Gary Oldman
(Leonard Gary Oldman; London, 1958) British actor.Born into a humble family, he studied Drama Art on a scholarship at Rose Brudford Drama College until 1979.He then joined the Greenwich Young People's Theater group and appeared in numerous plays in the early 1980s.He had his greatest success with The pope's wedding , which earned him the Best Actor award from the British Theater Association in 1985.
He began working in film in supporting roles.His portrayal of the punk singer Sid Vicious, leader of the legendary rock group Sex Pistols who died of heroin overdose, in Alex Cox's Sid and Nancy (1986), made him known internationally.In this role some of the constants of his acting career were already present: giving life to a character at the limit for whose characterization he had to physically transform, in this case lose weight.
Gary Oldman in Sid and Nancy (1986)
In Open your ears ( 1987), by Stephen Frears, delighted the viewer in one of his most extraordinary compositions of another real character, the British playwright Joe Orton.With a complex script by fellow playwright Alan Bennet, based on the homonymous biography written by John Lahr, Open your ears tells of Orton's rise to fame during the 1960s and his subsequent murder at the hands of his sentimental partner.Alfred Molina masterfully plays Kenneth Halliwell, the writer's lover and murderer, and Vanessa Redgrave, his representative.
In 1990 he married actress Uma Thurman, whom he divorced two years later.In his ascending acting career, he combined supporting roles in American films (as in The Clan of the Irish , from 1990, where he plays a petty criminal from the Irish mafias of New York) with acting in films.independent and more risky.
Among the latter, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have died (1990), debut as director of the playwright Tom Stoppard based on his own work.Along with fellow British Tim Roth, Oldman participated in this style exercise that takes as its starting point two minor characters from William Shakespeare's Hamlet .In JFK: Open Case (1991), by Oliver Stone, he played another real character, Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President John F.Kennedy.
His role became an international star came to him with Dracula by Bram Stoker (1992), by Francis Ford Coppola, adaptation of the horror classic for which he was chosen after a long selection process, thanks to his extraordinary combination of technique and intuition and his ability to adopt all kinds of foreign accents.
As Dracula (1992)
In a star-studded cast, Oldman stood at the height of the greats classics of horror cinema with its baroque reading of the work of Bram Stoker.His impressive characterization is one of the most remembered in a career full of strange or openly psychopathic characters.
In his filmography, in effect, he has composed a long list of villains, among which stand out his two collaborations with the Frenchman Luc Besson: The Professional (1994) and The fifth element (1996, with Bruce Willis and Milla Jovovich), or his little role as a pimp in Love at close range (1993), in which he is hardly recognizable.Without neglecting his interest in independent cinema, he has become one of the most sought-after secondary in Hollywood by playing the Russian terrorist who hijacks the plane of the president of the United States (played by Harrison Ford) in Air Force One (1997), by Wolfgang Petersen.He made his directorial debut with Nil by mouth (1998), a harsh autobiographical film inspired by his difficult childhood.
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