera roams New York office buildings, Edens addresses “Michael” in a recorded message—clearly unhinged but also making some sort of scary sense as he speaks of being cleansed of his past and giving himself over to a revelatory vision of the near future. As the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw puts it, Wilkinson’s Edens is “effectively the film’s id, its tortured soul, its intuition of something sinister within corporate culture.”

Off his meds, Edens swerves between manic rage and icy lucidity, and the unpredictability of these moods and how he chooses to weaponize them is at its most effective in the baguette scene, a crucial confrontation between Edens and Clayton. “Emotional truth is Job One,” Gilroy tells Catherine Shoard, “but there’s always something additionally available behind Tom’s performances—hidden steel, unforeseen awareness, unexpected vulnerability—it’s that hint of contradiction that confirms we’re in the presence of something real and Tom brought the glitch of humanity to everything he did.”

Gilroy’s tribute is one of eighteen that Shoard has gathered for the Guardian. Playwright and director David Hare recalls the great Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda showing up unannounced at the stage door of Nottingham Playhouse to cast Wilkinson, whom he’d never met, in his first film role, a 1976 adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s The Shadow Line. Wilkinson, the son of Yorkshire farmers who eventually ran a pub in Cornwall, had just begun a career in the theater after graduating from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1973, and “film’s gain was the theater’s loss,” says Hare.

But Wilkinson remained loyal to the stage both before and after his movie career took off with The Full Monty, the comedy about unemployed steelworkers who stage a striptease show to make ends meet. “The film’s tone balanced precariously between comedy and pathos,” says Cattaneo, “and Tom was able to step incredibly nimbly from deception to isolation and anger, with truth, tenderness, and impeccable comic timing.”

Even after The Full Monty became an international hit, one of the highest-grossing British films of all time, Wilkinson remained “one of those actors everyone knows even if they can’t quite place him,” as Alissa Wilkinson notes in the New York Times. “He played a lot of priests and a lot of soldiers and a lot of men from history, but he never quite managed to be pigeonholed as anyone in particular.” Wilkinson “usually didn’t play the lead. Instead he was the man you brought in to fill a role with gravitas and a spark of peril.”

“How do you steal the show in a film packed with scene-stealing actors?” asks Alexander Larman in the Telegraph. As the ruthless moneylender Hugh Fennyman, whose demands are assuaged with the offer of a small role in a Globe Theatre production in John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love (1998), Wilkinson “not only holds his own against the likes of Judi Dench, Geoffrey Rush, and Gwyneth Paltrow, but makes every single moment he’s in both hilarious and—a word that often comes up in a discussion of his work—poignant, as we watch this blunt, violent man become enraptured by the possibility of taking part on stage.”

Three weeks before he was to begin shooting In the Bedroom, Todd Field lost his male lead. He called up Stanley Kubrick’s right-hand man, Leon Vitali—they’d appeared together in Eyes Wide Shut (1999)—and told him that he was in desperate need of “a powerful middle-aged American to play the lead in this movie, someone audiences don’t know.” Vitali suggested “a brilliant actor Stanley loved and always wanted to work with. He’s British but I’m certain he could pull it off.” Field cast Wilkinson immediately, sight unseen.

Wilkinson and Spacek play the parents of a young man who’s fallen in love with an older woman and is killed by her jealous ex. “So much of the acting [Wilkinson] does in Field’s film is subtle to the point of subterranean,” writes Justin Chang in the Los Angeles Times. “There’s the quiet pleading in his expression as he asks a district attorney for help, the defeated stoop of his shoulders as he prepares to give his wife the worst news of their lives. For those of us who loved this actor’s work, there was a particular poignancy to see words fail him for once, this actor of Shakespearean grandiloquence, tamping down his natural gift for language to express a deeper, more sorrowful truth.”

In Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Wilkinson’s “understated performance as a surgeon eliminating painful memories from the brain of a lovelorn patient (Jim Carrey) left audiences ill-prepared for the emotional wallop from revelations in the doctor’s own past,” writes Ryan Gilbey in the Guardian. Wilkinson’s “credibility” as Father Moore is “the motor that drives the suspense” in Scott Derrickson’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), finds Walter Chaw at the Decider.

As a lawyer charged with proving in court that historian David Irving lied about the Holocaust in Denial (2016), written by David Hare and directed by Mick Jackson, “Tom delivered the defense counsel’s longest speech, word-perfect and impeccably acted, in a single magisterial take,” recalls Hare. “When I found him outside having a cigarette afterwards, I asked him how on earth he did it. Tom shrugged and said, a little grumpily, ‘That’s the job.’ But I could tell he was pleased I’d asked.”