Then director Todd Field (who had success with the film last year Tar) cast him in 2011 in indie drama In The Bedroom, as a village doctor whose son is murdered by a cuckolded husband, he said: “With someone like Robert Redford, you don’t immediately assume that he could be your neighbor in a fishing village in Maine. With Tom Wilkinson you believe that.” Field’s consciously undramatic debut film has just like Tar a psychological twist in which the real drama is not the events, but the unpredictable and sometimes unimaginable reactions of the characters. Wilkinson was as whimsical and refined in it as Cate Blanchett Tar. It would earn him his first Oscar nomination.
British actor Tom Wilkinson, who died on Friday at the age of 75, may have been a credible neighbor, but not exactly the ‘reliable neighbor’ type. He wasn’t an actor you could typecast in movie after movie. His fifty-year career and the more than 130 roles he played in film and television were too diverse for that. He once described himself as a ‘utility actor’, an actor who is useful for all kinds of roles. It was probably his working class background that led him to this modest imagery. His toolbox included precision instruments that allowed him to fillet, filter, countercolor, shade and highlight. And – not only in this film – the seriousness plays beneath the dullness, the sadness beneath the seriousness and beneath the sadness the threat of unpredictability. These are the actors you keep watching, whose supporting roles you look forward to.
Farmer’s son
If the headmaster of his secondary school in Knaresborough had not cared about him, Wilkinson would probably never have become an actor. In an interview, the son of Yorkshire farmers who briefly emigrated to Canada to escape poverty, born shortly after World War II, said that as a teenager he wandered aimlessly through the school hallways until the teacher “taught him how to eat with a knife and fork.” and took to the theater.” But it wasn’t until his studies at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London that he came to believe it was possible for working-class children to pursue careers in the arts.
His real breakout role was that of the tough ex-frontman Gerald Cooper The Full Monty in 1997, in which a group of unemployed steelworkers from Northern England practice a comic act to make money. Last year, a follow-up miniseries was made, in which the men show up 25 years later. It was one of Wilkinson’s last performances.
Also the film that brought him his second Oscar nomination, Michael Clayton (2007) shows another sample of his abilities. Opposite George Clooney, he plays a manic lawyer entangled in a class action regarding a pesticide scandal in this corporate thriller. Many of his scenes are telephone conversations, which makes the secret of his acting all the more striking: he does not play the melody but the countertone. That is incredibly clever with texts that have to convey a lot of information at the same time.
Hollywood
Other productions that made Wilkinson popular include Antonia Birds Priest (1994), playing a liberal priest who has given up celibacy, the Jane Austen film adaptation Sense and Sensibility (1995) and costume drama Shakespeare in Love (1998). He also appeared in Hollywood blockbuster Batman Begins (2005) as mob boss Carmine Falcone. Directors such as Michel Gondry and Wes Anderson, known for their refined ensemble castings, also enjoyed working with Wilkinson in respectively Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004, as a timid-sinister scientist) and as a narrator in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014).
Wilkinson was married to fellow actor Diana Hardcastle who he joined in the 1986 mini-series First Among Equals had gotten to know. The couple had two daughters.