Scotsman Obituaries: Tom Wilkinson, respected stage and TV actor who found fame in The Full Monty

Tom Wilkinson attends an event in New York in 2011 (Picture: Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images)

Tom Wilkinson was almost 50 before he got his breakthrough film role in The Full Monty as Gerald Cooper, the uptight ex-steelworks foreman who is coaxed into joining the amateur striptease line-up.

But Wilkinson made up for lost time over the last half century in an impressively wide series of roles. He was a stagestruck moneylender in Shakespeare in Love, a gangster in Batman Begins, a repressed gay judge who retires to India in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and President Lyndon B Johnson in Selma.

Wilkinson was born in Yorkshire, but seemed to be in demand to play American statesmen – on television he was Kennedy patriarch Joe Kennedy and he won an Emmy and Golden Globe for his performance as Benjamin Franklin in the HBO mini-series John Adams. Wilkinson could be authoritative or menacing or hopelessly adrift in life.

Tom Wilkinson, left, with co-stars in a scene from The Full Monty (AP Photo/Fox Searchlight, Tom Hilton, HO)

He was born Geoffrey Thomas Wilkinson in Leeds in 1948, but spent much of his childhood in British Columbia. His father’s background was in farming, but in Canada he worked in an aluminium plant. The family returned to England when Wilkinson’s father lost his job.

His parents ran a pub in Cornwall, but his father died at the age of 50, leaving behind a pile of debts, and Wilkinson and his mother went back to Yorkshire.

While studying Literature at Kent University, Wilkinson became very involved in student theatre. He was persuaded to apply to RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, but expressed great surprise when he actually got in.

He financed his studies by getting up before classes to work as an office cleaner. Never an obvious romantic lead, he struggled to find work in the early years and battled depression as he faced month after month of unemployment, an experience on which he could later draw for his role in The Full Monty.

But, although the early years were tough, Wilkinson was actually well established in theatre before making The Full Monty. He received an Olivier nomination for his performance as Horatio in an RSC production of Hamlet in 1981, he starred in a West End production of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People in 1988 and landed another Olivier nomination, and he played King Lear at the Royal Court in 1993.

On TV he had one of the leading roles in the adaptation of Jeffrey Archer’s First Among Equals, which is where he met his wife actress Diana Hardcastle. He was Helen Mirren’s lover in the first series of Prime Suspect.

And he had the choice between a decent pay packet for another TV series and taking a chance on The Full Monty, a low-budget British comedy-drama about unemployed steelworkers taking their kit off. The budget was so low that he agreed to take a share of any profits as part of his deal.

He felt he could personally relate to the struggles of his character, who still puts on a shirt and tie every day and pretends to his wife that he is off to work, even though he is headed for the dole office.

Channel 4 put up the money for script development, but declined to take it forward to the production stage. Fortunately, 20th Century Fox stepped into the breach.

Fox decided to premiere it at the 1997 Edinburgh Film Festival. Unemployment and despair sounded like dreary stuff, but its theme of the underclass regaining their dignity through an unlikely medium provided the movie with a genuine feelgood buzz right from that first screening. At Edinburgh it won an award determined by audience votes, helping persuade Fox to invest in a major marketing campaign.

The film had an ensemble cast including Robert Carlyle, it cost about £3 million and it took over £200 million worldwide, making it one of the most successful British movies of all time. It also prompted dozens of dull imitations about ordinary working-class people overcoming adversity via various unexpected, sleep-inducing challenges.

The film provided Wilkinson with financial security, a Bafta award and a proven box-office hit with which to woo film producers in both England and Hollywood.

He was a character actor rather than a marquee name, but over the next 25 years he worked alongside many of the biggest stars in the business, from Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol to Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, from George Clooney in the legal thriller Michael Clayton to Jackie Chan in Rush Hour. He received Oscar nominations for Michael Clayton and the drama In the Bedroom.

The New York Times said: “Mr Wilkinson might not have been known by name to many American moviegoers, but he used that inconspicuousness to his advantage, evading typecasting and inhabiting instead a wide array of roles persuasively.”

Wilkinson worked with wife Diana Hardcastle on several occasions. On the mini-series The Kennedys, he played Joe and she played Rose, parents of John and Bobby Kennedy. Wilkinson is survived by his wife and their two daughters.

Obituaries

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