Gary Oldman Defends Winston Churchill: 'He Is Incomparable to Any Figure'

Mark Judge | December 19, 2017
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Actor Gary Oldman praised Winston Churchill in a recent roundtable with the Hollywood Reporter. Oldman played Churchill in the new film “Darkest Hour,” which tells the story of how Prime Minister Churchill rallied the British people to resist the advancing Nazi threat in the spring of 1940.

When the Hollywood Reporter moderator told Oldman that in England there are “mixed feelings” about Prime Minister Churchill, and if Oldman had mixed feelings about playing him, Oldman wasn’t having it:

No, I came away with enormous admiration for him. He’ s incomparable to any figure - Lincoln, possibly, is the closest I think.  Here’s a man, 50 years in politics, he wrote 50 books, the Noble Prize for Literature, painted 540 paintings, had 16 exhibitions at the Royal Academy…commanded in four wars. Certainly his mind and ingenuity, he navigated that very cleverly, the Second World War.

Oldman added that Churchill was 65 when he became the prime minister in May 1940. He observed that Churchill is remembered as a “curmudgeon” who drank too much, but that the newsreel footagefrom the time reveales someone who "was different from some of the ways he’s been represented.”

(Cover Photo: Sam Hughes)

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